Mistress of the Empire

Raymond E. Feist was born and raised in Southern
California. He was educated at the University of
California, San Diego, where he graduated with
honours in Communication Arts. He is the author
of the bestselling and critically acclaimed Riftwar
Saga (Magician, Sil`,erthorn and A Darkness at
Sethanon), Prince of the Blood, Faerie Tale, The
King's Buccaneer and Shadow of a Dark Queen.
Feist lives with his wife, novelist Kathlyn Starbuck
and daughter Jessica Michele in Rancho Santa Fe,
California.

Janny Wurts is the author of several successful
fantasy novels including the Cycle of Fire trilogy
(Stormwarden, The Keeper of the Keys and
Shadomiane), a short story collection, That Way
Lies Camelot and The Master of Whitestorm. Her
epic new series, The Wars of Light and Shadow
begins with Curse of the Mistwraith and coritinues
with The Ships of Merior . All of her novels have
been published to great accalim.

Also by Raymond E. Feist and Janny Wurts
Daughter of the Empire
Servant of the Empire

Also by Raymond E. Feist
Magician
Silverthorn
A Darkness at Sethanon
Prince of Blood
Faerie Tale
The King's Buccaneer
Shadow of a Dark Queen

Also by Janny Wurts
Sorcerer's Legacy
Stormwarden
Keeper of the Keys
Shadomfane
The Master of Whitestorm
That Way Lies Camelot
The Curse of the Mistwraith
The Ships of Merior

SCIENCE
FICTION

FANTASY

RAYMOND E. FEIST
and
NANNY WURTS

Mistress of the Empire



Ha~perCollinsPublishe~s

HarperCollins Science Fiction 8` Fantasy
An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
77-85 Fulham Palace Road,
Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

This paperback edition 1994
3S79864

Previously published in paperback by Grafton 1993
Reprinted twice

First published in Great Britain by
HarperCollinsPublishers 1992

Copyright ~ Raymond Feist and Janny Wurts 1992

The Author asserts the moral right to
be identified as the author of this work

ISBN 0 586 20379 6

Set in Sabon

Printed in Great Britain by
HarperCollinsManufaauring Glasgow

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior
permission of the publishers.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not,
by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or
othetwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent
in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it
is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

This book is dedicated to
Kyung and Jon Conning,
with appreciation for giving us insights and friendship

Acknowledgments

In the course of five years, in writing three novels together,
we are indebted to the following people without whose
contributions the work would have not been as rewarding,
for either ourselves or the reader. Our thanks:

To the Friday Nighters, who started it all way back
when R.E.F. asked where Midkemia was, thereby making
it .mpossible not to write the story.

To our editors along the way, Adrian Zackheim, Jim
Moser, Pat LoBrutto, and Janna Silverstein, for turning us
loose.

To Elain Chubb, for continuity and finish.

To so many people at our publishing houses who care
more than the job requires and work above and beyond
the call of duty, those gone on to other places and those
still with us.

To Jonathan Matson for being more than an agent.

To Mike Floerkey for spreading the word and technical
suggestions.

And to Kathlyn Starbuck and Don Maitz for putting up
with R.E.F. and J.W. respectively while we were impossible
to live with for the last six years. The fact we're still married
speaks volumes for your patience and love.

Raymond E. Feist
Janny Wurts

San Diego, CA/Sarasota, FL
June 1991

1

Tragedy

The morning sun shone.

Dew bejeweled the lakeshore grasses, and the calls of
nesting shatra birds carried sweetly on the breeze. Lady
Mara of the Acoma savoured the air, soon to give way to
the day's heat. Seated in her litter, her husband at her side
and her two-year-old son, Justin, napping in her lap, she
closed her eyes and breathed a deep sigh of contentment.

She slipped her fingers into her husband's hand. Hokanu
smiled. He was undeniably handsome, and a proven
warrior; and the easy times had not softened his athletic
appearance. His grip closed possessively over hers, his
strength masked by gentleness.

The past three years had been good ones. For the first
time since childhood, she felt safe, secure from the deadly,
unending political intrigues of the Game of the Council.
The enemy who had killed her father and brother could no
longer threaten her. He was now dust and memories, his
family fallen with him; his ancestral lands and magnificently
appointed estate house had been deeded to Mara by the
Emperor.

Superstition held that ill luck tainted a fallen family's
land; on a wonderful morning such as this, misfortune
seemed nowhere in evidence. As the litter moved slowly
along the shore, the couple shared the peace of the
moment while they regarded the home that they had
created between them.

Nestled between steep, stone-crested hills, the valley
that had first belonged to the Minwanabi Lords was
not only naturally defensible, but so beautiful it was as

10 Mistress of the Empire

if touched by the gods. The lake reflected a placid sky,
the waters rippled by the fast oars of a messenger skiff
bearing dispatches to factors in the Holy City. There, grain
barges poled by chanting slaves delivered this year's harvest
to warehouses for storage until the spring floods allowed
transport downriver.

The dry autumn breeze rippled golden grass, and the
morning sun lit the walls of the estate house like alabaster.
Beyond, in a natural hollow, Force Commanders Lujan and
Xandia drilled a combined troop of Acoma and Shinzawai
warriors. Since Hokanu would one day inherit his father's
tide, his marriage to Mara had not merged the two houses.
Warriors in Acoma green marched in step with others
in Shinzawai blue, the ranks patched black, here and
there, by divisions of insectoid cho-ja. Along with the
Minwanabi lands, Lady Mara had gained an alliance with
two additional hives and with them the fighting strength
of three more companies of warriors bred by their queens
for battle.

An enemy foolish enough to launch an assault would
invite swift annihilation. Mara and Hokanu, with loyal
vassals and allies, between them commanded a standing
army unsurpassed in the Nations. Only the Light of
Heaven's own Imperial Whites, with levies from other
houses under his sovereignty, would rival these two armies.
And as if fine troops and a near-impregnable fortress did not
in themselves secure peace, the title Servant of the Empire,
bestowed upon Mara for her services to Tsuranuanni, gave
her honorary adoption into the Emperor's own family. The
Imperial Whites were as likely to march in her defence, for
by the honor central to Tsurani culture, insult or threat to
her was as an offense visited upon the Light of Heaven's
blood family.

'You seem delightfully self-satisfied this morning, wife,'
Hokanu said in her ear.
Tragedy

11

Mara tilted her head back into his shoulder, her lips
parted for his kiss. If, deep in her heart, she missed the
wild passion she had known with the red-haired barbarian
slave who had fathered Justin, she had come to terms with
that loss. Hokanu was a kindred spirit who shared her
political shrewdness and inclination toward innovation.
He was quick witted, kind, and devoted to her, as well
as tolerant of her headstrong nature, as few men of her
culture were inclined to be. With him, Mara shared voice
as an equal. Marriage had brought a deep and abiding
contentment, and though her interest in the Great Game
of the Council had lessened, she no longer played out of
fear. Hokanu's kiss warmed the moment like wine, until a
high-pitched shout split the quiet.

Mara straightened up from Hokanu's embrace, her
smile mirrored in her husband's dark eyes. 'Ayaki,' they
concluded simultaneously. The next moment, galloping
hoof beats thundered down the trail by the lake.

Hokanu tightened his arm around his wife's shoulder as
the two of them leaned out to view the antics of Mara's
older son and heir.

A coal black horse burst through the gap in the trffl,
mane and tail flying in the wind. Green tassels adorned its
bridle, and a pearl-stitched breastplate kept the saddle from
sliding backward along its lean length of barrel. Crouched
in the lacquer-worked stirrups was a boy, recently turned
twelve, and as raven haired as his mount. He reined the
gelding into a turn and charged toward Mara's litter, his
face flushed with the thrill of speed, and his fine, sequin
stitched robe flying like a banner behind.

'He's becoming quite the bold rider,' Hokanu said admiringly. '
And the birthday present appears to please him.'

Mara watched, a glow of pleasure on her face, as the boy
reined in the mount upon the path. Ayaki was her joy, the

person she loved most in life.
The black gelding tossed its head in protest. It was
spirited, and eager to run. Still not entirely comfortable
with the huge animals imported from the barbarian world,
Mara held her breath in apprehension. Ayaki had inherited a
wild streak from his father, and in the years since his narrow
escape from an assassin's knife, a restless mood sometimes
claimed him. At times he seemed to taunt death, as if by
defying danger he could reaffirm the life in his veins.

But today was not such a moment, and the gelding had
been selected for obedience as well as fleetness. It snorted
a gusty breath of air and yielded to the rein, falling into
stride alongside Mara's litter bearers, who overcame their
inclination to move away from the large animal.

The Lady looked up as boy and horse filled her vision.
Ayaki would be tall, the legacy of both his grandfathers.
He had inherited the Acoma tendency toward leanness, and
all of his father's stubborn courage. Although Hokanu was
not his blood father, the two shared friendship and respect.
Ayaki was a boy any parent could be proud of, and he was
already showing the wits he would need when he reached
adulthood and entered the Game of the Council as Lord
of the Acoma in his own right.

'Young show-off,' Hokanu teased. 'Our bearers might
be the only ones in the Empire to be granted the privilege
of sandals, but if you think we should race you to the
meadows, we'll certainly have to refuse.'

Ayaki laughed. His dark eyes fixed on his mother, filled
with the elation of the moment. 'Actually, I was going to
ask Lax'l if I might try our speed against a cho-ja. It would
be interesting to know whether his warriors could overtake
a troop of the barbarians' cavalry.'

'If there was a war, which there is not at the moment, gods
be praised,' Hokanu said on a note a shade more serious.
'Take care you mind your manners, and don't offend Force
Commander Lax'l's dignity when you ask.'

Tragedy

13

Ayaki's grin widened. Having grown up around the alien
cho-ja, he was not at all intimidated by their strange ways.
'Lax'l still has not forgiven me for handing him a jomach
fruit with a stone in it.'

'He has,' Mara interjected. 'But after that, he grew wise
to your tricks, which is well. The cho-ja don't have the
same appreciation of jokes that humans do.' Looking at
Hokanu, she said, 'In fact, I don't think they understand
our humor.'

Ayaki made a face, and the black curvetted under him
The litter bearers swerved away from its dancing hooves;
and the jostle disturbed young Justin. He awakened with
a cry of infant outrage.

The dark horse shied at the noise. Ayaki held the animal
with a firm hand, but the spirited gelding backed a few
steps. Hokanu kept a passive face, though he felt the urge
to laugh at the boy's fierce determination and control. Justin
delivered an energetic kick into his mother's stomach. She
bent forward, scooped him up in her arms.

Then something sped past Hokanu's ear, from behind
him, causing the hangings of the litter to flutter. A tiny
hole appeared in the silk where Mara's head had been
an instant before. Hokanu threw his body roughly against
those of his wife and foster child and twisted to look in the
other direction. Within the shadows of the bushes beside
the path, something black moved. Instincts honed in battle
pressed Hokanu to unthinking action.

He pushed his wife and younger child out of the
litter, keeping his body across them as a shield. His
sudden leap overturned the litter, giving them further
cover. 'The brush!' he shouted as the bearers were sent
sprawling.

Guards drew their blades in readiness to defend their mistress.
But seeing no clear target to attack, they hesitated.

Mara exclaimed in puzzlement from beneath a tangle of

14 Mistress of the Empire

cushions and tom curtains, over the noise of Justin's wails.
'What -'

To the guards, Hokanu shouted, 'Behind the akasi
bushes!'

The horse stamped, as if at a stinging fly. Ayaki felt his
gelding shudder under him. Its ears flattened, and it shook
its heavy mane, while he worked the reins to soothe it. 'Easy,
big fellow. Stand easy.' His stepfather's warning failed to
reach him, so intent was he on steadying his mount.

Hokanu glanced over the litter. The guards now rushed
the bushes he had indicated. As he fumed to check for
possible attack from the other quarter, he saw Ayaki
frantically trying to calm a horse grown-dangerously over
excited. A sparkle of lacquer in the sunlight betrayed a tiny
dart protruding from the gelding's flank. 'Ayaki! Get off!'

His horse gave a vicious kick. The dart in its hide had
done its work, and nerve poison coursed through the beast's
bloodstream. Its eyes rolled, showing wide rings of white.
It reared up, towering, and a near-human scream shrilled
from its throat.

Hokanu sprang away from the litter. He grabbed for the
gelding's rein, but slashing hooves forced him back. He
dodged, tried another grab, and missed as the horse twisted.
Familiar enough with horseflesh to know this animal had
gone berserk, he screamed to the boy who clung with both
hands locked around the beast's neck.
'Ayaki! Jump off! Do it now, boy!'

'No,' cried the child, not in defiance, but bravely. 'I can
quiet him!'

Hokanu leaped for the reins again, frightened beyond
thought for his own safety. The boy's concern might have
been justified if the horse had simply been scared. But
Hokanu had once seen the effects of a poison dart; he
recognised the horse's shivering flesh and sudden lack
of coordination for what they were: the symptoms of

Tragedy

15

fast-acting venom. Had the dart struck Mara, death would
have taken seconds. In an animal ten times her size, the
end would be slower, and brutally painful. The horse
bellowed its agony, and a spasm shook its great frame.
It bared yellow teeth and fought !he bit, while Hokanu
again missed his grip. 'Poison, Ayaki!' he shouted over
the noise of the frantic horse. Hokanu lunged to catch
the stirrup, hoping to snatch the boy clear. I-he horse's
forelegs stiffened, bracing outward as the muscles locked
into extension. Then its quarters collapsed, and it toppled,
the boy caught like a burr underneath.

The of the heavy body striking earth mingled with
Mara's scream. Ayaki refused to leap free at the last. Still
riding his horse, he was swept sideways, his neck whipped
back as the force of the fall threw him across the path. The
horse shuddered and rolled over upon the boy.

Ayaki made no sound. Hokan' avoided a hedge of
thrashing hooves as he darted around the tormented
animal. He reached the boy's side in a bound, too late.
Trapped under the weight of dying, shivering horseflesh,
the child looked too pale to be real His dark eyes turned
to Hokanu's, and his one free hand reached out to grip that
of his foster father's a heartbeat ahead of death.

Hokanu felt the small, dirty fingers go limp inside his
own. He clung on in a rage of aerial. 'No!' he shouted,
as if in appeal to the gods. Mara's cries rang in his ears,
and he was aware of the warriors from her honor guard,
jostling him as they labored to shift the dead horse. The
gelding was rolled aside, the rush of air as its lungs deflated
moaning through its vocal cords. For Ayaki, there would be
no such protest at shattering, untimely death. The gelding's

withers had crushed his chest, and the ribs stood up from
mangled flesh like the broken shards of swords.

The young face with its too white cheeks stared yet,
open-eyed and surprised, at the untroubled sky overhead.
16 Mistress of the Empire

The fingers that had reached out to a trusted foster father to
stave off the horror of the dark lay empty, open, the scabbed
remains of a blister on one thumb a last testimony to diligent
practice with a wooden sword. This boy would never know
the honors or the horrors of a battle, or the sweet kiss of
his first maid, or the pride and responsibility of the Lord's
mantle that had been destined one day to be his.

The finality of sudden ending left pain like a bleeding
wound. Hokanu knew grief and stunned disbelief. His mind
worked through the shock only out of reflex trained on the
fields of war. 'Cover the child with your shield,' he ordered.
'His mother must not see him like this.'

But the words left numbed lips too late. Mara had rushed
after him, end he felt the flurry of her silken robes against
his calf as she flung herself on her knees by her son. She
reached out to embrace him, to raise him up from the
dusty ground as if through sheer force of love she could
restore him to life. But her hands froze in the air over the
bloody rags of flesh that had been Ayaki's body. Her mouth
opened without sound. Something crumpled inside her. On
instinct, Hokanu caught her back and bundled her against
his shoulder.

'He's gone to the Red God's halls,' he murmured. Mara
did not respond; Hokanu felt the rapid beat of her heart
under his hands. Only belatedly did he notice the scuffle in
the brush beside the trail. Mara's honor guard had thrown
themselves with a vengeance upon the black clothed body
of the assassin. Before Hokanu could gather the wits to
order restraint - for, alive, the man might be made to say
which enemy had hired him - the warriors made an end
of the issue.

Their swords rose and fell, bright red. In seconds Ayaki's
killer lay hacked like a needra bullock slaughtered in a
butcher's stall.

Hokanu felt pity for the man. Through the blood, he

Tragedy

17

noted the short black shirt and trousers, the red-dyed hands,
as the soldiers turned the body over. The headcloth that
hid all but the eyes of the man, was pulled aside to reveal
a blue tattoo upon the left cheek. This mark would only
be worn by a member of the Hamoi Tong, a brotherhood
of assassins.

Hokanu stood slowly. It did not matter that the soldiers
had dispatched the killer: the assassin would have died
gladly before divulging information. The tong operated to
a strict code of secrecy, and it was certain the murderer
would not know who had paid his leader for this attack.
And the only name that mattered was that of the man who
had hired the Hamoi Brotherhood's services.

In a cold corner of his mind, Hokanu understood that
this attempt upon Mara's life had not come cheaply. This
man could not have hoped to survive his mission, and a
suicide killing would be worth a fortune in metal.

'Search the corpse, and track his path through the estates,'
he heard himself saying in a voice hardened by the emotions
that seethed inside. 'See if you can find any clues as to who
might have hired the tong.'

The Acoma Strike Leader in command bowed to the
master, and issued sharp orders to his men.

'Leave a guard over the boy's body,' Hokanu added.
He bent to comfort Mara, unsurprised that she was still
speechless, fighting horror and disbelief. Her husband did
not fault her for being unable to keep composure and show
proper Tsurani impassivity. Ayaki had been all the family
she had known for many years; she had no other blood
kindred. Her life before his birth had already been jarred
by too much loss and death. He cradled her small, shivering
body against his own, and added the necessary instructions

concerning the boy.

But when the arrangements were complete and Hokanu
tenderly tried to draw Mara away, she fought him. 'No!'

18 Mistress of the Empire

she said in strangled pain. 'I will not leave him here
alone!'

'My Lady, Ayaki is beyond our help. He already stands
in the Red God's halls. Despite his years, he met death
courageously. He will be welcomed.' He stroked her dark
hair, dampened with tears, and tried to calm her. 'You
would do better inside with loved ones around you, and
Justin in the care of his nurses.'

'No,' Mara repeated, a note in her voice that he instinctively
knew not to cross. 'I won't leave.'

And though she did after a time consent to have
her surviving child sent back to the estate house under
protection of a company of warriors, she sat through the
heat of the morning on the dusty soil, staring at the stilled
face of her firstborn.
Hokanu never left her. The stinks of death did not drive
him away, nor the flies that swarmed and buzzed and sucked
at the eyes of the seeping corpse of the gelding. Controlled
as if on a battlefield, he faced the worst, and coped. In quiet
tones he sent a runner slave to fetch servants, and a small
silk pavilion to offer shade. Mara never looked aside as
the awning was set up above her. As though the people
around her did not exist, she sifted torn earth through
her fingers, until a dozen of her best warriors arrived in
ceremonial armor to bear her fallen son away. No one
argued with Hokanu's suggestion that the boy deserved
battlefield honors. Ayaki had died of an enemy's dart, as
surely as if the poison had struck his own flesh. He had
refused to abandon his beloved horse, and such courage
and responsibility in one so young merited recognition.

Mara watched, her expression rigid as porcelain, as the
warriors lifted her son's body and set it on a bier bedecked
with streamers of Acoma green, a single one scarlet, in
acknowledgment of the Red God who gathers in all life.

The morning breeze had stilled, and the warriors sweated

Tragedy

19

at their task. Hokanu helped Mara to her feet, willing her
not to break. He knew the effort it took to maintain his own
composure, and not just for the sake of Ayaki. Inside his
heart, he bled also for Mara, whose suffering could scarcely
be imagined. He steadied her steps as she moved beside
the bier, and the slow cortege wound its way downslope,
toward the estate house that only hours earlier had seemed
a place blessed by felicity.

It seemed a crime against nature, that the gardens
should still be so lush, and the lakeshore so verdant and
beautiful, and the boy on the bier be so bloody and broken
and still.

The honor bearers drew up before the front doorway
used for ceremonial occasions. Shadowed by the immense
stone portal stood the household's most loyal servants.
One by one they bowed to the bier, to pay young Ayaki
their respects. They were led by Keyoke, First Adviser for
War, his hair silvered with age, the crutch that enabled him
to walk after battle wounds cost him his leg unobtrusively
tucked into a fold of his formal mantle; as he intoned the
ritual words of sympathy, he looked upon Mara with the
grief a father might show, locked behind dark eyes and
an expression like old wood. After him waited Lujan, the
Acoma Force Commander, his usual rakish smile vanished
and his steady gaze spoiled by his blinking to hold back
tears. A warrior to the core, he scarcely managed to
maintain his bearing. He had taught the boy on the bier
to spar with a sword, and only that morning had praised
his developing skills.

He touched Mara's hand as she passed. 'Ayaki may have
been only twelve years of age, my Lady, but he already was
an exemplary warrior.'

The mistress barely nodded in response. Guided by
Hokanu, she passed on to the hadonra next in line.
Small, and mouse-shy, Jican looked desolate. He had

20 Mistress of the Empire

recently succeeded in intriguing the volatile Ayaki with
the arts of estate finance. Their games using sEdl counters
to represent the marketable Acoma trade goods would
no longer clutter the breakfast nook off the pantry. Jican
stumbled over the formal words of sympathy to his mistress.
His earnest brown eyes seemed to reflect her pain as she
and her husband passed on, to her young adviser Saric,
and his assistant, Incomo. Both were later additions to the
household; but Ayaki had won their affection no less than
the others'. The condolences they offered to Mara were
genuine, but she could not reply. Only Hokanu's hand on
her elbow kept her from stumbling as she mounted the stair
and entered the corridor.

The sudden step into shadow caused Hokanu to shiver.
For the first time, the beautifully tiled stonework did not
offer him the feeling of shelter. The beautiful painted screens
he and Mara had commissioned did not warm him to
admiration. Instead he felt gnawing doubt; had young
Ayaki's death been an expression of the gods' displeasure,
that Mara should claim as spoils the properties of her
fallen enemies? The Minwanabi who had once walked
these halls had sworn blood feud against the Acoma.
Eschewing tradition, Mara had not buried their natami,
the talisman stone that secured the spirits of the dead
to life's Wheel as long as it stood in sunlight. Could the
lingering shades of vanquished enemies visit ill luck on her
and her children?

Afraid for young Justin's safety, and inwardly reprimanding
himself for giving credence to superstitions, Hokanu
focused upon Mara. Where death and loss had always
hardened her to courage and action, now she seemed
utterly devastated. She saw the boy's corpse into the great
hall, her steps like those of a mannequin animated by a
magician's spell, She sat motionless at the bier side while
servants and maids bathed her child's torn flesh, and robed

Tragedy

21

him in the silks and jewels that were his heritage as heir of
a great house. Hokanu hovered nearby, aching with a sense
of his own uselessness. He had food brought, but his lady
would not eat. He asked for a healer to make up a soporific,
expecting, even hoping, to provoke an angry response.

Mara dully shook her head and pushed the cup away.

The shadows on the floor lengthened as the sun crossed
the sky, and the windows in the ceiling admitted steepening
angles of light. When the scribe sent by Jican tapped
discreetly on the main door a third time, Hokanu at last
took charge and told the man to seek out Saric or Incomo, to
make up the list of noble houses who should be informed of
the tragedy. Plainly Mara was not up to making the decision
herself. Her only movement, for hours, had been to take the
cold, stiff fingers of her son in her own.

Lujan arrived near dusk, his sandals dusty, and more
weariness in his eyes than he had ever shown on campaign.
He bowed to his mistress and her consort and awaited
permission to speak.

Mara's eyes remained dully fixed on her son.

Hokanu reached out and touched her rigid shoulder. 'My
love, your Force Commander has news.'

The Lady of the Acoma stirred, as if roused from across
a great distance. 'My son is dead,' she said faintly. 'By the
mercy of all the gods, it should have been me.'

Rent to the heart by compassion, Hokanu stroked back
a fallen wisp of her hair. 'If the gods were kind, the attack
should never have happened.' Then, as he saw that his Lady
had slipped back into her stupor, he faced her officer.

The eyes of both men met, anguished. They had seen
Mara enraged, hurt, even in terror of her life. She had
always responded with spirit and innovation. This apathy

was not like her, and all who loved her feared that a
portion of her spirit might have perished along with
her son.

22 Mistress of the Empire

Hokanu endeavored to shoulder as much of the burden
as possible. 'Tell me what your men have found, Lujan.'

Had Mara's Force Commander been a more traditionbound
man, he would have refused; while Hokanu was a
noble, he was not master of the Acoma. But the Shinzawai
faction of the household was sworn to alliance with
the Acoma, and Mara was in no condition to make
critical decisions. Lujan released an almost imperceptible
sigh of relief. The strengths of the Shinzawai heir were
considerable, and the news Lujan brought was not cheering.
'My Lord, our warriors searched the corpse to no avail. Our
best trackers joined the search and, in a hollow where the
assassin had apparently been sleeping, found this.'

He offered "a round shell token, painted scarlet and
yellow, and incised with the triangular sigil of House
Anasati. Hokanu took the object with a touch that bespoke
disgust. The token was the sort a Ruling Lord might give
a messenger as proof that an important errand had been
carried out. Such a badge was inappropriate for an enemy
to entrust to an assassin; but then, the Lord of the Anasati
made no secret of his hatred for Mara. Jiro was powerful,
and openly allied with houses who wished to abolish the
Emperor's new policies. He was a scholar rather than a
man of war, and though he was too clever to indulge in
crude gestures, Mara had once slighted his manhood: she
had chosen his younger brother for her first husband, and
since that day, Jiro had shown open animosity.

Still, the shell counter was blatantly unsubtle, for a
working of the Great Game. And the Hamoi Tong was
too devious a brotherhood to consent to the folly of carrying
evidence of which Lord or family might have hired it. Its
history extended back for centuries, and its policies were
cloaked in secrecy. To buy a death from it ensured absolute
discretion. The token could be a play designed to throw
blame upon the Anasati.

.

Tragedy    23

Hokanu raised concerned eyes to Lujan. 'You think Lord
Jiro was responsible for this attack?'

His query was less a question than an implied expression
of doubt. That Lujan also had reservations about the
placement of the token was evident as he drew breath
to reply.

But the name of the Anasati Lord had pierced through
Mara's lethargy. 'Jiro did this?' She spun from Ayaki's body
and saw the red-and-yellow disk in Hokanu's hand. Her
face contorted into a frightening mask of fury. 'The Anasati
shall be as dust in the wind. Their natami will be buried in
offal, and their spirits be consigned to the dark. I will show
them less mercy than I did the Minwanabi!' Her hands
clenched into fists. She stared without seeing between her
husband and her Force Commander, as though her detested
enemy could be made manifest through the force of her
hatred. 'Not even that will pay for the blood of my son.
Not even that.'
'
Lord Jiro might not be responsible,' Lujan offered, his
usually firm voice torn by grief. 'You were the target, not
Ayaki. The boy is the nephew of the Anasati Lord, after
all. The tong assassin could have been sent by any of the
Emperors enemies.' ~

But Mara seemed not to hear. 'Jiro will pay. My son will
be avenged.'

'Do you think Lord Jiro was responsible?' Hokanu
repeated to the Force Commander. That the young Anasati
heir still felt as he did, even after inheriting the mantle and
power that had been his father's, bespoke stubborn, and
childish pride. A mature mind would no longer nurse such
a grudge; but in vain arrogance, the Anasati Lord might
well wish the world to know whose hand had contracted
for Mara's downfall.

Except that since Mara was Servant of the Empire, her
popularity was too widespread. Fool Jiro might be, over

24 Mistress of the Empire

slighted manhood, but surely not so much that he would
invite the Emperor's wrath.

Lujan turned dark eyes toward Hokanu. 'That bit of
shell is all the evidence we have. Its very obviousness might
be subtle, as if by calling attention to House Anasati, we
might dismiss them at once and look elsewhere for the
culprits.' Fury coiled beneath his words. He, too, wanted
to strike in anger at the outrage that had been committed.
'It matters very little what I think,' he finished grimly. For
honor demanded that he do his Lady's will, absolutely and
without question. If Mara asked him to muster the Acoma
garrison and march suicidally to war, he would obey, with
all his heart and will.

Dusk dimmed the skylights in the great hall. Servants
entered on quiet feet and lit the lamps arrayed around
Ayaki's bier. Scented smoke sweetened the air. The play
of warm light softened death's pallor, and shadow veiled
the misshapen lumps of the injuries beneath the silk robes.
Mara sat alone in vigil. She regarded her son's oval face,
and the coal-dark hair that, for the first time she could
remember, had stayed combed for more than an hour.

Ayaki had been all of her future, until that moment of
the gelding's crushing fall. He had been her hopes, her
dreams, and more: the future guardian of. her ancestors
and the continuance of the Acoma name.

Her complacence had killed him.

Mara clenched white fingers in her lap. She never, ever,
should have lulled herself into belief that her enemies could
not touch her. Her guilt at this lapse in vigilance would
follow her all her days. Yet how bleak any contemplation
of tomorrow had become. At her side lay a tray with the
picked-over remains of a meal; the food had no taste that
she could recall. Hokanu's solicitude had not comforted;
she knew him too well, and the echoes of her own pain

Tragedy

25

and anger she could sense behind his words galled her into
deeper recriminations.

Only the boy showed no reproach for her folly. Ayaki
was past feeling, beyond reach of sorrow or joy.

Mara choked back a spasm of grief. How she wished
the dart had taken her, that the darkness which ended
all striving could be hers, instead of her son's. That she
had another surviving child did not lessen her despair.
Of the two, Ayaki had known the least of life's fullness,
despite his being the elder. Fathered by Buntokapi of the
Anasati, whose family had been an Acoma enemy, in a
union from which Mara had derived much pain and no
happiness. Political expediency had led her to deeds of
deceit and entrapment that to her maturer view seemed
no less than murder. Ayaki had been her atonement for
his father's wasteful suicide, brought about by Mara's
own machinations. Although by the tenets of the Game
of the Council she had won a telling victory, privately she
considered Buntokapi's death a defeat. That his family's
neglect had made of him a tool open for her to exploit
made no difference. Ayaki had offered her a chance to
give her first husband's shade lasting honor. She had been
determined that his son would rise to the greatness that
Buntokapi had been denied.

But the hope was ended now. Lord Jiro of the Anasati
had been Buntokapi's brother, and-the fact that his plot
against her had misfired and resulted in a nephew's death
had shifted the balance of politics yet again. For, without
Ayaki, the Anasati were free to resume the enmity quiescent
since her father's time.

Ayaki had grown up with the best teachers, and all of
her soldiers' vigilance to protect him; but he had paid for
the privileges of his rank. At nine he had nearly lost his
life to an assassin's knife. Two nurses and a beloved old

household servant had been murdered before his eyes, and

26 Mistress of the Empsre

the experience had left him with nightmares. Mara resisted
an urge to rub his hand in comfort. The flesh was cold, and
his eyes would never open in joy and trust.
Mara did not have to fight down tears; rage at injustice
choked her sorrow for her. The personal demons that had
twisted his father's nature toward cruelty had inspired
melancholy and brooding in Ayaki. Only in the past three
years, since Mara's marriage to Hokanu, had the sunnier
side of the boy's nature gained ascendancy.

The fortress of the Minwanabi, Ayaki had been fond of
pointing out, had never been so much as besieged. The
defences her;,,were impregnable to an enemy. Moreover,
Mara was a Servant of the Empire. The title carried favor
with the gods, and luck enough to ward away misfortune.

Now, Mara berated herself for allowing his childish,
blind faith to influence her. She had used traditions and
superstitions to her advantage often enough in the past.
She had been a vain fool not to see that the same things
could be exploited against her.

It seemed an injustice that the child should have paid,
and not her.

His small half-brother, Justin, had helped lighten Ayaki's
bleak spells. Her second son was the child of the barbarian
slave she still loved. She had only to close her eyes for
an instant and Kevin's face came to mind, nearly always
smiling over some ridiculous joke, his red hair and beard
shining copper under Kelewan's sun. With him she had
shared none of the harmonious rapport she now enjoyed
with Hokanu. No, Kevin had been tempestuous, impulsive,
at times passionately illogical. He would not have hidden
his grief from her, but would have freed his feelings in an
explosive storm; in his intense expression of life she might
have found the courage to face this outrage. Young Justin
had inherited his father's carefree nature. He laughed easily,
was quick to get into mischief, and already evidenced a fast

Tragedy

27

tongue. Like his father before him, Justin had a knack for
snapping Ayaki out of his brooding. He would run on fat
legs, trip, and tumble over laughing, or he would make
ridiculous faces until it was impossible to be near him and
stay withdrawn.

But there would be no more shared laughter for Ayaki
now.

Mara shivered, only that moment conscious of the
presence of someone at her side. Hokanu had entered
the chamber in the uncannily silent manner he had learned
from the foresters on the barbarian world.

Aware that she had noticed him, he took her cold hand
into his warm one. 'My Lady, it is past midnight. You would
do well to take some rest.'

Mara half turned from the bier. Her dark eyes fastened
on Hokanu's, and the compassion in his gaze caused her to
dissolve into tears. His handsome features blurred, and his
grip shifted, supporting her body against his shoulder. He
was strong in the same sparely muscled way of his father.
And if he did not kindle the wild passion that Kevin had,
with him, Mara shared an effortless understanding. He was
husband to her as Ayaki's father had never been, and his
presence now as grief crumbled her poise was all that kept
her from insanity. The touch that sought to soothe her
sorrow was that of a man well capable of command on the
field of war. He preferred peace, as she did, but when the
ways of the sword became necessary, he had the courage of
the tigers that inhabited the world beyond the rift.

Now, belatedly, the Acoma would need those skills
in battle.

As tears rinsed Mara's cheeks, she tasted bitterness that

knew no limit. The guilt inside her had a name she could use
as a scapegoat. Jiro of the Anasati had murdered her son;
for that, she would destroy his house beyond the memory
of the living.

28 Mistress of the Empire

As though he sensed the ugly turn of her thoughts,
Hokanu shook her gently. 'My Lady, you are needed. Justin
cried all through his supper, asking what had happened
to his mama. Keyoke called each hour for instructions,
and Force Commander Lujan needs to know how many
companies should be recalled from garrison duty at your
estates near Sulan-Qu.'

In his inimitably subtle way, Hokanu did not argue the
necessity for war. That brought relief. Had he offered
questions, had he sought to dissuade her from vengeance
against Jiro upon grounds that a single shell token offered
too scanty evidence, she would have turned on him in a
fury. Who was not with her at this moment was against
her. A blow had been struck against the Acoma, and honor
demanded action.

But the form of her murdered son sapped her will; life
in any form seemed sucked dry, devoid of interest.

'Lady?' prompted Hokanu. 'Your decisions are necessary
for the continuance of your house. For now you are the
Acoma.'

A frown gathered Mara's eyebrows. Her husband's
words were truth. Upon their marriage, they had agreed
that young Justin would become the Shinzawai heir after
Hokanu. Fiercely, suddenly, Mara wished that promise
unspoken. Never would she have agreed to such a thing
had she realised Ayaki's mortality.

The circle closed, again. She had been negligent. Had
she not grown dangerously complacent, her black haired
son would not lie in state inside a circle of death lamps.
He would be running, as a boy should, or practicing the
skills of a warrior, or riding his great black gelding faster
than the wind over the hills.

Again Mara saw in her mind's eye the arc of the brute's
rearing form, and the terrible, thrashing of hooves as it
toppled . . .

Tragedy

29

'Lady,' chided Hokanu. Tenderly he pried her fingers
open, and endeavored to stroke away her tension. 'It is
over. We must continue to strive for the living.' His hands
brushed away her tears. More spilled between her eyelids
to replace them. 'Mare, the gods have not been kind. But
my love for you goes on, and the faith of your household
in your spirit shines like a lamp in the darkness. Ayaki did
not live for nothing. He was brave, and strong, and he did
not shy from his responsibilities, even at the moment of his
death. As he did, so must we or the dart that felled the horse
will deal more than one mortal blow.'

Mara closed her eyes, and tried to deny the oil-scented
smoke of the death lamps. She did not need reminding
that thousands of lives depended upon her, as Ruling
Lady of the Acoma; today she had paid for the proof
that she did not deserve their trust. She was regent for
a growing son no longer. There seemed no heart left in
her, and yet she must prepare for a great war, and achieve
vengeance to keep family honor, and then, she must produce
another heir.

Yet the hope, the future, the enthusiasms, and the dreams
she had sacrificed so much for had all gone to dust. She felt
numbed, punished beyond caring.

'My Lord and husband,' she said hoarsely 'attend to my
advisers, and have them do as you suggest. I have not the
heart to make decisions, and the Acoma must make ready
for battle.'

Hokanu looked at her with wounded eyes. He had
long admired her spirit, and to see her beautiful boldness
overcome by grief made his heart ache. He held her close,
knowing the depth of her pain. 'Lady,' he whispered softly.
'I will spare you all I can. If you would march upon Jiro
of the Anasati, I will stand at the right hand of your Force
Commander. But sooner or later, you must put on the
mantle of your house. The Acoma name is your charge.
Ayaki's loss must not signify an ending but create a renewal
of your line.'

Past speech, beyond rational thought, Mara turned her
face into her husband's shoulder, and for a very long
time her tears soaked soundlessly into the rich blue silk
of his robe.

2

Confrontation

Jiro frowned.

Though the unadorned robe he wore was light and the
portico around the courtyard adjacent to his library was
still cool at this early hour, fine sweat beaded his brow.
A tray of half-eaten breakfast lay abandoned at his elbow,
while he tapped tense fingers on the embroidered cushion
he sat on; his eyes unwaveringly studied the game board
spread at his knees. He considered the position of each
piece singly, and sought to assess the probable outcome of
each move. A wrong choice might not seem immediately
obvious, but against today's opponent, the consequences
were apt to prove ruinous several moves later. Scholars
claimed the game of shah sharpened a man's instinct for
battle and politics, but Jiro, Lord of the Anasati, enjoyed
puzzles of the mind over physical contests. He found its
intricacies hypnotic for their own sake. -'

His skills had surpassed those of his father and other
teachers at a precociously early age. When he was a boy,
his older brother, Halesko, and younger brother, Buntokapi,
had often as not pummeled him for the contemptuous
ease he displayed in defeating them. Jiro had sought
older opponents, and had even contended against the
Midkemian traders who visited the Empire more and
more often, seeking markets for their otherworld goods.
They called the game chess, but the rules were the same.
Jiro found few in their ranks to challenge him.

The one man he had never defeated sat opposite him,
absently scanning through an array of documents piled
meticulously around his knees. Chumaka, E;first Adviser

32

Mistress of the Empire

to the Anasati since Jiro's father's time, was a whip-thin,
narrow-faced man with a pointed chin and black, impenetrable
eyes. He checked the game board in passing, now
and again pausing to answer his master's moves. Rather
than being irritated by the absent-minded fashion in which
his First Adviser routinely defeated him, Jiro felt pride that
such.a facile mind served the Anasati.

Chumaka's gift for anticipating complex politics at times
seemed to border on the uncanny. Most of Jiro's father's
ascendancy in the Game of the Council could be credited
to this adviser's shrewd advice. While Mara of the Acoma
had humiliated the Anasati early in her rise to greatness,
Chumaka had,offered sage counsel that had sheltered family
interests from setbacks in the conflict that had followed
between the Acoma and the Minwanabi.

Jiro chewed his lip, torn between two moves that offered
small gains and another that held promise of long-term
strategy. As he debated, his thoughts circled back to the
Great Game: the obliteration of House Minwanabi might
have proven a cause for celebration, since they had been
rivals of the Anasati - save that the victory had been won
by the woman Jiro hated foremost among the living. His
hostility remained from the moment Lady Mara named
her choice of husband, and picked his younger brother,
Buntokapi, as her consort over Jiro.

It did not matter that, had his ego not suffered a
bruising, Jiro would have been the one to die of the
Lady's machinations, instead of Bunto. Enamored though
he was of scholarly thought, the last surviving son of the
Anasati line stayed blind to logic on this point. He fed his
spite by brooding. That the bitch had cold-heartedly plotted
the death of his brother was cause for blood vengeance;
never mind that Bunto had been despised by his family,
and that he had renounced all ties to Anasati to accept the
Lordship of the Acoma. So deep, so icy was Jiro's hatred

Confrontation

33

that he preferred obstinate blindness to recognition that he
had inherited his own Ruling Lordship precisely because
Mara had spurned him. Over the years his youthful thirst
for retribution had darkened into the abiding obsession of
a dangerous, cunning rival.

Jiro glared at the shah board but raised no hand
to advance a player. Chumaka noticed this as he riffled
through his correspondence. His high brows arched
upward. 'You're thinking of Mara again.'

Jiro looked nettled.

'I have warned you,' Chumaka resumed in his grainy,
emotionless voice. 'Dwelling on your enmity will upset your
inner balance and ultimately cost you the game.'
The Lord of the Anasati indicated his contempt by
selecting the bolder of the two short-range moves.

'Ah.' Chumaka had the ill grace to look delighted as he
removed his captured minor player. With his left hand still
occupied with papers, he immediately advanced his priest.

The Anasati Lord chewed his lip, vexed; why had his First
Adviser done that? Enmeshed in an attempt to fathom the
logic behind the move, Jiro barely noticed the messenger
who hurried into the chamber.

The arrival bowed to his master. Immediately upon
receiving the languid wave that allowed him leave to rise,
he passed the sealed packet he carried to Chumaka.

'Your permission, master?' Chumaka murmured.

'The correspondence is coded, is it not?' Jiro said, not
wanting the interruption as he pondered his next move.

His hand lingered between pieces, while Chumaka cleared
his throat. Jiro took this for affirmation. 'I thought so,' he
said. 'Open your dispatches, then. And may the news in
them for once dull your concentration for the game.'

Chumaka gave a short bark of laughter. 'The more
scurrilous the gossip, the keener I will play.' He followed
Jiro's indecision with an amusement that almost, but not

34 M'stress of the Empire

quite, approached contempt. Then he flipped over the
pouch and used the one thumbnail he left unbitten for
the purpose to slit the tie.

As he thumbed through the papers inside, his brows
arched. 'This is most unexpected.'

The Lord of the Anasati's hand hung in space. He looked
up, intrigued by the novelty of his First Adviser's surprise.
'What?'

Servant to two generations of Ruling Lords, Chumaka
was rarely caught out. He regarded his master, speculation
in the depths of his eyes. 'Pardon, my Lord. I was speaking
of this.' He drew a paper from the pouch. Then, as his
peripheral sight took in the piece under Jiro's poised hand,
he added, 'Your move is anticipated, master.'

Jiro withdrew his hand, caught between irritation and
amusement. 'Anticipated,' he muttered. He lounged back
on his cushions to settle his mind. From this changed
vantage, the game board showed a different perspective;
a trick picked up from his father at an early age.
Chumaka tapped a leathery cheek with the document
that had caused the interruption and smiled in his enigmatic
way. Typically he would point out a mistake; but in shah
he would not advise. He would wait for Jiro to pay for the
consequence of his moves. 'This one,' he muttered, making
a mark upon the parchment with a small quill.

Jiro furiously reviewed strategy. Try as he might, he found
no threat. 'You're bluffing me.' He went on to move the
piece in dispute.

Chumaka looked faintly disgusted. 'I don't need to bluff.'
He advanced another piece and said, 'Your Warlord is now
guarded.'

Jiro saw the trap his First Adviser had set: its subtlety
infuriated. Either the master would surrender the center
of the board and be forced to play a defensive game,
or he would lose his Warlord, the most powerful piece,

Conf ontatson

3S

and exchange position for a weakened offensive capacity.
Jiro's forehead creased as he considered several positions
ahead. No matter how many combinations he imagined,
he discovered no way to win. His only hope was to try for
a stalemate.

He moved his remaining priest.

Chumaka by now was engrossed in reading. Still, at his
Lord's reply, he glanced down, captured the priest with a
soldier, and paradoxically allowed his master to free his
Warlord.

Warned to caution by the reprieve, Jiro sought to
extrapolate as far ahead as possible. Too late, his mind
gave him insight: he saw with disappointment that he had
been manipulated to the very move his First Adviser had
desired. The hoped-for stalemate was now forfeit, with
defeat simply a matter of time. Prolonging the match
never helped; Chumaka seemed at times to be impervious
to human mistakes.

Sighing in frustration, the Lord of the Anasati resigned
by turning his Emperor over on its side. 'Your game,
Chumaka.' He rubbed his eyes, his head aching from the
aftermath of tension.

Chumaka gave him a piercing glance over his letter. 'Your
play is steadily improving, Lord Jiro.'

Jiro let the compliments soothe the sting of yet another
defeat. 'I often wonder how you can play so brilliantly with
your mind on other matters, Chumaka.'

The First Adviser snapped the document into folds. 'Shah
is but one aspect of the prepared mind, my Lord.' Holding
his master's attention with heavy-lidded eyes, he added, 'I
hold no trick of strategy, but of knowing my opponent. I
have observed you all your life, master. From your third
move, I could sense where you were probing. By your sixth
move, I had eliminated more than four fifths of the total
possibilities in the game.'

36 Mistress of the Empire

Jiro let his hands fall limp to his lap. 'How?'

'Because you are like most men in the gods' creation, my
Lord. You can be depended upon to act within a pattern
determined by your individual character.' Chumaka tucked
the parchment in a capacious pocket of his robe. 'You
spent a peaceful night. You ate well. You were relaxed.
While you were focused, you were not . . . hungry. By the
third move, I extrapolated that your game would reflect
directness, and . . . not boldness and risk.' Paying Jiro his
undivided attention, he summed up, 'The secret is to ferret
out the dues that will reveal the thoughts of one's opponent.
Learn his motives, know his passions, and you need not wait
to see what he does: you can anticipate his next move.'

Jiro gave back a humorless smile. 'I hope that one day a
shah master may visit who could humble you, Chumaka.'

The First Adviser chuckled. 'I have been humbled many
times, my Lord. Many times. But you have never seen it.'
His gaze flicked over the disarranged players, in satisfied
reminiscence. 'Play with those who do not know you as
I do, and you will emerge victorious. In truth, you have
an enviable gift for strategy. I am not a better shah player,
master.' The First Adviser selected another paper from his
pouch as he finished his rumination. 'But I am a far better
student of you than you have ever been of me.'

Jiro felt discomforted that anyone, even a servant as
loyal as Chumaka, would have subjected him to so detailed
a scrutiny. Then he caught himself short: he was fortunate
to have the man as a high officer. Chumaka's job was to act
as adviser, confidant, and diplomat. The better he knew his
master, the better he would serve the Anasati. To hate him
for his supreme skill was a fool's measure, the mistake of a
master too vain to admit shortcoming. Jiro chastised himself
for selfish, unworthy suspicions and said, 'What has you so
engrossed this morning?'

Chumaka shuffled through the pouch, selected several

Confrontation
37

more missives, and pushed the shah board aside to make
space to array the papers around his knees. 'I have been
pursuing that lead we had into the Acoma spy network,
and keeping watch upon the contacts as you requested.
News has just arrived that I'm attempting to fit in.' His
voice fell to a mutter intelligible only to him as he reshuffled
his piles, then resolved to thinking aloud: 'I'm not quite yet
sure -' He twitched another paper from one pile to the next.
'Forgive the disarray, master, but such visualizations help
me keep track of relationships. Too often one is tempted
to consider events in a straight line, in a particular order,
when actually life is rather . . . chaotic.' He stroked his chin
with thumb and forefinger. 'I have often thought of having a
table constructed of sticks, so I might place notes at different
heights, to further dramatise interconnections . . .'

Experience had taught Jiro not to be nettled by his First
Adviser's idiosyncrasies. He might grumble over his work,
but he seemed to produce the most valuable results at such
times. The Anasati spy network that Jiro had spent all the
wealth he could spare to expand was providing more useful
information each year. Other great houses might employ
a spy master to manage such an operation in his own
right; yet Chumaka had urged against allowing another
to oversee his works. He insisted on first-hand control of
those agents he had placed in other houses, guild halls,
and trading centers. Even when Tecuma, Jiro's father,
had ruled House Anasati, Chumaka had occasionally
left the estate to oversee some matter or another in
person.

While Jiro showed a young man's impatience at his First
Adviser's foibles, he knew when not to interfere. Now,
while Chumaka pored over the gleanings of his agents,
the Lord of the Anasati noticed that some of the reports on
the stacks dated back as much as two years. A few seemed
nothing more than the jottings of a grain factor's secretary

38

Mistress of the Empire

who used the margins to figure his accounts. 'What is this
new information?'

Chumaka did not glance up. 'Someone's tried to kill
Mara.'

This was momentous news! Jiro sat up straight, irked
that he had not been told at once, and maddened that some
other faction, rather than the Anasati, had discommoded
the Lady. 'How do you know this?'
The wily Chumaka hooked the folded paper out of his
robe and extended it toward his master. Jiro snatched the
message and read the opening lines. 'My nephew Ayaki's
dead!' he exclaimed.

The Anasati First Adviser interrupted-before his master
could launch into a tirade. 'Official word will not reach us
until tomorrow, my Lord. That gives us today and tonight
to weigh the manner in which we shall respond.'

Distracted from chastising his officer for withholding
information unnecessarily, Jiro diverted to consider the
course of thought Chumaka desired: for politically, the
Anasati and the Acoma had been bitterest enemies until
Mara's marriage to Buntokapi; since Bunto's ritual suicide,
her heir Ayaki represented a blood tie between the two
houses. Family duty had provided the only reason for
suspension of hostilities.

Now the boy was in Turakamu's halls. Jiro felt no
personal regret at the news of his nephew's death. He
knew anger, that his closest male kin should have been born
to the Acoma name; he had long chafed under the treaty
that compelled him as Anasati to provide the Acoma with
an alliance in the cause of that same child's protection.

That constraint was ended at long last. Mara had signally
failed in her duty as guardian. She had gotten the boy killed.
The Anasati had the public excuse, no, the honorable duty,
of exacting reprisal for the boy's untimely end.

Jiro could barely keep from revering in the knowledge

_

Confrontation

39

that he could at last begin to avenge himself on Mara. He
asked, 'How did the boy die?'

Chumaka shot his master a look of unveiled rebuke. 'Had
you read to the end of what you hold, you would know.'

Lord Jiro felt moved to assert himself as Ruling Lord.
'Why not tell me? Your post is to advise.'

The hot black eyes of the First Adviser dropped back
to his papers. He did not show any overt irritation over
Jiro's correction. If anything, he replied with unctuous
complacence. 'Ayaki died of a fall from a horse. That's
made public. What is not widely known, what has been
garnered by our agent near her estates, is that the horse
died as well. It fell and crushed the child after being struck
by a poisoned dart.'
Jiro's mind pounced on pertinent bits of earlier conversation. '
A tong assassin,' he surmised, 'whose intended target
was Lady Mara.'

Chumaka's expression remained ferociously bland. 'So
the paper in your hand spells out clearly.'

Now Lord Jiro inclined his head, half laughing in
magnanimous spirits. 'I accept the lesson, First Adviser.
Now, rather than your using this news as a whip to instruct
me, I would hear what conclusions you have drawn. The son
of my enemy was, nevertheless my blood kin. this news

makes me angry.'

Chumaka gnawed on the thumbnail he did not keep
sharpened, to break the seals off his correspondence. His
eyes stopped tracking the cipher on the page in his hand
as he analysed his master's statement. Jiro showed no
outward emotion, in traditional Tsurani fashion; if he
said he was angry, he was to be taken at his word. Honor
demanded the servant believe the master. But Jiro was less
enraged than excited, Chumaka determined, which did not
bode well for Mara. Young yet at ruling, Jiro failed to
grasp the longer-range benefits of allowing the alliance

40

Mistre# of the Empire

between Anasati and Acoma to dissolve into a state of
laissez-faire.

The silence as his adviser pondered rasped at Jiro's nerves.
'Who?' he demanded peevishly. 'Which of Mara's enemies
desires her death? We could make ourselves an ally out of
this, if we are bold.'

Chumaka sat back and indulged in a deep sigh.

Behind his pose of long-suffering patience, he was
intrigued by the unexpected turn events had taken, Jiro
saw. The Anasati First Adviser was as enamored of Tsurani
politics as a child craving sweets.

'I can conceive of several possibilities,' Chumaka allowed.
'Yet those houses with the courage to act lack the means,
and those with the means lack courage. To seek the death of
a Servant of the Empire is . . . unprecedented.' He chewed
his thin lower lip, then waved one of the servants over
to stack the documents into piles to be gathered up and
conveyed to his private quarters. To Jiro's impatience, he
said at last, 'I should venture a guess that Mara was attacked
by the Hamoi Tong.'
Jiro relinquished the note to the servant with a sneer. 'Of
course the tong. But who paid the death price?'

Chumaka arose. 'No one. That's what makes this so
elegant. I think the tong acts for their own reasons.'

Jiro's brows rose in surprise. 'But why? What has the
tong to gain by killing Mara?'

A runner servant appeared at the screen that led into
the main estate house. He bowed, but before he could
speak, Chumaka second-guessed the reason behind his
errand. 'Master, the court is assembled,' he said directly
to his Lord; Jiro waved the servant off as he rose from
his cushions. As master and First Adviser fell into step
toward the long hall in which the Lord of the Anasati
conducted business, Jiro surmised aloud, 'We know that
Tasaio of the Minwanabi paid the Hamoi Tong to kill Mara.

Confrontatson

41

Do you think he also paid them to attempt vengeance upon
her should he fall?'

'Possibly.' Chumaka counted points on his fingers, a habit
he had when ordering his thoughts. 'Minwanabi revenge
might explain why, seemingly from nowhere, the tong chose
to act after months of quiet.'

Pausing in the shadow of the corridor that accessed the
double doors of the great hall, Jiro said, 'If the tong acts
on behalf of some pledge made to Tasaio before his death,
will it try again?'

Chumaka shrugged, his stooped shoulders rising like tent
poles under his turquoise silk robe. 'Who can say? Only the
Obajan of the Hamoi would know; he alone has access to
the records that name those deaths bought and paid for. If
the tong has vowed Mara's death . . . it will persevere. If it
merely agreed to make an attempt on her life, it has fulfilled
its obligation.' He gestured in rueful admiration. 'The Good
Servant has her luck from the gods, some might argue. For
anyone else, an agreement to send an assassin is a virtual
guarantee of success. Others have avoided the tong, once,
even twice before; but the Lady Mara has survived five
assassins that I know of. Her son was not so lucky.'

Jiro moved on with a step that snapped on the tiles. His
nostrils flared, and he barely saw the two servants who
sprang from their posts to open the audience hall doors
for him. Striding past their abject bows, Jiro sniffed. Since
getting his First Adviser to act with proper subservience
was a waste of time, Jiro sniffed again. 'Well, it's a pity the
assassin missed her. Still, we can seize advantage: the death
of her son will cause much confusion in her household.'

Delicately, Chumaka cleared his throat. 'Trouble will
transfer to us, master.'

Jiro stopped in his tracks. His sandals squeaked as
he pivoted to face his First Adviser. 'Don't you mean
trouble for the Acoma? They have lost our alliance.

42 Mistress of the Empire

No, they have spit on it by allowing Ayaki to come
to harm.'

Chumaka stepped closer to his Lord, so the cluster of
factors who awaited Jiro's audience at the far end of the
hall might not overhear. 'Speak gently,' he admonished.
'Unless Mara finds convincing proof that it is Tasaio of
the Minwanabi's hand reaching from the halls of the Dead
in this matter, it is logical for her to place blame upon
us.' Acerbically, he added, 'You took pains when Lord
Tecuma, your father, died to make your hostilities toward
her house plain.'

Jiro jerked up his chin. 'Perhaps.'

Chumaka did not press chastisement. Caught again into
his innate fascination for the Game, he said, 'Her network
is the best I've seen. I have a theory: given her adoption
of the entire Minwanabi household-'

Jiro's cheeks flushed, 'Another example of her blasphemous
behavior and contempt for tradition!'

Chumaka held up a placating hand. There were times
when Jiro's thinking became clouded; having lost his
mother to a fever at the tender age of five, as a boy
he had clung irrationally to routine, to tradition, as if
adherence to order could ward off the inconsistencies of
life. Always he had tended to wall off his grief behind
logic, or unswerving devotion to the dutiful ideal of the
Tsurani noble. Chumaka did not like to encourage what he
considered a weakening flaw in his Lord. The ramifications
of allowing such traits to become policy were too confining
for his liking. The perils, in fact, were paramount; in a
bold move of his own, Chumaka had seized the initiative
to take in more than two hundred soldiers formerly sworn
to Minwanabi service. These were disaffected men whose
hatred of Mara would last to their dying breath. Chumaka
had not housed such for his own entertainment; he was
not a disloyal man. He had secretly accommodated the

Confrontation

43
warriors in a distant, secret barracks. Tactful inquiry had
shown Jiro to be adamant in his refusal to consider swearing
them to Anasati service; ancient custom held that such men
were anathema, without honor and to be shunned lest the
displeasure of the gods that had seen the unfortunate house
fall be visited upon their benefactor. Yet Chumaka had
refrained from sending these men away. He had no hope of
a change in attitude from his master; but a tool was a tool,
and these former Minwanabi might someday be useful, if
the Ruling Lord of the Anasati could not be weaned from
his puerile hatred of Mara.

If the two Houses were going to be enemies, Chumaka
saw such warriors as an advantage to be held in trust for
the day their service might be needed. Mara had proven
herself to be clever. She had ruined one house far larger
than her own. Guile would be needed to match guile, and
Chumaka was never a man to waste an opportunity.

Indeed, he saw his secret as a loyal act, and what Jiro
did not know, could not be forbidden.

The warriors were not all. Chumaka had to restrain
himself from the desire to rub his thin hands together in
anticipation. He had spies as well. Already a few factors
formerly in the Minwanabi employ were now working on
behalf of the Anasati and not the Acoma. Chumaka gained
the same pleasure in co-opting these people to his master's
service that he might in isolating an opponent's fortress or
priest upon the shah board. He knew eventually the Anasati
would benefit. Then his master must see the wisdom of some
of Mara's choices.

And so the Anasati First Adviser smiled, and said
nothing; to a fine point, he knew just how far he could
go in contradicting Jiro. Pressing his Lord toward his
meeting with the factors, he said quietly, 'Master, Mara

may have flouted tradition by taking on responsibility for
her vanquished enemy's servants, but rather than merely
removing her greatest enemy, she has gained immeasurable
resources. Her strength has grown. From being a dangerous,
dominant player in the Game of the Council, at one stroke
Mara has become the single most powerful Ruling Lord or
Lady in the history of the Empire. The Acoma forces, alone,
now number more than ten thousand swords; they surpass
several smaller clans. And Clan Hadama and its allies
together rival the Emperor's Imperial Whites!' Chumaka
turned reflective as he added, 'She could rule by fiat, I
think, if she had the ambition. The Light of Heaven is
certainly not of a mind to oppose her wishes.'

Disliking to be reminded of the Lady's swift ascendance,
Jiro became the more nettled. 'Never mind. What is this
theory?'
Chumaka raised up one finger. 'We know Tasaio of the
Minwanabi employed the Hamoi Tong. The tong continues
to pursue Mara's death.' Counting on a second finger, he
listed, 'These facts may or may not be related. Incomo,
Tasaio's former First Adviser, was effective in discovering
some or all of the Acoma agents who had infiltrated the
Minwanabi household. There was a disruption after that,
and a mystery remains: our own network reported that
someone killed every Acoma agent between the Minwanabi
Great House and the City of Sulan-Qu.'

Jiro gave an offhand wave. 'So Tasaio had all her agents
killed as far back as he could trace her network.'

Chumaka's smile became predatory. 'What if he didn't?'
He flicked up a third finger. 'Here is another fact: the Hamoi
Tong killed those servants inside the Minwanabi household
who were Acoma agents.'

The Lord's boredom intensified. 'Tasaio ordered the
tong -'

'No!' Chumaka interrupted, verging on disrespect. Swiftly
he amended his manners by turning his outburst into
prelude for instruction. 'Why should Tasaio hire tong to

Confrontation

4S

kill his own staff ? Why pay death price for lives that could
be taken by an order to the Minwanabi guards?'

Jiro looked rueful. 'I was thinking carelessly.' His eyes
shifted forward to where the factors were fidgeting at the
delay, as Lord and adviser continued to equivocate just
inside the doorway.

Chumaka ignored their discomfort. They were underlings,
after all, and it was their place to wait upon their Lord.
'Because there is no logical reason, my master. However, we
can make a surmise: if I were the Lady, and I wished to insult
both the tong and Tasaio, what better way than to order the
tong, under false colors, to kill her spies?'

Jiro's expression quickened. He could follow Chumaka's
reasoning on his own, now he had been clued in to the first
step. 'You think the Hamoi Tong may have cause to declare
a blood debt toward Mara?'

Chumaka's answer-was a toothy smile.

Jiro resumed walking. His steps echoed across the vast
hall, with its paper screens drawn closed on both sides,
and its roof beams hung with dusty war relics and a
venerable collection of captured enemy banners. These
artifacts reminded of a time when the Anasati were at
the forefront of historical battles. Theirs was an ancient
tradition of honor. They would rise as high again, Jiro
vowed; no, higher yet. For Mara's defeat would be his
to arrange, a victory that would resound throughout the
Empire.

He alone would prove that Mara had incurred the

gods' displeasure in granting reprieve to conquered enemy
servants. Single-handedly, he would exact vengeance for
her flouting of the old ways. She would look into his eyes
as she died, and know: she had made her worst mistake
on the day she had chosen Buntokapi for her husband.
Unlike the grandeur of the Minwanabi great hall that Mara
had inherited, the Anasati great hall was as reassuring in

46

Mistress of the Empire

its traditional design as the most time-honored ritual in
the temple. Jiro luxuriated in this; no different from the
halls of a hundred other Ruling Lords, this chamber was
nevertheless unique; it was Anasati. Along both sides of the
center aisle knelt petitioners and Anasati retainers. Omelo,
his Force Commander, stood at attention to one side of the
dais upon which Jiro conducted the business of his court.
Arrayed behind him were the other officers and advisers of
the household.

Jiro mounted his dais, knelt on the Lord's cushions,
then settled back on his heels as he adjusted his formal
robe. Before he signaled his hadonra to begin the day's
council, he said to his First Adviser, 'Find out for certain
if the tong pursues Mara on its own. I would know, so we
can make better plans when this news of Ayaki's death
becomes official.'

Chumaka clapped his hands and a servant came to his
shoulder. 'Have two runners in my quarters by the time I
reach them.' While the servant bowed and hastened away,
he made his own obeisance to the master. 'Lord, I shall
begin at once. I have some new sources that may provide
us with better information.' Then, seeing the hardened
glint in Lord Jiro's eyes, Chumaka touched his master's
sleeve. 'We must show restraint until Mara's messenger
reaches us with- formal announcement of Ayaki's death.
Speak now, and your staff will gossip. We would ill be
served by giving our enemy proof, that we have spies in
sensitive places.'

Jiro snapped away from Chumaka's touch. 'I understand,
but do not ask me to be complacent! All in Anasati service
will mourn. Ayaki of the Acoma, my nephew, has been
slain, and every man of ours who is not a slave will wear
a red band upon his arm in token of our loss. When this
day's business is finished, you will ready an honor guard
for travel to Sulan-Qu.'

Conf ontat~on

47

Chumaka bit back annoyance. 'We attend the boy's
funeral?'

Jiro bared his teeth. 'He was my nephew. To stay home
when his ashes are honored would be to admit responsibility
or cowardice, and we are guilty of neither. He may have
been the son of my enemy, and I may now destroy his
mother without constraint, but he shares Anasati blood! He
deserves the respect any grandson of Tecuma of the Anasati
is entitled. We shall carry a family relic to be burned with
him.'Jiro's eyes flashed as he finished, 'Tradition demands
our presence!'

Chumaka kept his reservations about this decision as he
bowed in acknowledgment of his master's wishes. While it
was a First Adviser's place to shepherd his Lord through
decisions that affected house policy, Chumaka was wont
to chafe at the more mundane responsibilities of his office.
The Game of the Council had changed dramatically since
Mara of the Acoma first entered the arena; yet it was still the
game, and nothing in life captured the adviser's fascination
like the puzzle of Tsurani politics. Taut as a coursing hound,
he rose up in excitement for the chase.

Almost happy despite the prospect of unfortunate developments
on the horizon, the First Adviser left the great
hall, muttering over the lists of instructions he would need
to dispatch with his runners. Substantial bribes would be
necessary to pry loose the information he desired, but if
the gathered bits of intelligence could prove his morning's
theory, the gains would outweigh the cost. As Chumaka
paused for the servants to open the door to let him out,
his lips reflected an unholy smile.

Years had passed since he had tested his wits against
a worthy opponent! Lady Mara was going to afford him
much amusement if Lord Jiro's obsession could not be

cooled, and the Anasati marked her house for ruin.

* **
Mara tossed fitfully in sleep. Her sounds of distress tore at
Hokanu's heart, and he wished to do something, to touch
her, to speak soft words, to ease her agony. But she had
slept very little since Ayaki's death. Even the restlessness of
nightmares offered some release. To waken her was to force
her to awareness of her loss, and to the crushing necessity
of bearing up under the strain.

Hokanu sighed and regarded the patterns that moonlight
cast through the screens. The shadows in the corners seemed
to loom darker than ever before; not even the presence of
doubled sentries at each door and window could recover
the lost sense of peace. The heir to the Shinzawai and
husband to the Servant of the Empire now found himself
a man alone, with nothing but his wits and his love for a
troubled woman. The predawn air was cool, unusual for
lands in Szetac Province, perhaps owing to the proximity
of the house to the lake. Hokanu arose and slipped on the
light robe he had cast off the night before. He tied the sash,
then took a stance overlooking the sleeping mat with his
arms crossed tightly against his chest.

He kept vigil while Mara tossed in the bedclothes, her
hair like a patch of lingering night in the slowly brightening
air. The coppery moonlight faded, washed out by early gray.
The screen that opened upon the private terrace had turned
slowly from black to pearl.

Hokanu restrained an urge to pace. Mara had woken
during the night, sobbing in his arms and crying Ayaki's
name. He had held her close, but his warmth would bring
her no comfort. Hokanu's jaw tightened at the memory. A
foe he would willingly face in battle, but this sorrow . . . a
child dead as his potential had barely begun to unfold . . .
There was no remedy under sky that a husband could offer.
Only time would dull the ache.

Hokanu was not a man who cursed. Controlled and taut
as the pitched treble string of a harplike tiral he allowed

Confrontation

49

himself no indulgence that might in any way disturb his
wife. Silently, dangerously graceful, he slid aside the door
just enough to pass through. The day was too fair, he
thought as he regarded the pale green sky. There should
have been storms, strong winds, even lightning and rain;
nature herself should rail at the earth on the day of Ayaki's
funeral.

Across the hill, in the hollow before the lakeshore, the
final preparations were being carried out. The stacked
wood of the pyre arose in a ziggurat. Jican had made
free with Acoma wealth, on Hokanu's order, and made
sure that only aromatic woods were purchased. The stink
of singed flesh and hair would not offend the mourners or
the boy's mother. Hokanu's mouth chinned. There would
be no privacy for Mara on this most sad occasion. She had
risen too high, and her son's funeral would be a state rite.
Ruling Lords would converge from all parts of the Empire
to pay their respects - or to further their plot's intrigues.
The Game of the Council did not pause for grief, or joy,
or any calamiq of nature. Like rot unseen under painted
wood, the circumstances that had created Ayaki's death
would repeat themselves again and again. ~

A dust cloud arose on the northern skyline; guests already
arriving, Hokanu surmised. He glanced again at his wife,
reassured that her dreams had quieted. He stepped quietly
to the door, spoke to the boy runner, and arranged for the
Lady's maids to be with her when she wakened. Then he
gave in to his restlessness and strode out onto the terrace.

The estate was beginning to stir. Jican could be seen crossing
at a half run between the kitchen wing and the servants'
quarters, where laundry girls already hurried between guest
chambers with baskets of fresh linens balanced on their
heads. Prepared for state visitors, warriors in dress armor
marched to relieve the night watch. Yet, amid the general
air of purpose, two figures walked by the lake, keeping pace

50

Msstress of the Empsre

with each other, but apparently on no logical errant beyond
a morning stroll. Suspicion gave Hokanu pause, until he
looked closer and identified the pair. Then curiosity drew
him across the terrace and he descended the stairs that gave
access to the grounds below.

Following quietly between the rows of akasi flowers,
Hokanu confirmed his first impression: Incomo and Irrilandi
moved ahead of him at their unhurried pace, seemingly lost
in thought. The former First Adviser and the former Force
Commander to Tasaio of the Minwanabi did not wanter
aimlessly.

Intrigued by what these two previous enemies turned
loyal servants might be doing out so early on this sat day,
Hokanu slipped silently after.

The pair reached the edge of the lake, and the reed-frail
adviser and leathery, battle-muscled warrior both knelt
upon a little rise. Past a notch between the scrolled eaves
of the great house and the hill it fronted, the first pink clouds
drifted in the sky, their undersides heating to orange as the
rays of a sun not yet visible gilded their edges.

Both men sat as if praying. Hokanu noiselessly drew
nearer. For several minutes the Lord ant the two servants
abided in frozen tableau. Then daybreak pierces the gloom,
and a sun beam fanned across the sky, catching in a
crystalline formation at the peak of the rise. There came
a flash that dazzled. Warmth ant first light bathes the
 quiet, and the dew sparkled, touched to gemlike
brilliance. Then Irrilandi ant Incomo bowed until their
heads touched the earth, repeating faint words that Hokanu
could not make out.

For that brief instant, the son of the Shinzawai was nearly
blinded by the unexpected flash; then it was gone as the
angle of the rising sun changed.

The two men completed their strange rite ant stood.
The war-wary eyes of Irrilandi were first to pick out a
discrepancy in the quiet morning. He saw the Lord who
waited nearby, and bowed. 'Master Hokanu,' he salt.
Caught short, Incomo repeated the gesture.

Hokanu motioned both servants back toward the house.
'I could not sleep,' he said ruefully. 'I observed you walking
and came to see what brought you here.'

Irrilandi gave a Tsurani shrug. 'Each day before sunrise
we give thanks.'

Hokanu's silence begged for a further explanation,
though he did not look at either man but studied his
bare feet as he stepped through dew-damp grass.

Incomo cleared his throat in what might have been
embarrassment. 'We come here each day to witness the

day's beginning. And to give thanks, since the Good
Servant came to us.' He regarded the great house, with
its high, peaked gables, stone pillars, and the screen lintels
tied now with red bunting in respect for Turakamu, the Red
God, who would welcome Ayaki's spirit into his keeping
during the day's rites. Incomo elaborated for Hokanu's
benefit. 'When our Lady brought about Tasaio's ruin, we
expected death or slavery. Instead we were given the gift
of days: another chance to serve and gain honor. So each
sunrise we offer a prayer of thanks for this reprieve, and
for the Good Servant.'

Hokanu nodded, unsurprised by the devotion of these
high officers. As Servant of the Empire, Mara was beloved
by the masses. Her own staff served her with an affection
that bordered upon awe. Indeed, she would need such
support for her house to recover from this loss. A ruler
disliked by his people might expect a blow of this magnitude
to cause hesitation in his staff, as servants from the
highest positions town to the meanest slave fretted over
whether heaven had withdrawn the luck of the house.
Even without divine disapproval, mortal enemies would
seize upon opportunity and strike where the ranks were

52 Mistrcss of the Empire

most confused. And so the superstition fed upon the results,
since a house weakened would suffer setbacks, ant so seem
to be in the disfavor of the gods.

Hokanu felt irritation. Too many events in this Empire
twisted in upon themselves, until centuries of unbending
customs led their society toward stagnation and entropy.

This inbred cycle he and Mara and Ichindar, the Emperor
of the Nations, had dedicated themselves to overturn.

Ayaki's untimely end was more than sorrow and grief;
it could become a major setback and be turned into a
rallying cry for all those Ruling Lords who were disgruntled
by recent changes. If the Acoma showed any sign of
irresolution, there would be strife; and at the heart of
the faction that had begun to form in rigid adherence to
old traditions^, the Anasati voice would be loudest.

The funeral guests would not be here to observe the ashes
of the departed as they spiraled in their smoky ascent to
heaven; no: they would be watching one another like
starving dogs, and Lady Mara would be subjected to the
most thorough scrutiny of all. Weighed down by dread,
for he knew his Lady was too lost in her pain to handle
peripheral matters, Hokanu pushed open the ornamental
gate and started across the garden. He forgot the two men
who walked with him until Incomo said, 'First Adviser
Saric has all in readiness, master. Entertainments have been
arranged to divert the guests, and the honor guards of all but
the greatest Ruling Lords will be quartered in the garrison
across the lake. The pyre has been soaked in oils, and all
has been done to keep the ceremony as brief as possible.'

Hokanu found no reassurance in Incomo's words; that
the adviser felt need to stress such points bespoke a sharing
of concern. The game would go on, whether or not Lady
Mara could rally and cope.

'We shall not stint in our honors to the departed young
master,' added Irrilandi, 'but it is my suggestion that you

Confrontation

::

~;

__

53

stay by your Lady's side, and be prepared to interpret her
instructions.'

Politely, tactfully, the high officers of House Acoma
acknowledged that their mistress remained incapacitated.
Hokanu felt a surge of gratitude to these men, who were
quietly and staunchly prepared to try to cover for her
lapse. He tried to reassure them that House Acoma would
not flounder with the currents of misfortune like some
rudderless ship. 'I shall be with my Lady. She is touched
by your devotion and would have me say that you should
not hesitate to approach if you have any difficulties or
concerns.'

A knowing glance passed between master and servants.
Then Irrilandi bowed. 'More than a thousand soldiers have
made prayers to Turakamu to take them in the young
master's place.'

Hokanu nodded in respect. Those soldiers would wear
arms throughout the funeral ceremony in token of their
vow, a strong deterrent to any visiting Lord who might contemplate
causing trouble, in breach of Acoma hospitality.

The number was a great honor to Ayaki, the men's dedication
also demonstrated that barracks rumor recognised
the political ramifications of what was far more than a
personal tragedy. The Lords who came today would gather
and circle like jaguna, the eaters of dead meat, to see what
prizes could be snatched from the teeth of misfortune.

Hokanu received the departing bows of the two officers,
then looked over his shoulder at the lake, where barges were
now heading rapidly toward the docks. Banners flew from
their poles, and the chant of the oarsmen carried across the
water. Very shortly now the quiet estate would become a
political arena. Hokanu considered the great stone house
that had been the hall of the Minwanabi for centuries.
The place had been designed as a fortress, but today even
enemies must be invited inside. The priest of Chochocan,
the Good God, had blessed the estate, and Mara had seen
the Minwanabi natami placed in a dedicated glade, so that
a once great house should be remembered. Yet despite these
measures and the assurances of the priests that the Good
Servant's acts had earned divine favor, Hokanu swallowed ~i
back a feeling of dread. The depths of the eaves seemed to
hold shadows in which the spirits of enemies peered out in
silent laughter at Mara's grief.

Hokanu wished for a moment he had overridden her bolt
choice and opted to adhere to the customs of conquest that
would have seen this house tom down, each stone carries
to the lake and thrown into the deep, each timber and fidt
burned, and the soil of all these lush acres sown with salt.
Unlucky ground should nurture nothing, according to the
ways adhered to over the centuries, that the cycle of curses
events might be broken for eternity. Despite the beauty of
this estate, and the near-impregnable location of its grounds
and holdings, Hokanu repressed the cold premonition that
he might be doomed never to find happiness with Mara as
long as they lived under this roof.
But this was an ill time to brood, with the state guests
already arriving. The consort to the Servant of the Empire
stiffened his shoulders, prepared for the coming ordeal.
Mara must show the proper Tsurani bearing in the face
of her overwhelming grief. The death of her father and
brother, who were warriors, had been one dining; the loss
of her own child, far worse. Hokanu intuitively senses
that this was the ugliest fate that could have befallen the
woman he loved more than life. For her he must be strong
today, armor against public dishonor, for while he was still
the dedicated heir of the Shinzawai, he embraced Acoma
honor as if it were his own.

Secure in his resolve, he returned to the terrace outside
his Lady's sleeping quarters. As the screens were not
yet opened, he knew that the servants had allowed her

Con,Sontation

55

undisturbed rest. He slid the panel soundlessly in its track
and entered. He did not speak but let the gentle warmth
of daylight fall upon his wife's cheek.

Mara stirred. Her hands closed in the twisted sheets, and
her eyes fluttered open. She gasped and pushed herself up.
Her eyes swept the room in terror until Hokanu knelt and
captured her in his embrace.

Her complexion looked as if she had not slept at all. 'Is
it time?'

Hokanu stroked her shoulder, as servants who had waited
outside hurried in at the sound of their mistress's voice. He
said, 'The day begins.'

Gently he helped raise his Lady to her feet. When he
had steadied her, he backed away and gestured for the
servants to perform their offices. Mara stood with a bleak
expression as her maids bustled to arrange her bath and her
dress. Hokanu endured the sight of her lackluster manner
without showing the anger in his heart. If Jiro of the Anasati
was responsible for causing this pain to his Lady, the heir to
the Shinzawai vowed to see the man suffer. Then, recalled
to his own state of undress by the admiring stare of one of
Mara's handmaids, he put aside thoughts of revenge. He
clapped for his own servants, and suffered their fussing in
silence as they arrayed him in the formal robes required
for Ayaki's funeral.

The throng mended the hills surrounding the Acoma estate
house, clothed in the colors of a thousand houses, with red
sashes, red ties, or red ribbons worn in homage to the Red
God, brother to Sibi, who was Death, and lord of all lives.
The color also symbolised the heart's blood of the boy
that no longer flowed to clothe the spirit. Six thousand
soldiers stood in columns flanking the hollow where the
bier awaited. In front, in polished green armor, stood the
Acoma warriors who had dedicated their lives; behind

S6 Mistress of ~e Emptrc

these, the ranks in the blue of Mara's Shinzawai consort;
and after them, the gold-edged white of the Imperial Guard
sent by Ichindar to carry the Emperor's condolences. Next
came Kamatsu of the Shinzawai, Hokanu's father, and then
the families who made up the Hadama Clan, all who had
blood ties to the dead boy. After them, in a great, sprawling
crows, stood the houses who had come to pay their respects
.or to indulge in the next round of the Great Game.

The warriors were statue-still, heads bowed, shields held
with edges resting upon the ground. Before each lay a
sword, points facing the bier, empty scabbard placed
crosswise beneath. Behind the soldiers, up the hillside,
members of the household kept a respectful distance from
the line of march, for the great of the Empire had come to
bid farewell to a boy.

~Trumpets blew to begin the procession. In the shade of
the outer portico where the Acoma advisers and officers
gathered to march, Mara fought the weakness in her knees.
She felt Hokanu's grip on her elbow, but the meaning of
the sensation did not register. The eyes half hidden behind
her red veil of mourning were locked on the litter that held
her motionless son. His body was encased in fine armor;
his white hands clasped the grip of a rare metal sword.
The hand that had been crushed in the fall was decently
clothed in a gauntlet; the mashed chest, hidden behind a
breastplate and shield emblazoned with a shatra bird in
rare gold leaf.

To the eye, he seemed a sleeping warrior, prepared at a
call to arise and fight in the glory and honor of his youth.

Mara felt her throat dose. No prior event, not placing
the mementos of her father and brother in the family's glade
to mourn them, not enduring her first husband's brutality,
not losing the first man with whom she had discovered the
passion of love, not the death of her beloved foster mother-nothing
compared to this moment for sheer horror.

Confrontation

57

She could not believe, even now, far less accept the finality
of her firstborn's death. A child whose life had made hers
endurable, through her unhappy first marriage. An infant
whose carefree laughter had weaned her from despair, when
she had faced enemies greater than the means of her house
to defend. Ayaki had given her the courage to go on. Out of
stubbornness, and a fierce desire to see him live to carry on
the Acoma name, Mara had accomplished the impossible.

All would be consigned to ashes, this day. This accursed
day, when a boy who should have outlived his mother
would become a pillar of smoke to assault the nostrils of
heaven.

A step behind Mara, baby Justin fretfully asked to be
carried. His nurse cajoled him to stand hushing his noise.
His mother seemed deaf to his distress, locked as she was
in dark thoughts. She moved like a puppet to Hokanu's
guidance as the retinue prepared to start forward.

Drums beat. The tattoo thrummed on the air. An acolyte
clad in red thrust a dyed ke-reed into the Lady's unfeeling
hands; Hokanu's fingers clasped hers, raising the reed with
her lest she drop the religious symbol.

The procession moved. Hokanu "gathered her into the
crook of his arm and steadied her into the slow march.
To honor her loss, he had forsaken the blue armor of the
Shinzawai for the green of the Acoma and an officer's
helm. Vaguely Mara knew he grieved, and distantly she
sensed the sorrow of the others - the hadonra, who had so
often shouted at the boy for spilling ink in the scriptorium;
the nurses and teachers, who had all borne bruises from
his tantrums; the advisers, who had sometimes wished
for a warrior's sword to knock sense into the boy's
mischievous head by whacking the flat on his backside.
Servants and maids and even slaves had appreciated Ayaki's
quick spirit.

But they were as shadows, and their words of consolation

58

Mistress of the Empire

just noise. Nothing anyone said or did seemed to penetrate
the desolation that surrounded the Lady of the Acoma.

Mara felt Hokanu's hand gently upon her arm, guiding
her down the low stairs. Here waited the first of the state
delegations: Ichindar's, clad in blinding white and gold.
Mara bent her head as the regal contingent bowed to her;
she stayed silent behind her veils as Hokanu murmured the
appropriate words.

She was moved on, past Lord Hoppara of the Xacatecas,
so long a staunch ally; today she presented to him the
manner she would show a stranger, and only Hokanu heard
the young man's graceful expression of understanding. At
his side, elegant as always, the dowager Lady of the
Xacatecas regarded the Good Servant with something more
magnanimous than sympathy.

As Hokanu made his bow to her, Lady Isashani lingeringly
caught his hand. 'Keep your Lady close,' she warned
while she outwardly maintained the appearance of offering
a personal condolence. 'She is a spirit still in shock. Very
likely she will not recognise the import of her actions for
some days yet. There are enemies here who would provoke
her to gain advantage.'

Hokanu's politeness took on a grim edge as he thanked
Lord Hoppara's mother for her precaution.

These nuances passed Mara by, as well as the skill
with which Hokanu turned aside the veiled insults of the
Omechan. She made her bows at her Lord's cue, and did
not care as she roused whispers in her wake: that she had
shown more obeisance than necessary to Lord Frasai of the
Tonmargu; that the Lord of the Inrodaka noticed that her
movements lacked her characteristic fire and grace.

She had no focus in life beyond the small, fragile form
that lay in final rest upon the litter.

Plodding steps followed in time to the thud of muffled
drums. The sun climbed overhead as the procession wound

Confrontation

59

into the hollow where the pyre had been prepared. Hokanu
murmured polite words to the last and least of the Ruling
Lords who merited personal recognition. Between the
litter and the pyre waited one last contingent, robed in
unadorned black.

Touched by awe, Hokanu forced his next step, his hand
tightening upon Mara. If she realised she confronted
five Great Ones, magicians of the Assembly, she gave
no sign. That their kind was above the law and that
they had seen fit to send a delegation to this event
failed to give her pause. Hokanu was the one to ponder
the ramifications, and to connect that of late the Black
Robes seemed to have taken a keener interest than usual
in the turnings of politics. Mara bowed to the Great
Ones as she had to any other Lord, unmindful of the
sympathy offered by the plump Hochopepa, whom she
had met at the occasion of Tasaio's ritual suicide. The
always awkward moment when Hokanu faced his true
father was lost on her. The iq regard of the red-haired
magician who stood behind the more taciturn Shimone
did not faze her. Whether hostile or benign, the magicians'
words could not pierce through her apathy. No
life their powers could threaten meant more than the one
Turakamu and the Game of the Council had already seen
fit to take.

Mara entered the ritual circle where the bier lay. She
watched with stony eyes as her Force Commander lifted
the too still form of her boy and laid him tenderly on the
wood that would be his final bed. His hands straightened
sword and helm and shield, and he stepped back, all his
rakishness absent.

Mara felt Hokanu's gentle prod. Numbly she stepped
forward as around her the drums boomed and stilled.
She lowered the ke-reed across Ayaki's body, but it was
Hokanu's voice that raised in the traditional cry: 'We

60 Mistress of the Empire

are gathered to commemorate the life of Ayaki, son of
Buntokapi, grandson of Tecuma and Sezu!'

The line was too short, Mara sensed, a vague frown on
her face. Where were the lists of life deeds, for this her
firseborn son?

An awkward stillness developed, until Lujan moved at
a desperate glance from Hokanu and nudged her around
to face the east.

The priest of Chochocan approached, robed in the white
that symbolised life. He shed his mantle and danced, naked
as at birth, in celebration of childhood.

Mara did not see his gyrations; she felt no expiation
for the guilt of knowing her laxity had caused disaster.
As the dance,,` bowed to earth before the bier, she faced
west when prompted, and stood, dull-eyed, as the whistles
of Turakamu's followers split the air, as the priest of the
Red God began his dance for Ayaki's safe passage to the
halls of the Red God. He had never needed to represent a
barbarian beast before, and his idea of how a horse might
move had been almost laughable had it not ended in the
fall to earth that had crushed so much young promise.

Mara's eyes stayed dry. Her heart felt hardened to a
kernel incapable of being renewed. She did not bow her
head in prayer ?s the priests stepped forward and slashed
the red cord that bound Ayaki's hands, freeing his spirit
for rebirth. She did not weep, or beg the gods' favor, as
the white-plumed tirik bird was released as symbol of the
renewal of rebirth.

The priest of Turakamu intoned his prayer for Ayaki. 'In
the end, all men come before my god. The Death God is a
kind Lord, for he ends suffering and pain. He judges those
who come to him and rewards the righteous.' With a broad
wave of his hand and a nod of his skull mask, the priest
added, 'He understands the living and knows of pain and
grief.' The red wand pointed to the armored boy on the

Confrontation

:.

.!



i
~:
~
-

__
61

pyre. 'Ayaki of the Acoma was a good son, firmly upon
the path that his parents would have wished for him. We
can only accept that Turakamu judged him worthy and
called him so that he might be returned to us, with an even
greater fate.'

Mara clenched her teeth to keep from crying.

What prayer was there to be said that would not be
tainted with rage, and what rebirth beyond being son of
the Light of Heaven himself could await that was more
honorable than heirship of the Acoma? As Mara shivered in
pent fury, Hokanu's arms dosed around her. He murmured
something she did not hear as the torches were lifted from
their brackets around the circle and the aromatic wood was
set alight. A cold band twisted itself around her heart. She
watched the red-yellow flames lick upward, her thoughts
very far from the present.

As the priest of Juran the Just approached to give her
blessing, only Hokanu's surreptitious shake prevented her
from screaming curses at him, demanding to know what
sort of justice existed in a world where little boys died before
their mother's eyes.

The flames crackled skyward, then sheeted over the pyre
with a roar of disturbed air. The treated wood spared
the sight of the boy's body twisting and blackening in
its embrace. Yet Mara looked upon the sight with every
fiber of her body braced in horror. Her imagination depicted
what lay at the heart of a brightness too dazzling for sight;
her mind supplied the screams the boy had never uttered.

'Ayaki,' she whispered. Hokanu's hold upon her tightened
with enough force to recall her momentarily to
propriety: to the stiff-faced mask that as Servant of the
Empire she was expected to show in public grief. But the
effort of holding her features immobile was enough to cause
her to tremble.

For long minutes the crackle of flames vied with the

62

Mistress of the Empire

voices of the priests who chanted their various prayers.
Mara fought to control her breathing, to stave off the
monstrous reality of her dead child vanishing into a roil
of smoke.

For the death rite of one of lesser station, this would be
time for the guests to file away, leaving those closest to
the departed to a time of private mourning. But with the
passing of the great, such courtesies were forborne. Mara
was allowed no reprieve. At the forefront of the public
eye she remained, while the acolytes of Turakamu threw
consecrated oil upon the flames. Waves of heat rolled off
the pyre, reddening Mara's skin. If she shed any tears, they
dried upon her cheeks in the face of that cruel furnace.
Above writhing curtains of flame, the thick black smoke
coiled skyward to draw notice from heaven that a spirit of
high honor had departed.

The sun added to the blaze, and Mara felt sick and
dizzy. Hokanu turned his body to shade her as he could.
He dared not glance at her too often in concern, for fear
of betraying her weakness, while the time dragged by as
torture. Nearly an hour passed before the flame subsided;
then more prayers and chanting followed as the wood-ashes
were spread to cool. Mara all but swayed on her feet when
the priest of Turakamu intoned, 'The body is no more. The
spirit has flown. He who was Ayaki of the Acoma is now
here,' he said, touching his heart, 'here' - he touched his
head - 'and in Turakamu's halls.'

The acolytes braved the smoking embers as they picked
their way to the heart of the mound of decimated fuel. One
used a square of thick leather to drag out the warped blade
of Ayaki's sword, quickly passing the bundle to another who
waited to quench the hot metal in wet rags. Steam rose to
mingle with the smoke. Mara endured with deadened eyes
as the priest of Turakamu employed an ornate scoop to
fill the waiting urn with ashes. More wood than boy, the

Conf ontation

63

remains would become the symbol of the body's interment
in the glade of his ancestors. For the Tsurani believed that
while the true soul traveled to the halls of the Red God,
a small part of the spirit, the shade, would rest alongside
its ancestors within the stone that was the natami of the
house. That way the essence of the child would thus return
in another life, while that which made him Acoma would
remain to watch over his family.

Hokanu steadied his wife as two acolytes arrived before
her. One offered the sword blade, which Mara touched.
Then Hokanu took the twisted length of metal while the
other acolyte surrendered the urn. Mara accepted the
ashes of her son in trembling hands. Her eyes did not
acknowledge what she held but remained fixed upon the
scattered, charred wood that remained in the circle.

Hokanu touched her arm lightly and they turned as one.
The drums boomed out as the procession veered around and
resumed its march toward the Acoma contemplation glade.
No impression of the walk registered upon Mara beyond
the stony cold of the urn in her hands, warmed at the base
by the still warm ashes inside. She set one foot before the
other, barely aware of her arrival at the scrolled gateposts
that marked the glade entrance.

The servants and Hokanu paused in deference to her;
for the only one not of Acoma blood who was permitted
to step through the arch and make his way along the stone
path that led within was the gardener whose life had been
dedicated to tend the glade. Here even her husband, who
was still a Shinzawai, could not enter, upon pain of death.
To allow any stranger admittance was to offer insult to the
shades of Acoma ancestors, and to bring lasting disharmony
to the peace that abided in the natami.

Mara stepped away from Hokanu's embrace. She did

not hear the murmur of the nobles who watched, pitying
or predatory, until she had moved beyond sight behind the

64 Mistress of the Empire

hedges. Once before, upon her family's old estate, she had
undertaken the terrible task of consecrating the shades of
dose family to the natami.

The size of this garden disoriented her. She paused, the
urn clutched to her breast in stunned incomprehension. This
was not the familiar glade of her childhood, where she had
gone as a tiny girl to address the shade of her mother; this
was not the known path where she had narrowly escaped
death at the hands of a tong assassin while mourning her
father and brother. This place was alien, vast, a wide park,
in which several streams meandered. For a second a shadow
crossed her heart as she wondered whether this garden that
had been home to Minwanabi shades for so many centuries
might reject the aspect of her son.

Again in her memory she saw the horse fall, a blackness
like evil stamping out innocent life. Feeling lost, she gulped
a breath. She chose a path at random, only vaguely recalling
that all of them led to the same site where the ancient
rock, the natami of her family, rested at the edge of a
large pool.

'I did not bury your natami deep below the Acoma's,'
she said aloud to the listening air; a smaller voice inside her
warned that she talked out of madness. Life was mad, she
decided, or she would not be here making empty motions
over the remains of her young heir. Her extraordinary
display of graciousness in insisting that the Minwanabi
natami be taken to a distant place and cared for, so that
the shades of the Minwanabi might know peace, at this
moment seemed empty folly.

She did not have the strength in her to laugh.

Mara curled her lip at the sour taste in her mouth. Her
hair smelled of sweet oil and greasy smoke. The stench
turned her stomach as she knelt on the sun-warmed ground.
Next to the natami a hole had been dug, the damp soil piled
to one side. Mara placed the fire-warped sword that had

_

Confrontation

65

been her son's most prized possession in the cavity, then
tipped the urn to let his ashes pour over it. With bare
hands she sifted the earth back into the hole and patted
it down.

A white robe had been left for her beside the pool. On
its silk folds lay a vial, and nearby, the traditional brazier
and dagger. Mara lifted the vial and removed the stopper.
She poured fragrant oils upon the pool. In the shimmers
of fractured light that played upon its surface, she saw no
beauty, but only the face of her son, his mouth wide with
suffering as he struggled to draw his last breath. The rituals
gave no release but seemed a wasting wind of meaningless
sound. 'Rest, my son. Come to your home soil and sleep
with our ancestors.'

'Ayaki,' she whispered. 'My child.'

She gripped the breast of her robe and pulled, tearing the
cloth from her body, but unlike years before, when she had
performed the ritual for her father and brother, no tears
followed the violence. Her eyes remained painfully dry.

She plunged her hand into the almost extinguished
brazier. The sting of the few hot cinders remaining was
not enough to focus her thoughts. Grief remained a dull
ache inside her as she smeared the ashes across her breasts
and down her exposed stomach, to symbolise that her heart
was ashes. In truth, her flesh felt as lifeless as the spent wood
of the pyre. She slowly lifted the heirloom metal dagger, kept
sharp for this ceremony over the ages. For the third time in
her life, she drew the blade from its sheath and cut herself
across the left arm, the hot pain barely felt in the fog of
her despair.

She held the small wound over the pool, letting drops
of blood fall to mix with the water, as tradition required.
For more than a minute she sat motionless, until nature's
healing staunched the flow. A scab had half dried before
she absently tugged at her robe, but she lacked the fierceness

66 Mistress of the Empire

of will to fully sunder the garment. In the end, she simply
dragged it over her head. It fell to earth, one sleeve soaking
up oil and water from the pool.

By rote, Mara unfastened her hairpins, loosening her dark
locks over her shoulders. Anger and rage, grief and sorrow
should have driven her to pull upon her tresses, yanking
handfuls lose. Her emotions only smoldered sullenly, like
a spark smothered by lack of air. Boys should not die; to
grieve for them in a fullness of passion was to abet the
acceptance of their passing. Mara twisted at a few tangles,
outwardly listless.

Then she settled back upon her heels and regarded the
glade. Such immaculate beauty, and only she among the
living could appreciate it. Ayaki would never perform
the death rite far his mother. Hot tears erupted unbidden
and she felt something of the hardness wedged within break
loose. Mara sobbed, abandoning herself to an outpouring
of grief.

But unlike before, when such release brought clarity, this
time she found herself driven deeper into chaotic thought.
When she dosed her eyes, her mind whirled with images:
first Ayaki running, then Kevin, the barbarian slave who
had taught her of love, and who had time and again risked
his life for her alien honor. She saw Buntokapi, sprawled on
the red length of his sword, his great ham fists quivering
closed as the life left his body. Again she acknowledged that
her first husband's death would forever be marked against
her. She saw faces: her father and brother, then Nacoya, her
nurse and foster mother.

All of them offered her pain. Kevin's return to his own
world was as painful a loss as death, and not one other
had died as nature intended; all had been casualties of
twisted politics, and of the cruel machinations of the
Great Game.

The horrid certainty would not leave her, that Ayaki
Confrontation

67

would not be the last boy to die for the empty ambitions
of the nation's Ruling Lords.

That reality struck her like torture: that Ayaki would not
be the last. Howling in hysteria born of agony, Mara threw
herself headlong into the pool.

The wetness swallowed her tears. Her sobs were wrenched
short by a gasp as cold water sucked into her nostrils, and
life recalled her to its own. She crawled back on dry earth,
choking. Water streamed from her mouth and hair. She
dragged in a hacking breath, then reached mechanically
for the robe, its whiteness marred by dirt and sweet oil.

As if she were a spirit wearing the body of a stranger, she
saw herself drag the fabric over her wet flesh. The hair she
left bunched under the collar. Then the body that felt like
a living prison gathered itself up and trudged back toward
the entrance to the glade, where thousands waited with
eyes hostile or friendly.

Their presence took her aback. In this Lord's fatuous
smile and that Lord's leering interest, she saw the truth
confirmed: that Ayaki's death would happen again and
again, and other mothers after her would howl useless
outrage at the injustices of the Great Game. Mara glanced
down to shut away the acknowledgment of futility. One of
her sandals was missing. Mud and dust caked her bared
foot, and she hesitated, debating whether to look for the lost
footwear, or to fling the remaining sandal into the hedge.

What did it matter, a far-off voice reasoned inside her.
Mara watched her misshod feet with grey detachment as
the person that was herself left the glade. Passing between
the shielding hedges, she did not look up as her husband
hurried forward to take up his station at her elbow. His
words did not soothe. She did not want to return from her

inward retreat to work at sorting their meaning.

Hokanu shook her gently, forcing her to look up.

A man in red armor stood before her; thin, elegant,

68 Misttess of the Empire

poised, he carried his chin at an arrogant angle. Mara
stared at him, distracted. His eyes narrowed. He salt
something. The hand that held some object in it gestured,
and something of the biting scorn that underlay his manner
came through.
Mara's gaze sharpened. Her eyes focused on the device
upon the young man's helm, and a deep quiver shook her.

'Anasati!' she said, a bite like a whip's crack to her
voice:

Lord Jiro gave back a chilly smile. 'The Lady deigns to
acknowledge me, I see.'

Wakened to a slow, spiraling rage, Mara stiffened.

She said nothing. Hokanu's fingers wrenched unobtrusively
at her wrist, a warning she did not acknowledge.

Her ears rang to a sound like a thousand enraged sarcats
spitting in defiance, or torrents of storm-swollen rivers
crashing down jagged rock.

Jiro of the Anasati raised the object he held, a small puzzle
cleverly cut to a pattern of interlacing wooden hoops. He
inclined his head in a formal bow, saying, 'My nephew's
shade deserves remembrance from the Anasati.'

'Remembrance!' Mara said, in a high, tortured whisper.
Inside her mind, her spirit howled: Anasati remembrance
had sent her firstborn to a bed of ashes.

She did not remember moving; she did not feel the wrench
of tendons as she yanked free of Hokanu's restraint. Her
scream of rage cut across the gathering like the sound of
a drawn metal sword, and her hands rose like claws.

Jiro leaped back, dropping the puzzle in horrified astonishment.
And then Mara was on him, clawing to reach his
throat through the fastenings of his armor.

Those Lords standing nearest exclaimed in shock as this
small woman, unarmed, dirty, and wet, threw herself at her
former brother-in-law in a fit of pure fury.

Hokanu sprang with all his warrior's quickness, fast

Confrontation

69

enough to catch Mara back before she drew blood. He
smothered her struggling body in his embrace.

But the damage by then was irrevocable.

Jiro glared around at the circle of stunned onlookers.
ùYou all bear witness!' he cried in an indignation that held an
undertone of wild joy. Now he had the justification he had
long wished for, to see the Lady Mara ground under his heel
in utter defeat. 'The Acoma have offered the Anasati insult!
Let all present be informed that alliance is dead between
our two houses. I claim my right to expunge this shame to
my honor, and blood will be called for in payment.'

t

War

3

War

Hokanu acted.

Wile Mara beat her fists in mindless fury against his
breastplate, the warriors of her honor guard closed in a
tight ring to shield their Lady's hysteria from public view.
Hokanu called urgently for Saric and Incomo.

One glance at their distraught mistress was sufficient
to convince the two advisers: grief and nerves had overwhelmed
her. She was past recognition of individual faces,
and obviously beyond any capacity to issue a public
apology to Lord Jiro. It had been the sight of him that
had set off this breakdown. Even should reason return
to her before the guests departed, it would not be wise i
to encourage a meeting between injured parties so she
might ask forgiveness. Worse damage might result. The
two advisers, one old and practiced, the other young and
talented, could see that already the scope of the trouble her
lapse had created was widening. It was too late, now, to
mend the past.

Hokanu realised that he should have heeded Isashani's
warning more closely, but he must not allow regret for his
miscalculation to hamper the need for fast decisions. 'Saric,'
he rapped out, 'issue a statement. Tell no falsehoods, but
select your words to insinuate that our Lady has fallen ill.
We need immediate tactics to soften Jiro's accusations of
insult, which will certainly come within hours, and to find
a sane reason to dismiss the state guests.'

The dark-haired First Adviser bowed and ducked away, i
already composing his words of formal announcement.

Unasked; Force Commander Lujan stepped to the fore.

:
.t

71

Despite the Ruling Lords who crowded against his warriors,
to gape at the prostrate Mara, he did not turn his face
from her shame, but stripped off bracers, sword, and belt
knife, then bent to lend his aid to subdue Mara's struggles
without causing her bruises. With a glance of profound
relief, Hokanu continued with instructions to Incomo.
'Hurry back to the estate house. Assemble Mara's maids,
and find her a healer who can mix a soporific. Then see
to the guests. We need help from what allies we have left
to avert an outbreak of armed hostilities.'

'Lord Hoppara and the Xacatecas forces stand with
you,' announced a husky female voice. The tight ranks
of honor guard swirled aside to admit the elegant, yellow-and-
purple-robed form of Lady Isashani, who had used the
almost mystical effect of her beauty and poise to gain passage
between the warriors. 'And I can help with Mara.'

Hokanu assessed the sincerity of the concern in her
exotic dark eyes, then nodded. 'Gods pity us for my lack
of understanding,' he murmured by way of apology. 'Your
house has all our gratitude.' Then he turned the charge of
his Lady over to the feminine wisdom of the Xacatecas
dowager.

'She has not gone mad,' Lady Isashani answered, her
fine hand closing over Mara's in comfort. 'Sleep and
quiet will restore her, and time will heal her grief. You
must be patient.' Then, back to the hardcore immediacy
of politics, she added, 'I have set my two advisers to waylay
the Omechan and the Inrodaka. My honor guard, under
Hoppara, will find ways to interpose themselves where
they will most hamper other troublemongers.'

Two fewer enemies to concern them; Hokanu tossed
back a harried nod. Mara had staunch friends against
the vicious factions who sought to pull her down. She
was beloved by many in these nations. It tore his heart

not to be able to stay at her side when she was in such

72 M'stress of thc Emp~re

a terrible state. He forced his gaze away from the small
cortege that formed to convey his distraught Lady to the
comfort of the grate house. To let his heart rule him at
this time was fool's play. He must harden himself, as if he
stood on the brink of deadly combat. There were enemies in
plenty who had attended Ayaki's last rites precisely to grab
advantage from an opportunity like this. Mara's insult to
Jiro was by now past forgiveness. Bloodshed would result that
was a foregone conclusion - but only a fool would
initiate an assault in the heart of Mara's estate, with her
army gathered to pay honor to Ayaki. Once beyond the
borders of the Acoma lands, Mara's enemies would start
their mischief.

Hokanu moved now in an attempt to stave off immediate
war. The Acoma stood to be ruined if he misstepped; not
only that, but the warriors and resources of the Shinzawai
might be sucked into gainless strife also. All that had been
won in the past three years to secure centralised rule for
the Emperor might be thrown away at a stroke.

Council must be called, to see what could be done to
stave off more widespread disaster. Those Lords who held
allegiance to neither Mara nor Jiro would have to be wooed,
cajoled, or threatened, so that those openly opposed to her
would think twice before challenging the Good Servant.

Lujan, Hokanu called over the rising tumult to the
Acoma Force Commander, 'arm the garrison, and call
up the most level-headed of your officers. No matter
what the provocation, at all costs set your patrols to
keep the peace.'

The high green plumes of the officer's helm bobbed
acknowledgment over the chaos. Hokanu spared a moment
for thanks to the gods that Mara had chosen her staff for
intelligence and sense. Cool heads were their only hope of
extricating House Acoma from devastation.

Saddened by this turn of affairs, Hokanu directed the
honor guard to march back to the estate house. Had Mara
been less herself, and more the pliant wife that so many
Empire women became as a result of their traditional
upbringing, she would never have been strong enough to
have attended a full state funeral for a son cut down by
assassins. As Ruling Lady, and Servant of the Empire, she
was too much in the public eye, denied even the human
frailties that any lesser mother might be forgiven.

Caught up in the heated core of intrigues, Lady Mara
was forced into a role that made her a target.

A frantic hour later, Mara lay on her sleeping mat, stupefied
by potions administered by the priest of Hantukama, who
had appeared as if by magic to offer his skills. Isashani had
the household well in hand, and the short hadonra, Jican,
was as busy as three men, quelling wild rumors among the
servants.

Hokanu found himself alone to deal with the decisions
that must be made in behalf of House Acoma. He listened to

the reports of the Acoma retainers. He took notes for Mara
to review, when she was restored and capable. He marked
which guests stood by her, and which were outspoken
against her. Most had the dignity to stay silent, or else
they were too shocked to frame any hostile response. All
had expected to spend the day in quiet contemplation, then
to be hosted by the Servant of the Empire at a formal evening
meal. Instead, they were already returning home, appalled
by an unforgivable act authored by a woman who held the
highest office in the land, short of the Emperor's throne.
More than one delegate of great houses had stopped by,
ostensibly to pay their respects, but except for the Lord of
the Keda, Hokanu had murmured empty thanks to men
eager to catch any hint that House Acoma stood weakened.
Lord Hoppara and the Lords of Clan Hadama were doing a
fine job of moving through the crowds of departing guests,

74 Mistress of tbe Empire

toning down the damage of Mara's act against the Anasati
by whatever expedient they could find. Many who were all
too ready to be outraged by the breach of protocol became
more inclined to overlook a grieving mother's outburst after
one of the Hadama Lords or Lord Hoppara had finished
speaking to them.

Another noble frustrated in his attempts to reach the
inner apartments had been the Lord of the Anasati. Jiro had
stiffly insisted that the insult to his person was irreparable.
A pack of supporters had clustered at his heels as he
was turned away from Mara's door. They had found a
common rallying point, and even those who had counted
Mara a friend would be hard pressed to ignore a personal
attack; for an enemy, it was impossible. In Tsurani culture,
forgiveness was simply a less shameful form of weakness
than capitulation. All in the course of seconds, the Lady had
changed political opponents into allies of deadly enemies.

Jiro had not sued for public apology; indeed, he had
surrounded himself with Lords whose disgruntlement with
Ichindar's reformed powers of rule was most vociferous.
Saric and Incomo shared the conclusion that the Anasati
Lord was deliberately discouraging conciliatory overtures,
choosing to place blame for the scandal squarely upon the
Acoma. Jiro's loud complaints reached any who hovered
within earshot: that he had come to his nephew's funeral
under what was understood as a traditional truce by all who
attended, and had endured physical attack, humiliation at
the hands of his host, and public accusation. As much as any
ruler understood or sympathised with the source of Mara's
irrational act, none could deny that deadly insult had been
given, with no atonement offered. Any attempt to deflect
the accusation by pointing out Mara's present inability to
offer a rational apology was ignored by the Anasati.

The hall of the Acoma had grown stifling, its screens
drawn closed against the prying eyes of the curious, its

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War
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doors guarded by the scarred veterans of past wars. These
men did not wear the brightly lacquered ceremonial armor
but fidd trappings well tested by previous engagements.
Sitting upon a lower, less formal dais that was deserted in
Mara's absence, Hokanu quietly requested opinions on the
day's events.

That the closest, most loyal Acoma officers chose to
respond to a consort who was not their sworn house
Lord showed their immeasurable regard for Hokanu's
judgment. If the honor of these men's vows was not his
to command, they awarded him their absolute trust to act
as needed in their mistress's behalf. Touched as he was by
their devotion, he was also disturbed, for it signified how
deeply they understood Mara's peril. Hokanu prayed that
he was up to the task.

He listened in grave stillness as Force Leader Irrilandi
and Keyoke, Adviser for War, reviewed the strength of
the garrison, even as Force Commander Lujan readied
the Acoma forces for battle. As if in emphasis, old Keyoke
thumped his crutch against the stump of his lost leg. 'Even
if Jiro knows he will be defeated, he has no choice: honor
requires he answer public insult with bloodshed. I doubt
he will settle for a contest of champions. Worse, if Mara's
cries of accusation were heard by any beyond chose close

by, her implication that Jiro hired the Hamoi Tong to kill
Ayaki could be taken as an insult to the lonani that can
only end in a Call to Clan.'

Absolute stillness followed this statement, making the
footfalls of rushing servants echo through the hall. Several
of chose at the table turned to listen to the calls of house
officers, gathering their masters' families into personal
litters for a quick departure, and a few looked at one
another and shared a common understanding: a Clan War
would rip the Empire asunder.

Into the face of such grim musing, Saric ventured, 'But

76 Mistress of the Empire

who could take such a concept seriously? No tong dares
reveal their employers, and what evidence we found to
link the Anasati to the attack is hardly compelling, given
the Hamoi Brotherhood's clandestine practices. I'm more
inclined to suspect it's an intentional false trail.'

Incomo nodded, wagging a crooked finger. 'The evidence
of Jiro's hand in Ayaki's death is too neat. No tong survives
to win itself wealthy clients by being this imprudent. And
the Hamoi is the most powerful tong because its secrets have
never been compromised.' He scanned the faces around
the table. 'After - what? five attempts upon Mara - they
suddenly allow one of their own to be caught with proof
of Anasati participation? Unlikely. Certainly questionable.
Hardly convincing.'

Hokanu regarded the advisers with a flash in his eyes as
dire as light on barbarian steel. 'We need Arakasi beck.' The
gifts of the Acoma Spy Master were many, and his ability
to read through the snarl of politics and individual greed
of the Nations' myriad Ruling Lords at times approached
the uncanny. 'We need him to pursue this evidence that
supports Jiro's guilt, for the boy's true murderer lies behind
it.' Hokanu sighed. 'Meantime, speculation is leading us
nowhere. With Tasaio of the Minwanabi gone, who dares
seek the death of the Servant of the Empire?'

Saric scratched- his chin in the gloom. Not without
sympathy, he said, 'Master, you are blinded by love for
your wife. The common folk of the Nations may regard
her as a talisman, but her exalted station invites jealousy
from other hearts. Many would see the Good Servant on
her way to Turakamu's halls, simply because of her breaks
with tradition, and her climb to a rank unmatched by any
previous Warlord. Also there are many who see their House
status lessened, and their ambitions curtailed, because she
is favored by Ichindar. They would seek Mara's dishonor
. . . if they dared.'

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77

Hokanu looked impatient. 'Then who would dare?'

'Of us all, Arakasi might know.' Glancing at Incomo,
Saric tactfully phrased the question that played upon his
restless mind. 'Is there any reason to think that your former
master might be reaching from the land of the dead to strike
a blow in vengeance?'

As Keyoke's eyes hardened at this possibility, the former
First Adviser to the Lord of the Minwanabi, now Second
Adviser to the Lady of the Acoma, cleared his throat. He
unflinchingly met the distrust that focused on him. 'If so,
I was no part of such a plot. But Tasaio was a secretive
man, and dangerous. Many times he was wont to make
arrangements outside my knowledge. I was often dismissed
when most Lords would have commanded my attendance.
The Obajan of the Hamoi Tong was seen to pay a personal
visit to Tasaio. My impression at the time was that the
event involved unanswered questions over the murder of
Acoma spies then in Minwanabi service.' Incomo's long
face showed unguarded distaste as he concluded, 'Threats
were exchanged, and a bargain struck. But no man alive
overheard the words that passed between the Obajan and
Tasaio. I can only relate that never in life did I observe the
Lord of the Minwanabi so balked in his plans that he lost
himself to a display of wild anger. Tasaio was many things,

but he was seldom without control.'

To this, Saric added speculative observation. 'If the
former First Adviser of the Minwanabi cannot know for
certain that Tasaio left orders for vengeance should he
fall, I offer that we waste ourselves in guesswork. More
to the point, Tasaio was not a man who ever for a moment
considered defeat - as tactician he was unmatched. Given
that he believed until the end that he was free to crush our
Lady in open war, why should we assume that he took the
coward's path and paid death price for Mara when he gave
no credence to the chance she might survive him? We should

78

Mistress of the Empire

more nearly be examining the ranks of Jiro's enemies. Mara
is one of the few Rulers in the Nations with strength
enough to engage him without stalemate; with Imperial
support behind her, discord between Acoma and Anasati
is the more likely to lead to setbacks for Lord Jiro.'

'And yet the Anasati Lord seems eager enough to take
what provocation fate and our misfortune have offered,'
Hokanu broke in. 'He does not shrink from conflict. That
does little to excuse him from culpability in the matter of
Ayaki's murder. Until my wife is able, I will presume to
make this decision. Order the garrison to make ready to
march. There must be war, and we dare not be caught
unprepared.'

Keyoke silently inclined his head. He would not accord
the situation the formality of spoken word, since this he
could only do before his Lady. Yet his acquiescence in
the matter showed unswerving support. Saric, who was
younger and less bound to the old traditions, inclined his
head in a gesture very dose to the bow an adviser would
offer hissworn Lord. 'I shall make formal declaration of
war upon the Anasati. When Jiro responds in kind, we shall
march.'

Keyoke glanced at Irrilandi, who nodded to indicate his
own endorsement of what would soon occur. Most Tsurani
bloodshed was committed surreptitiously, with ambush and
raid, and without public acknowledgment of responsibility.
But formal battle between houses was a time honored,
ceremonial event. Two armies would meet upon a field
at an agreed-upon time, and one would leave victorious.
No quarter was asked or given, save in rare circumstances,
and again by formal rules of conduct. History held record
of battles that had raged for days; it was not uncommon
for both houses to be destroyed in the process.

Then Hokanu sought one further step. 'I ask that we
notify Clan Hadama.'

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Saric raised his eyebrows, concerned deeply, but also
intrigued by the subtleties of the suggestion. 'You provoke
an Anasati Call to Clan?'

Hokanu sighed, 'I have an intuitive feeling-'

But Keyoke broke in with a rare interruption that
supported Hokanu's hunch. 'Jiro is no warrior. He has
Omelo for Force Commander, and though a good enough
field general in his own right, he does not excel at large
scale engagements. A Call to Clan is the best hope Jiro
has to keep his House and army intact. We do not provoke
what is likely a foregone conclusion.'

'More,' Incomo added. 'Lord Jiro is a scholar at heart.
He sneers at the coarseness of armed conflict. He wishes
reason to declare against Mara, and has nurtured a hatred of
her that extends back into his youth. But he prefers hidden
attacks, and cleverness. He is a master of shah. Remember
that. He will seek to ruin by subterfuge, not raw force. If we
do call a Clan War first, then the possibility exists that Clan
lonani will not permit an Anasati interest to drag them to
destruction. We are more than Jiro's match in open combat.
If his Clan members are behind his obsessive desires enough
to escalate by accepting his slight of honor for their own,
Clan Hadama will answer.' ~

Hokanu weighed this without much hope or enthusiasm.
Whether Clan lonani moved against them or not Lord Jiro

had managed to set himself at the spearhead of other
factions that had cause to undermine Mara's strength.
That his was not the only mind to perceive past this
personal spat to deeper, more lasting discord had been
evident by the number of Ruling Lords who turned out
for Ayaki's funeral. The High Council might be abolished,
but its tradition of contention continued in secret, ferocious
intensity, whenever excuse existed for the Empire's nobles
to gather. That the Black Robes had sent a contingent of
five to the rites showed that their trend of intervention into

80

Mrstress of the Empire

the arena of intrigue was far from ended since Ichindar's
ascension to centralised power.

At last, Hokanu concluded, 'We may have strength ant
allies enough to crush the Anasati, but at what cost? In the
end, it may not change things. We can only hope that a swift,
bloody dash on the battlefield will contain the damage, and
split up the traditionalists before they can ally and organise
into a united political party.'

'Master Hokanu,' Saric interjected at the naked look of
sorrow that appeared on the Acoma consort's face, 'the
course you have chosen is the best we have available.
Rest assured that your Lady could do no better, were she
capable of hearing our counsel. Now go, attend to her,
for she needs you at her side. I will instruct the scribes to
prepare documents and arrange for messengers to convey
them to Lord Jiro's estates.'

Looking haunted despite the relief at this unstinting
statement of support, Hokanu left the hall. His stride
was a warrior's, purposeful and quick; his hands were a
worried husband's, balled into helpless fists.

Saric remained, as the other Acoma officers broke the
circle and departed from the hall. Left alone in the breezeless
shadows, he slapped his fist into a hand grown uncalloused
since his promotion from a warrior's ranks. He ached for
those friends he had left in the barracks, and for the woman
he had been called to serve, who had wholly won his support.
If the Acoma acted quickly enough to end this dispute,
the gods would be granting a miracle. Too many disgruntled
Lords remained with too few responsibilities since the
disbanding of the High Council. Peace left them too much
space for mischief. The old political parties had broken up,
their reason for existence canceled by Ichindar's new rule.

The Empire was quiet, but far from settled; the climate
of unrest that had three years been held in abeyance was
ripe for renewed civil war.

War

81

Saric loved his Ruling Lady and appreciated her brilliance
in changing the only society he had ever known, but he
regretted the disbanding of the Warlord's office and the
power of the High Council, for at least then events could
be interpreted according to centuries of precedents set by
the forms of the Great Game. Now, while the old ways
were still followed by the houses of the Empire, the rules
were forced into change.

Speculation was becoming too uncertain, Saric decided
with a grimace of disgust. He left the deserted hall, heading
for those quarters he had chosen when Mara had come to
occupy the former Minwanabi estate. En route to his suite of
rooms, he sent Mara's runner to fetch a scribe to attend him.
When the man arrived with his satchel of ink and pens, the
Acoma First Adviser's instructions were clipped and short:
'Prepare notice for our factors and agents. If Arakasi makes
his presence known anywhere in the Nations, inform him
he is to return home at once.' The scribe sat upon the floor
without comment, but he looked troubled as he placed a
wooden lapboard upon his knee. Quickly putting pen to
parchment, he started to compose the first document.

'Add this, and use the number seven cipher,' Saric
concluded, pacing the floor in an agitation that had no
other outlet. 'Our Lady is in deadly danger.'

The chime sounded, and a puff of disturbed air winnowed
the silken hangings that walled the great gathering hall
in the City of the Magicians. Shadows cast by the flickering
flames of the oil lamps wavered as a magician
appeared upon the pattern in the center of the floor.
He stepped off briskly. Hard on his heels, two colleagues
appeared in rapid succession. These were followed by
others, until a crowd of black-robed figures congregated
on the benches surrounding the walls. The huge,
leather-hinged doors creaked wide to admit others that

82 Mistress of the Empire

chose not to convey their bodies to the meeting by arcane
means.
The Hall of the Assembly fillet swiftly and quietly.

The delegates converged from all walks of the City of the
Magicians, a complex of buildings and covered terraces,
towers, and galleries that made a maze-like warren of an
entire island. Located in the midst of a great lake in the
foothills of the High Wall, the northern mountains of the
Empire, the City of the Magicians was unapproachable by
any means but magic. Black Robes in distant provinces
teleported to the site, responding to the call to Assembly sent
out that morning. Gathered together in sufficient number
to form a quorum, the magicians constituted the most
powerful body in Tsuranuanni, for they existed outside
the law. No one, not even the Emperor, dared gainsay
their command, which had carried absolute privilege for
thousands of years of history.

Within minutes the benches were packed to capacity.
Hodiku, a thin, hook-nosed man of middle years who
by preference spent most of his time in study within the
Holy City, walked to the First Speaker's position, at the
center of the patterned tile floor. His voice extended across
the cavernous hall seemingly without effort. 'We are called
together today so that I may speak for the Good of the
Empire.' The routine greeting was met with silence, for all
matters requiring convocation of the Assembly of Great
Ones related to the state of the Empire. 'Today, the Red
Seal upon the inner sanctum of the Temple of Jastur was
broken!'

The announcement caused a shocked stir, for only when
formal warfare was announced between houses or clans,
were the arched doors to the central chamber of the
Temple of the War God thrown open to allow public
entry. Hodiku raised his arms to encourage a return to
order. 'Mare of the Acoma, as Lady of her House and

War

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83

Warchief of Clan Hadama does pronounce war upon Lord
Jiro of the Anasati!'

Astonished exclamations swept the chamber. While a
cadre of the younger magicians stayed abreast of current
events, they were not among the majority. These newly
sworn had joined the Assembly during the upheavals caused
by the force known as the Enemy that had endangered
both their own world of Kelewan and that of Midkemia,
beyond the rift. The massive threat to two civilizations had
necessitated a move by the Magicians to aid the Emperor
Ichindar to seize absolute rule of the Nations, that internal
bickering not weaken the land in time of larger crisis. The
newest of the mages might be enamored of using their
powers to influence the sway of events. But to the elders
of the Assembly, who were set in their individual ways
and courses of scholarly study, intervention in Tsurani
politics was looked on as bad form; a bothersome chore
only performed at dire need.

To a still-smaller faction, headed up by Hochopepa
and Shimone, once close acquaintances of the barbarian
magician Milamber, the recent departures from traditional
rule were of interest for deeper reasons. Exposure to
Midkemian thought had prompted them to view the affairs
of Tsuranuanni in a changed light, and since the Lady Mara
was currently the linchpin of Ichindar's support, these war
tidings were of particular concern.

An old practitioner of Tsurani politics of all stripe,
Hochopepa raised a chubby hand to his face and closed his
dark eyes in forbearance. 'As you predicted,' he murmured
to the reed-thin, ascetic Shimone. 'Trouble, when the
Nations can least afford the price.'

Taciturn as ever, Shimone made no reply, but watched
with hawk-keen scrutiny as several of the more impulsive
magicians surged to their feet, indicating their desire to
speak. Hodiku singled out a young Black Robe named
Sevean and pointed. The one selected stepped forward
onto the central floor while the others sat.

Barely a year past his initiation to mastery of magic,
Sevean was fast on his feet, quick-spoken, ant inclined
to be impulsive. He would leap to outspoken conclusions
where other, more seasoned colleagues would wait to
hear the thoughts of less experienced members before
revealing their opinions. He raises a voice too lout by
half for the sensitive acoustics of the hall. 'tt is widely
believed that Jiro had his hand in the teeth of the Goot
Servant's son.'

Which was no news at all; Shimone turned his mouth
town in a faint curl of disgust, while Hochopepa muttered
just lout enough for half the room to hear, 'What, has he
been listening in on Isashani's sitting room again, taking in
the social gossip?'

Shimone gave no answer to this; like many of the elder
magicians, he considered using powers to look in on the
affairs of individual nobles as the lowest level of crass
behavior. Sevean was embarrassed by Hochopepa's remark
ant by the harsh looks from several of the elder members.
Left at a loss for words, he curtailed his speech, repeating,
'It is widely believed.'

More magicians vied for the First Speaker's attention.
Hodiku made a choice among them, ant as a slow-spoken,
ponderously built initiate boned out his irrelevant viewpoint,
more experienced magicians spoke quietly among
themselves, ignoring all but the gist of his speech.

A mage two seats to the rear of Hochopepa ant Shimone,
whose name was Teloro, inclined his heat toward the
others. 'What is the real issue, Hocho?'

The plump magician sighed ant left off twiddling his
thumbs. 'The fate of the Empire, Teloro. The fate of the
Empire.'

Teloro bridled at this vagueness. Then he revises his first

War

85

impression: the stout magician's bearing might betray no
concern, but his tone rang with deep conviction.

Both Shimone and his stout companion seemed fixed on a
discussion the other site of the hall, where several magicians
held private counsel. As the current speaker sat, ant a
round-shouldered man from this whispering cadre stood
up, Teloro heart Hochopepa mutter, 'Now we'll begin to
see how this round of the game is to be played.'

Hodiku motioned to the man, who was slender with
brown hair trimmed above his ears in the Tsurani fashion
called a warrior's cut. The style was an odd affectation for
a Black Robe, but by any measures Motetha was a strange
magician. He had been friends with the two brothers who
had actively supported the old Warlord, but when Elgoran
had died and Elgohar had left to serve upon the Midkemian
world, Motecha had conspired to maintain an appearance
of distance between himself and the two brothers.

The attention of Shimone and Hochopepa intensified
as Motecha opened. 'Is there no end to Lady Mara's
ambition? She has called a Clan War, over a personal
insult she delivered, as Lady of the Acoma.'

Hochopepa nodded as if in confirmation of a hunch.
~So, Motecha has made alliances with the Anasati. Odd.
He's not an original thinker. I wonder who put him up
to this?'

Shimone held up his hand. 'Don't distract with thatter.

I want to hear this.'

Motecha waved a ringed hand, as if inviting rebuttal
from his colleagues. But he was not as magnanimous in his
equivocation as his gesture suggested, since he rushed on to
cut off any interruption. 'Obviously not. The Good Servant
was not satisfied with flouting tradition by co-opting her
former enemy's forces-'

'Which we conceded was a brilliant move,' interjected
Hochopepa, again just loud enough to make the speaker

86 M`stress of the Emp~re

stumble. Teloro and Shimone repressed amusement. The
stout magician was a master at embarrassing colleagues that
he deemed in need of having their pomposity punctured.
As Motecha seemed ready to depart from his prepared
remarks, Hochopepa added, 'But please, I didn't mean to
interrupt; pray continue.'

Motecha was nonetheless thrown off strife. He brushed
lamdy past his hesitation saying, 'She will crush the
Anasati -'

Representing the more seasoned members of the Assembly,
Fumita stood. At Hodiku's nod of acknowledgment he
said, 'Forgive the interruption, Motecha, but an Anasati
defeat is neither assured or even likely. Given the welldocumented
assessment of the forces available to both sides,
it is a given Jiro must counteract with a Call to Clan. Alone,
Anasati's war hosts are no match for Lady Mara's, and
she has spoken boldly by raising Clan Hadama. This has
already cost her politically. She will lose powerful allies - in
fact, two will be forced by blood ties to take the field against
her on Jiro's behalf - and while the Acoma are awesome in
wealth and power, the two clans are closely matched.'

Hochopepa grinned openly. Motetha's thinly veiled
attempt to stir the Assembly on behalf of the Anasati
was now crushed. Rather than sit down, Fumita continued.
'There is another issue here, that must be addressed.'

Motetha jerked his chin and conceded the floor in
disgust. As he moved away, and no other Great One
stood to claim the floor, Hodiku merely waved at Fumita to
continue. 'While matters of honor are deemed inviolate, we
must consider: will this dash of clans so weaken the internal
structure of the Empire that the stability is set at risk?'

A murmur stirred the Assembly, but no one thrust to the
fore to debate the issue. Clan lonani and Clan Hadama
were large factions, yes, but neither commanded enough
followers to upset civil order irretrievably. Hochopepa

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War
87

knew his ally Fumita stalled for time; the underlying
concern behind this tactic was wider than the settlement
of one House's personal honor over insult. The worst was
already halfway realised: that the conflict of the Anasati
and the Acoma would create a polarisation of factions who
opposed Ichindar. Disorganised dissenters already rallied

behind Jiro's cause, forming a traditionalist party that could
throw serious opposition against the Empire's new order.
Though they were not yet incensed enough to contribute
to the bloodshed, were there still a High Council left with
power to act, there could be no doubt that if a vote were held
at this minute, Lord Jiro would hold enough support to take
the Warlordship. There were magicians who had regarded
Ichindar's rise to power as an impious expedient: that the
balance should be returned to the time before the Enemy,
with the Light of Heaven's office restored to the old ways.
Hochopepa led a small contingent that welcomed change;
he paid scant heed to Fumita's stalling, but instead watched
to see where Motecha would gravitate. To his colleague he
confided, 'Ah, there's the hand behind Jiro's cause.'

With a slight nod of his head, he indicated the magician
Motecha now spoke with, an athletic-looking man just out
of youth, unremarkable save for the red hair that showed
around the edges of his black cowl. He had thick brows,
an expression that approached a scowl, and the carriage of
a man who tended to fidget with excess nerves.
'Tapek,' Shimone identified. 'He's the one who burned
up a building while practicing for his mastery. Came into his
talents very early, but took a long time to learn restraint.'

Hochopepa's mild face furrowed in concern. 'He's no
friend of Jiro's. I wonder what his stake in this is?'

Shimone gave the barest lift of shoulders, as dose as
he ever came to the enigmatic Tsurani shrug. 'His kind
gravitates toward trouble, as floating sticks will draw
toward a whirlpool.'

88 Mistress of tbe Empire

On the floor, debate continued. Careful to keep his tone
neutral lest someone point out his personal tie to Hokanu
ant Mara's House, Fumita offered up his conclusion. 'I
believe that if Clans lonani ant Hadama destroy each other,
we shall be faced with both internal ant external perils.'
He heft one finger aloft. 'Can any doubt that whoever
survives, that house will be so weakened that others will
instantly fall upon it?' He raised a second finger, adding,
'Ant can any gainsay that enemies outside our border will
take advantage of our internal dissension to strike?'

'My turn to contribute to the general excess of hot air,'
Hochopepa muttered, and promptly stood. At the cue,
Fumita sat with such abruptness that nobody else could
rise to his feet in time to prevent Hodiku's indication that
the stout maFaan had the floor.

Hochopepa coughed to dear his throat. 'My learned
brother makes a strong brief,' he salt, warming up to a
virtuoso speech of confusing pomposity. 'But we must not
blind ourselves with rhetoric.'

Shimone's lips twitched at this half-lie. His fat companion
paces heavily to and fro, meeting the eyes of all d e
magicians m the front rows to draw them to attention.
'I would like to point out that such dashes before have not
spelled the end of civilisation as we know it!' He nodded
for emphasis. 'And we have no intelligence to indicate that
those upon our borders are poised to strike. The Thuril
are too busy with trade along our eastern frontier to seek
struggle so long as we give them no cause. They can be
a hard lot, but profit is bound to seem more attractive
to them than bloodletting; at least that seems to be the
case since the Alliance for War resisted in their attempt
to conquer them.' A murmur of disapproval disturbed
the shadowy hall, for the attempt to annex the Thuril
Highlands as a new province had ended in disgrace for
the Empire, and it was considered bad form to recall the

War
89

defeat. Hochopepa's scruples did not restrain him from
using this point to unbalance his opposition. He simply
raised his sonorous voice enough to be heard above the
noise. 'The desert men of Tsubar have sworn binding treaty
with the Xacatecas ant Acoma on behalf of the Empire, and
we have had no resumption of conflict in Dustari.'

That this was in part to Lady Mara's credit was not lost
on the Assembly. A smile spread across Hochopepa's round
face as the tumult diet back to respectful stillness. 'By any
measure, the Empire is peaceful to the point of boredom.'
In a dramatic shift, his smile fled before a scowl, and he
shook a finger at the "gathering. 'Need I remind my brothers
that the Servant of the Empire is counted a member of the
Imperial House by adoption? An odd convention, I know,
but a tradition.' He waved to single out Motecha, who
had sought to discredit Mara. 'Should we be so rash as
to do anything on behalf of the Anasati, the Emperor
could conceivably consider this an attack upon his family.
And, more to the point, Elgohar and I witnessed the last
Warlord's execution. At his hanging ...' He paused for
effect, and tappet his temple. 'Let me see if I can recall
our Light of Heaven's exact words upon that occasion of
a magician acting in conspiracy with council politics. Oh,
yes, he said: "If another Black Robe is ever discovered
involved in a plot against my house, the status of Great
Ones outside the law will end. Even should I be forced to
pit all the armies of the Empire against your magic might,
even to the utter ruination of the Empire, I will not allow
any to challenge the supremacy of the Emperor again. Is
that understood?"'

Sweeping a dire glare over the assembly, Hochopepa said,
'I assure you all, Ichindar was sincere. He is not the sort
to threaten violence lightly. Our previous Emperors may
have been content to sit by, dividing their time between
holy devotions in the temples, and begetting heirs upon

go Mistress of the Empi e

their assorted wives and mistresses' - he let his voice rise
again - 'but Ichindar is not one! He is a ruler, not some
divine puppet wearing the costume of religious office!'

Lowering his voice, forcing every magician present to
strain with undivided attention to hear him, Hochopepa
summed up. 'We who attended the Good Servant's son's
funeral know full well that Mara's lapse was born of
overwhelming grief. Now she must bear up to the consequences
of her shame. From the moment she assaulted
Jiro with her bare hands, this conflict was inevitable. As
our charge is to preserve the Empire, I strongly doubt we
can justify pursuing any activity that might find us all' shaking
the hall with a thunderous bellow- 'opposing the
armies of the Empire in the-field over a matter of personal
insult!' Quietly, reasonably, he resumed, 'We should win, of
course, but there would be very little Empire left to preserve
after that.' He ended with a dismissive wave of his hand.
'That was all I had to say.' And he sat.

Silence lasted only a moment before Tapek shot to his
feet. Hodiku granted him a nod, and his robes swirled to
his agitated stride as he stalked onto the floor

His face was pale as he surveyed the "gathering silently
gripped by reflection. 'We have heard enough of Lady Mara.
The wronged party, I must point out, is Lord Jiro. He did
not initiate hostilities.' Tapek raised his arms. 'I bid you all
to consider direct evidence instead of words for a change!'
He made a sweeping gesture that carved out a frame upon
the air. An incantation left his lips, and in the space before
him light gathered. A rainbow play of colors resolved into
a sharply defined image of a room lined with books and
scrolls. There, dad in a robe elegant in its simplicity, paced
Lord Jiro in a rare state of agitation. Seated on a cushion
in one corner, barely out of the path of his master's temper,
was Chumaka, his leathery face carefully expressionless.

'How dare the Lady Mara threaten me!' Jiro ranted in

injured fury. 'We had nothing to do with the death of her
son! The implication that we are a house so honorless
as to strike down a boy who shares Anasati blood is
preposterous! The evidence planted on that tong assassin
is a transparent effort to discredit us, and because of it, we
are heed with Clan War!'

Chumaka steepled his fingers, adorned with rings of
carved corcara that he had yet to remove since the funeral.
'Clan lonani will recognise these wrongs,' he said in an
effort to restore his master to calm. 'We will not march
unsupported to the field of war.'

'war!' Jiro whirled, his eyes narrowed with disgust. 'The
Lady is nothing, if not a coward to initiate this call to
arms! She thinks to best us without dirtying her hands,
using sheer numbers to annihilate us. Well, we must fall
back on our wits and teach her a lesson. Clan lonani may
support us; all to the good. But I will never forgive that
such a pass has become necessary. If our house emerges
from this heavy-handed attack, be sure that the Acoma
will have created an enemy to be feared!'

Chumaka licked his teeth. 'The political arena is stirred
to new patterns. There are advantages to be gained,
certainly.' .~

Jiro flung around to face his First Adviser. 'First, damn
the bitch, we have to escape with our hides from what will
amount to wholesale slaughter.'
The scene cut off as Tapek clapped his hands and
dispersed the spell that had drawn it. He flung back his
flame-colored bangs, half sneering at the oldsters in the
gathering who had stiffened in affront at his intrusion into
the privacy of a noble citizen.

'You go against tradition!' cried a palsied voice from a

rear bench. 'What are we, meddling old women, to stoop
to using arcane arts to spy? Do we peek into ladies'
dressing chambers!' His opinion was shared by several

92 Mistress of the Empire

of the greyer-headed members who shot to their feet and
stalked out in protest.

Tapek yelled back. 'That's a contradiction of ethics! What
has Lady Mara made of tradition? She has dared to meddle,
I say! Do we wait and pay the price of the instability she
may create in the future? What morals will stop her? Has she
not demonstrated her lack of self-control in this despicable
attack against Lord Jiro?'

At this inflammatory remark, even Shimone looked disturbed. '
She lost a child to a horrible death!' he interrupted.
'She is a woman and a human being. She is bound to
have faults.'

Tapek stabbed both hands over his head. 'An apt point,
brother, but my concern is not for the Lady's shortcomings.
She has risen to a dizzying height by anyone's measure.
Her influence has grown too great, and her powers too
broad. As Warchief of the Hadama and Lady of the
strongest house in the Empire, she is preeminent among
the Ruling Lords. And as Servant of the Empire, she
holds dangerous sway over the masses. I submit the
point that she is only human! And that no Ruling Lord
or Lady should be allowed to wield so much influence
throughout the Empire! I claim we should curb
her excesses now, before the trouble grows too large to
contain.'

Hodiku, as First Speaker, stroked his chin at the turn
the discussion had taken. In attempt to soothe the uneasiness
that stirred through the gathering, he appealed to
Hochopepa. 'I have a question for my reamed friend.
Hocho, what do you suggest we do?'

Leaning back, making every effort to appear casually
unconcerned by resting an elbow upon the riser behind
him, Hochopepa said, 'Do? Why, I thought that should
be obvious. We should do nothing. Let these contentious
factions have their war. When their slights of honor are
.

.

..

__

War
93

sated with bloodshed, it will be an easy enough matter to
pick up the pieces.'

Voices rang out as another dozen magicians rose, seeking
recognition. Shimone sighed audibly. 'You're not going to
get your way on this one, Hocho.'

The stout magician set his chin in his palms, dimpling
both cheeks. 'Of course not,' he whispered. 'But I wasn't
about to let that hotheaded boy run off unconstrained.'
Outside the law, each Great One was free to act as he saw
fit. Anyone could by his own judgment intervene against
Mara should he deem his action in the best interest of
the Empire. By taking the issue of noninterference to the
floor of the Assembly, Hodiku had made it a matter for
quorum consensus. Once an accord was made formal, no
member would willingly defy the final decision. Since quick
resolution was beyond hope, Hochopepa changed his goal
toward forcing due process to instill tempered judgment.
The stout magician adjusted his robes around his girth in
resignation. 'Now, let's get to the meat of the matter by
letting these hotheads rant themselves hoarse. When they
run out of steam, we'll show them the only reasonable
choice, and call a vote, letting them think the idea was theirs
in the first place. It's safer to let Tapek and Motecha think
they are leading the Assembly to consensus than to leave
them free to initiate regrettable action on their own.'

Shimone turned a sour eye upon his portly companion.
'Why is it that you always seek the solution to everything

through inexhaustible sessions of talk?'

'Have you a better idea?' Hochopepa shot back in sharp
reproof.

'No,' Shimone snapped. Unwilling to bother himself
with further speech, he turned his attention back to the
floor, where the first of many speakers vied to continue
the debate.

94 Mistress of the Empire

The early sun heated the great command tent. The halfgloom
inside smelled of the heavy oils used to keep the
hide waterproof and of grease used to supple the straps of
armor and scabbards. The scent of lamp oil was absent,
as the Lady had declined the need for light. Dressed in
ornamental armor and helm crowned with the plumes
of the Hadama Clan Warchief, Mara sat on fine silk
cushions. The flaps of the tent's entrance were lashed
back, and the morning outside edged her stiff profile in
light. Behind her, his gauntleted hand upon her shoulder,
Hokanu surveyed the army arrayed in ranks across the
broad vale below.

The mass of waiting warriors darkened the meadow
across the entire vista, from the vantage point on the hill
behind: spear" and helms in their neat rows too numerous
for counting. The only visible movement was caused by the
wind through the officers' plumes, which were many colors
besides Acoma green. Yet the stillness was deceptive. At any
second, every man at arms of Clan Hadama stood ready for
attack, to answer their Warchief's call to honor.

Mara seemed an ornament carved of jade in her formal
armor. Her face was the expressionless facade expected of
a Tsurani Warchief. Yet those advisers who attended her
observed in her bearing a brittleness born of rigidness, as
if her stiff manner were all that contained the seething
emotions inside. They moved and spoke quietly in her
presence, as if the chance-made gesture, or the wrongly
inflected word might jar her control and the irrational rage
she had unleashed upon Lord Jiro might hammer past her
barriers and manifest itself again.

In this setting, with the vast armies at her command

spread in offensive readiness, she was unpredictable as
the thunderhead whose lightnings have yet to be loosed. A
formal declaration of war meant putting aside cunning and
strategies, forgoing guile and reason, and simply charging

V7ar

95

across an open field at the foe names in ceremony in the
Temple of Jastur.

Across from the Hadama war force were raised the
banners of Clan lonani; like Lady Mara, Lord Jiro sat
with the Ionani Warchief upon the crest of the opposite hill,
proud as befitted their lineage, ant of no mint to forgive
a slight of honor from the Lady of the Acoma. Beyond
the tight-ranked warriors of the lonani, the comment tent
flew the ancient scarlet ant yellow Anasati war banner
on a standard set next to the black ant green tent of
Lord Tonmargu, Warchief of the clan. The placement of
colors symbolised an age-oft affirmation that the slight
to the Anasati hat been accepted by all the houses, to be
resolved by bloodshed that would count no cost in lives.

To die was Tsurani; to live in dishonor, cowardice deemed
worse than death.

Mara's eyes registered the details, yet her hands did not
shake. Her thoughts were walled off, isolated in a colt
place that even Hokanu court not penetrate. She who hat
deplored war ant killing now seemed eager to embrace raw
violence. Bloodshed might not bring her son back, but the
heat ant horror of battle court maybe stop her thinking.
She would know a surcease from pain ant grief until Jiro
of the Anasati was ground to a pulp in the dust.

Her mouth hardened at the bent of her thoughts. Hokanu
senses her tautness. He tit not try to dissuade her, knowing
by instinct that no consolation existed that court move her.
He stayed by her, quiet, tempering her decisions where
he court.

One day, she might waken ant accept her tears for what
they were. Until time might begin to heal her, he court only
give unstinting support, knowing that until then, anything
less might drive her to more desperate measures.

With true Tsurani impassivity, Hokanu followed the
distant panoply as several figures left the Hadama lines

96 Mistress of the Empsre

and approached the ranks of the Ionani. Lujan led the
party, sunshine glancing off his armor, and lighting the
tips of his officer's plumes to emerald brilliance. At his
shoulder walked his two Force Leaders, Irrilandi ant Kenji,
and behind, according to rank, the Force Commanders of
the other houses of Clan Hadama. A scribe came last, to
record the exchange as this delegation met its opposite in
the center of the chosen site of battle, following tradition.
A discussion would set the conditions of the coming war,
the limits of the field, the hour of commencement, and the
possibility, if any, that quarter could be offered or accepted.
But Mara had ended hope of the last.

That the houses of Clan lonani had seen fit to become
involved had moved her not a hairsbreadth. They could
stand or fall,,with Jiro, and she would not be alone
in enduring the atrocities inherent in the Game of the
Council.

When Keyoke, her Adviser for War, had broached the
subject of quarter, her eyes had flashed hot anger as she
pronounced, 'No quarter.'

The lines were now drawn, the stakes set. None could
dispute the word of Mara, as Warchief. Hokanu glanced
around the command tent, as much to steady himself as
to assess the mood of those present. Keyoke wore armor
rather than the adviser's garb his position entitled him to;
Saric, who had fought in the Acoma ranks before rising to
high office, had also donned armor. With battle about to
rage, he felt naked wearing only thin silk on his back.

Old Incomo yet wore his robes. More at home with his
pen than his eating knife, he stood with his hands locked at
his sash, his leathery features drawn. Though as seasoned
in his way as a field general, he was unschooled in the arts
of violence. Mara's Call to Clan was no sane act, and since
she had heretofore been the soul of gentleness and reason,
her venomous embracing of Tsurani ritualised vengeance

War

97

left him inwardly terrified. But his years of experience as
adviser to the Minwanabi enabled him to stand firm in
obedience.

Every man and woman of the Acoma, and of all the
houses of Clan Hadama, waited upon the gods' will
today.

Trumpets sounded and the high, curving war horns blew.
Drummers beat a tattoo as the delegations of lonani and
Hadama parted company, turned about, and marched back
to their ranks. The drumbeat quickened, and the fanfare
assumed a faster tempo. Lujan took his place in the center
ranks; Irrilandi and Kenji marched to the right and left
flanks; and the other officers assumed position at the heads
of their house armies. Early sun glanced off the lacquered
edges of shields and spears and lit the rippling movement
of thousands of warriors drawing sword from sheath.

The banners snapped in a gust, and streamers unfurled
from the crossposts, red for the Death God Turakamu,
whose blessing was asked for the slaughter about to begin.
A priest of the Red God's order stepped onto the narrow
strip of earth between the armies and chanted a prayer. The
swell of sound as voices of the warriors joined in seemed like
the tremor that preceded cataclysm. Beside the priest stood
another, a black-shrouded sister of Sibi, She Who Is Death.
The presence of a priestess who worshipped Turakamu's
elder sister affirmed that many men were fated to die on this
day. The priest completed his invocation and cast a handful
of red feathers into the air. He bowed to the earth, then
saluted the priestess of the Death Goddess. As the religious
representatives withdrew, the warriors raised their voices
to shouts. Cries and insults shattered the morning as men
reviled their enemies across the field. Unforgivable words
were exchanged, to seal their dedication to annihilating
combat: to win or to die, as honor dictated; to stiffen
the will lest any soldier be tempted to turn craven. The
98 Mistress of the Empire

Tsurani cote of honor was inflexible: a man would earn
his life through victory, or his disgrace would extent past
the Wheel of this Life, to cause misery in the next.

Mara regarded the scene without passion. Her heart was
hart. This day, other mothers would know what it was to
weep over the bodies of slain sons. She barely notices when
Hokanu's fingers settles on the shoulder plates of her armor,
as his own heart began to pound in anticipation.

The heir to the Shinzawai had the right to stand apart,
for he had no blood ties to either Hadama or Ionani, but
as husband to the Good Servant, he felt obliged to supervise
this slaughter. Now, with the excitement of the warriors
reaching a pitch to quicken the blood, a darker part of
his nature looked forward to the call to charge. Ayaki had
been loved as his own, and the boy's loss quickened him to
share his Lady's rage. Logic might absolve House Anasati
of the tong's hiring, but the thirst of his arouses emotion
remained unslaked. Whether or not Jiro was guilty, blood
must atone for blood.

A runner sent by Lujan arrived at the command tent.
He bowed to earth, silent until the Lady waved. 'Mistress,
Warchief of Clan Hadama, Ionani Force Commanders have
given agreement. Battle shall commence when the sun rises
to a height of six diameters over the eastern horizon.'

Mara scanned the heavens, assessing. 'That means the
signal to charge will be sounded in less than a half-hour.'
She snapped a nod of approval. Yet the delay was longer
than she desired: Ayaki had received no such reprieve.

Minutes passed slowly. The soldiers continued to cry
insults until their voices grew hoarse. The sun inched higher,
and the air heated with the day. All in the command tent
leashed in fraying nerves, until the touch of an alighting
fly was enough to snap the gathering atmosphere of
pent force.

Hokanu's impatience mounted. He was ready to draw

War

99

blade and see the edge drink blood. At last the sun reached
its designated position. No signal passed between the high
officers in the command tent. Keyoke sucked in a quick
breath in concert with Mara's lifted hand. Lujan, on the
field, raised his bared sword, and the trumpets pealed out
their call to war.
Hokanu had drawn his own sword without thought. The
battle might finish without his ever facing an enemy, for
his place was beside his Lady. No lonani warriors would
breach the honor guard who surrounded the command tent
lest Clan Hadama be routed, yet he, and beside him Saric,
were both ready.

The notes of the fanfare seemed drawn out to eternity. In
the distance, at the head of the army, Lujan waited with his
blade poised high, glittering like a needle in sunlight. Across
the field the Ionani commenting officer held a like pose.
When the weapons of both men fell, a flood of screaming
soldiers would charge across the narrow strip of meadow,
and the hills would echo with the clash of swords and the
cries of war.

Hokanu snatched breath to mutter a hurried prayer for
Lujan, for the brave Acoma Force Commander was almost
certain to die. The press of soldiers on both sides made it
unlikely any in the first five ranks would survive the initial
strike. The two great armies would grind themselves against
each other like the teeth on opposing jaws, and only the
warriors in the rearmost ranks might see who emerged
victorious.

The moment of suspension ended. Men finished their last
silent appeals to the gods for honor, victory, and life. Then
Lujan's sword quivered in the stroke of descent.

As warriors shifted forward onto the balls of their feet
and banners stirred in the hands of bearers who lifted the
poles from the earth, thunder slammed out of the clear
green sky.

100 Mistress of tl~e Empire

The concussion of air struck Mara ant Hokanu full in the
face. Cushions flew, and Hokanu staggered. He dropped to
his knees, the arm not holding his weapon catching Mara
into protective embrace. Incomo was flung back, his robes
cupped like sails, as the command tent cracked and billowed
in the gust. Keyoke stumbled backward into Saric, who
caught him, and nearly went down as the crutch fetched
him a blow across the legs. Both Acoma advisers clung
to each other to keep their footing, while, inside the tent,
tables overturned and charts depicting battle tactics flapped
and tumbled into the tangle of privacy curtains that aashed
across Mara's sleeping mat.

Through a maelstrom of dust devils, chaos extended
across the field. Banners cracked and whipped, torn out
of the bearers hands. A cry went up from the front ranks
of both armies as warriors were cast to the ground. Their
swords stabbed earth, not flesh. Thrown into disarray
by the whirlwind, the warriors behind tripped over one
another until not one was left able to press forward to
engage the fight.

In the breach between the lines appeared several figures
in black. Their robes did not stir, but hung down in an
uncanny calm. Then the unnatural winds abated, as if on
command. As fury dwindled into awe, men on both sides
blinked dust-caked lashes. They saw Great Ones come
to intervene, and while their weapons remained in their
hands, and the bloodlust to attack still drove them, none
arose, nor did any make a move to overrun the magicians
who stood equidistant between the armies. The downed
warriors stayed prone, their faces pressed to the grass. No
command from master or mistress could drive a man of
them forward, for to touch a Great One was to invite utter
ruin, if not commit offense against the gods.

Mara regarded the Black Robes that had balked her
vengeance with hostile eyes. The straps on her armor

War

101

creaked as she arose to her feet. Her hands damped
into fists, and muscles jumped in her jaw. Softly, she
said, 'No.'

A strand of loose hair slipped from beneath her helm,
and her Warchief's plumes trembled like reeds before a
breeze. A heartbeat later, another Great One materialised
beside the open flap of her tent. His robe seemed cut from
night itself, and though he was slender with youth, there
was nothing young about his eyes. They held a light that
seemed to blaze in contrast to his dark skin and hair. His
voice proved surprisingly deep, 'Lady Mara, hear our will.
The Assembly forbids this war!'

Mara turned pale. Rage shook her, to be constrained from
fulfilling her call to Clan War. Never had she imagined that
the Assembly might intervene against her given will. She was
as helpless to protest this development as her former enemy,
Tasaio of the Minwanabi, had been, for to be forbidden
the traditional means of vengeance for Ayaki's murder was
to forfeit Acoma honor. To withdraw without bloodshed
from this confrontation would disgrace her far more than
any shame the Anasati might fall heir to. Her son was the
one left unavenged; Lord Jiro would be given the victory.
He would gain esteem for his courage, having gone to the
field prepared to engage in battle to defend his honor, but
it was not his son or his family ancestors whose shades
would be diminished for being deprived of blood price
for a murder. As the accuser who had not prosecuted her
claims by strength of arms, the Lady of the Acoma would
forfeit much of the veneration due her rank.

Mara found her voice. 'You force me to dishonor,
Great One.'

The magician dismissed her remark with haughty calm.
'Your honor, or lack of it, is not my affair, Good Servant.
The Assembly acts as it will, in all cases, for the Good of
the Empire. The carnage of clan conflict between Hadama

a_102 Mistress of the Emp~re

ant lonani would weaken the Nations ant leave this land
vulnerable to attack from outside our borders. Therefore,
you are tort: no force of the Acoma or of the Anasati or
their clan, or allies may take the field to oppose the other
for this or any other matter. You are forbidden to make
war against Lord Jiro.'

Mara heft herself silent by force of will. Once, she hat
stood witness when the barbarian Black Robe, Milamber,
hat torn open the skies above the Imperial Arena. The
powers unleashes on that day hat killed, ant shaken the
earth, ant causes fire to rain town from the clouds. She
was not so far gone in grief to lose reason ant forget: the
magicians were the supreme force within the Empire.

The young, nameless magician looked on in arrogant
silence as Mara swallowed hart. Her cheeks flushed red,
ant Hokanu, at her shoulder, court feel her trembling
suppresses rage. Yet she was Tsurani. The Great Ones
were to be obeyed. She gave a stiff not. 'Your will, Great
One.'

Her bow was seep, if resentful. She half turned toward
her advisers. 'Orders: withdraw.' In the face of this
command she hat no choice. Though Ruling Lady of the
greatest house in the Empire, though Servant of the
Empire, even she court but bow to the inevitable ant
ensure that no lapse of dignity court compound this
enforced dishonor.

Hokanu relayed his Lady's orders. Saric shook off a
stunned stillness ant hastened to rouse the signal runners
outside the tent from their abject prostration. Keyoke
readies the signal flags, ant, as if grateful to be excuses
from the presence of the one dark-robed form in the
comment tent, messengers snatches up green ant white
flags ant hurries off to the knoll to wave the comment for
withdrawal.

War

103

On the field, emit the kneeling mass of his warriors,
Lujan saw the signal. He cupped his hands to his mouth
ant shouted, and around him the other Force Commanders
of Clan Hadama called orders to retreat. Like a wave
held in check, the men gathered up their swords ant
spears, slowly stood, and pulled back into family groups.
Movement surged through their ranks as they formed up,
and began the march back up the hillsides toward their
respective masters' encampments.

The armies poised to clash rolled back from each other,
leaving the meadow trampled in the sunlight. The
magicians between the hosts oversaw the retreat, then,
their office completed, disappeared one by one, relocating
upon the hill near the Ionani command tent.

Intent on her bitterness, Mara barely noticed the
magician still before her, nor Hokanu at her side,
dispensing instructions to dismiss Clan Hadama's forces
homeward to their respective estate garrisons. Her eyes
might view an ending of war, but their hardness did not
relent. Honor must be satisfied. To fall upon her family
sword was no just reparation for Ayaki's life. The public
disgrace remained, not to be forgotten. Jiro would use
such shame to ally enemies against her house. Shaken to
re assume her responsibilities, she could only atone for her
error. No choice remained now, but to use intrigue to
resolve the death and the insult between herself and the
Anasati. The Game of the Council must now serve, with
plots and murder done in secret, behind a public front of
Tsurani propriety.

A disturbance arose outside the command tent, a flurry
of raised voices, and Keyoke's rising clearest in
astonishment. 'Two companies from the extreme left
flank are moving!'

Mara hurried into the open, fear dislodging her thoughts
of hatred. She stared out over the valley in horrified

104 Mistrcss of thc Empirc

disbelief to see the leftmost element of the Hadama forces
countermand orders and surge forward.

The magician who had followed at her elbow hissed
affront, and more of his fellows appeared out of empty
air. Mara fought panic at the new arrivals. If she did not
act, the Great Ones would take issue at her side's disregard
of orders. In another moment her house, her Clan, and
every loyal servant of the Acoma might lie dead of the
magicians' wrath.

'who commands the left?' she cried in shrill desperation.


Irrilandi, now arrived on the hilltop, called answer.
'That's a reserve company,-mistress. It is under charge of
the Lord of the Petcha.'
Mara bit her lip in furious thought: Petcha was a lord
but lately come to his inheritance. Barely more than a
boy, he commanded out of deference to his rank, not
through skills or experience. Tsurani tradition gave him
the right to a place at the forefront of the ranks. Lujan
had compensated as best he might, and set the boy over
an auxiliary unit, which would be called upon only when
the battle's outcome was decided. But now either his youth
or his hot blood invited total disaster.

Keyoke considered the situation in the valley with the
eyes of a master tactician. 'The impetuous fool! He seeks
to strike while confusion occupies the Anasati side of the
line! Didn't he see the Great Ones? [how could he ignore
their arrival?'

'He's bereft of his senses.' Hokanu gestured to the
runners, who had reached even the farthest sections of
the lines. 'Or else he can't read the command flags.'

Saric raced off to dispatch more runners, while on the
field, several older commanding officers broke away from
the press of retreating warriors and hurried to converge on
Lord Petcha's moving banners.

War

.~

.

..
105

On the hill, Lady Mara looked on in horror as two
full companies of men in Lord Petcha's orange-and-blue-plumed
armor moved forward to attack the Anasati right
flank. The soldiers in red and yellow on the far hillside
swirled in an about-face, preparing to meet the charge.
Their commander's shouts floated on the wind as he
exhorted each warrior to keep his head. They were seasoned
troops, or dse their fear lent them prudence. They held in
compliance with the Great Ones' edict, and did not rush
forward to answer Lord Petcha's provocation.

Keyoke's sinewy hands whitened on his crutch. 'He's
wise, that Anasati Strike Leader. He will not violate the
order to withdraw, and should our men under Petcha keep
coming, they will be attacking uphill. He has time to wait,
and perhaps maintain the truce.'

The words were spoken for the benefit of the Black
Robes, who had banded together in a disturbed knot.
Frowning under ink-dark hoods, they watched the Petcha
forces race headlong up the rise on the lonani side of
the vale.
One spoke, and two vanished with a whipping snap of
air.

Mara's servants threw themselves prone in abject fear,
and more than one veteran turned white. Lujan looked sick
and Keyoke like chiseled rock.

On the field, the two Black Robes reappeared before
the charging forces. Tiny as toys, yet menacing for that
smallness, they threw up their hands. Green light sparked
from their fingertips, and a searing flash erupted in the path
of the running warriors.

The eyesight of every watcher was dazzled.

Left blind by the afterimage, Mara was forced to blink
tears from her stinging eyes. Moments passed before she
recovered clear vision. She forced herself to face front, and
gasped.

rr,~ ~mp,~e

At first glance nothing appeared wrong. Lord Pacha's
soldiers no longer ran; they still stood upright, their orange
armor bright in the sunlight and their plumes twisting in
the breeze. More careful study showed that their quietness
masked a tableau of horror. The hands that still clutched
weapons writhed and twitched, the flesh slowly blistering.
Faces contorted in nightmarish, silent agony. Their skin
raised up in pustules, then darkened, blackened, and
crisped. Smoke curled on the wind, stinking of scorched
carrion. Flesh cracked and oozed blood that boiled away
into steam.

Mara's belly clenched with nausea. She sagged back,
caught by Hokanu, who shared her tortured horror. Even
the battle-hardened Keyoke looked ill to his very core.

There came no screams from the field. The victims stood
arrested as puppets as their eyes burst and empty sockets
seeped. Their tongues became thick purple obscenities
protruding from mouths that could not emit even a single
strangled cry. Hair smoked and fingernails melted, yet the
soldiers lived, their jerks and quivers dearly visible to the
stunned observers upon the distant hilltops.

Saric choked back a gasp. 'Gods, gods, they are surely
punished enough.'

The magician first appointed to Mara's tent turned
toward the adviser. 'They are only punished enough when
we decide to allow them their crossing to Turakamu.'

'As you will, Great One!' Saric immediately prostrated
himself, his face pressed to the dirt like a slave's. 'Your
forgiveness, Great One. I regret my outburst, and apologise
for speaking out of turn.'

The magician deigned no reply, but stood in cold silence
as the Petcha warriors continued to suffer on the field.
Burned flesh peeled from their bodies, to fall smoking
to the ground. The men at last began to topple, first
one, then another, until all two hundred warriors lay

War

107

tumbled, blackened skeletons, on untouched grass, still
clad in gleaming armor. The orange-and-blue Petcha banner
lay before them, the tassels fluttering in wind that carried
barely a signature of smoke.

The young magician at length stood apart from his
fellows and addressed the Lady Mara. 'Our rule is absolute,
Good servant,Let your people remember. Any who defy us
invite instant oblivion. Is that understood?'

Mara fought back her sickness, croaked a whisper. 'Your
will, Great One.'

Another magician separated himself from the group. 'I
am not yet satisfied.' He regarded Mara's officers, all on
their feet except for Saric. They might appear uncowed as
Tsurani propriety demanded, yet not one did not tremble
with terror. This brave front seemed to increase the Black
Robe's displeasure. 'Who defied us?' he inquired of his
colleagues, ignoring Mara.

'Young Lord Petcha,' came the reply, cold, and to the
point. A third voice arose from the Black Robes, this
one more temperate. 'He acted upon his own, without
his Warchief's permission or approval.'

The second magician, a sharp-eyed man with a shock
of red hair that escaped the edges of his hood, shifted his
regard to Mara. 'His dishonor does not end here.'

The magician who seemed to mediate called out again.
'Tapek, I said Lady Mara had nothing to do with the
defiance.'

Tapek raurned a shrug, as if irritated by a fly. 'As Lord
Petcha's Warchief, she is responsible for the conduct of all

forces under her command.'

Mara lifted her chin. Her mind stilled with a horror of
recognition: these Black Robes might order her dead, with
no more concern than they had showed for Tasaio of the
Minwanabi, whose suicide had resulted from their bidding.
Her officers looked arrested with terror. Keyoke showed

108 Mistress of the Empire

nothing beyond a hardness around his eyes that no one
living had ever seen.

Hokanu made an involuntary jerk forward, but was
stopped by Lujan's rock-hard grip upon his arm.

The onlookers, to a man, held their breath. Should the
Black Robes order her destruction, no sword, no plea, no
power of love might prevent them. The loyalty of thousands
of servants and soldiers who would gladly give their lives in
her peace would avail her nothing.

While the red-haired Tapek studied the Lady with a
snake's heartless regard, the young magician said, 'Is Lord
Petcha still alive?'

Lujan reacted instantly, dispatching a runner to the field.
Minutes passed. Tapek shifted in impatience, while out at
the scene of the carnage the messenger conferred. A flag
was brought to signal. It dipped and waved, in code, which
Lujan interpreted. 'All who attacked are dead.' He dared
raise his eyes to the Great Ones as he concluded, 'Lord
Petcha was leading his men. His body is ashes and bones,
with the rest.'

The first magician nodded curtly. 'The obliteration of the
offender is ample punishment.'

The third magician from the group affirmed, 'So be
it.'

Mara felt faint with relief, until Tapek stepped sharply
toward her. Deep in the shadow under his hood, his
heavy eyebrows drew up in displeasure. His eyes we"
pale, cold as the depths of the sea, and menace edged
his tone as he said, 'Mare of the Acoma, the House of
Petcha is no more. You shall see that all of that line
are dead before nightfall. The estate house ant barracks
will be burned, and the fields fired. When the
crops are destroyed, Acoma servants shall salt the earth,
that nothing shall grow on the land. All soldiers sworn
to the Petcha natami are to be hung. You will leave

- ~_

.1
,

.

.
.,

::

.

War
109

their remains to rot in the wind, and never offer them
haven as you have other warriors of conquered houses.
All Petcha free servants are now slaves, given over to
the service of the Emperor. All Petcha holdings now
belong to the temples. The Petcha natami is to be
broken by hammers and the fragments buried, never
to know the sun's warmth, never more to secure Petcha
spirits to the Wheel of Life. From this night unto
eternity, that house no longer exists. Let the ending
signify this: no one may defy the will of the Assembly.
No one.'

Mara forced her knees not to give way. She used every
shred of her strength to draw breath and find her voice.
'Your will, Great One.'

She bowed. Her armor dragged at her shoulders, and the
plumes of her helm seemed to weigh down her neck, yet
she lowered herself until her knees and forehead touched
soil, and the feathers of a Hadama Warchief became sullied
with dust.

The young magician inclined his head in perfunctory
acknowledgment of her obeisance, then withdrew a round
metal device from his robe. He depressed a switch with
his thumb. A whining sound cut the stillness. With an
audible pop and an inrushing of air, the Black Robe
vanished.

The magician named Tapek lingered, studying the woman
who was folded on the ground at his feet. His lips
twitched as if he enjoyed her groveling. 'See that the
object of this lesson is well learned by all others in
your Clan, Good Servant. Any who defy the Assembly
will face the same kite as the Petcha.' He withdrew
another of the round devices and a moment later, disappeared.
The other Black Robes vanished after him,
leaving the hilltop bare but for the circle of Mara's
shocked officers.

110

Mistress of the Empire

Below, shouts rang across the vale as officers called
orders to confused soldiers. Warriors crowded back up the
hillsides, some in a hurry to put space between themselves
and the carnage wrought by magic, others reluctant to turn
their backs upon the enemy, who marched to the same
edict given to Lady Mara. Saric gathered himself to his
feet, while her Force Commander helped his Lady, in the
encumbrance of her armor, to do the same. Hoarsely, she
said to Lujan, 'Hurry and dispatch more messengers. We
must make haste to disperse the clan, lest further mishap
provoke an incident.'

Swallowing hard, and still feeling sickened, Mara gestured
to Saric. 'And, Gods grant us mercy, order this terrible
thing done: obliterate the Petcha.'

Saric nodded, unable to speak. He had a gift for
reading character, and the memory of Tapek's intensity
gave him chills. Mara had been dealt the worst punishment
imaginable, the utter destruction of a loyal clan
family for no worse offense than youthful impetuosity.
All for his mistress's Call to Clan, the young Lord had
died in lingering agony; before nightfall his young wife
and baby sons would be dead, as would cousins and
relations who bore his name. That Mara must herself
be the instrument of that unjust decree cut through her
grief for Ayaki.- For the first time since the great black
gelding had toppled upon the body of her son, her eyes
showed the spark of awakened feeling for others beyond
herself.

Saric saw this as he trudged off to complete the horrifying
task set upon the Acoma by the Great Ones. Hokanu
observed as he steadied his Lady's steps on her return to
the command tent. The fires of the Assembly's magic had
cauterised the wounds to her spirit. In place of the obsession
for revenge against Jiro, a fierce anger now commanded
her mind.

V7ar

L

111

Mara had recovered herself. Hokanu knew bittersweet
relief at the change. He regretted the Petd~a's loss; but
the woman he loved was once again the most dangerous
player of the Game of the Council the Empire had ever
known. With a gesture, she dismissed the servants who
rushed to neaten the disorder left in the tent. When the
last of them had retreated a discreet distance away, she
called Irrilandi to unlace the door flaps and restore her a
measure of privacy.

Keyoke entered as the last flap slapped down. He
performed servant's task lighting the lanterns, while Mara
paced. Vibrant, even jagged with nerves, she regarded those
of her house who were present, arrayed in semicircle before
her. Her voice seemed flat as she said, 'They dare . . .'

Keyoke stiffened. He glanced askance at Hokanu, who
stood as mute as the others. Mara reached the fallen
tangle of her privacy curtains, then spun around. 'Well,
they will learn.'

Irrilandi, who knew her moods less well than the others,
gave her a fist-over-heart salute. 'Lady, surely you do not
speak in reference to the magicians?'

Mara seemed tiny, in the lantern light that held the
shadows in the cavernous tent at bay. A moment passed,
filled by the muffled shouts of the officers stilt mustering
troops outside. Bowstring-taut, Mara qualified. 'We must
do what has never been done since the Empire came into
existence, my loyal friends. We must discover a way to
evade the will of the Great Ones.'

Irrilandi gasped. Even Keyoke, who had faced death
through a lifetime of campaigns, seemed shaken to the

core. But Mara continued grimly: 'We have no choice. I
have shamed the Acoma name before Jiro of the Anasati.
We are forbidden expiation by means of war; I will not fall
upon my sword. This is an impasse for which tradition has
no answer. The Lord of the Anasati must die by my design,

112

Mistress of the Empire

and I will not stoop to hiring assassins. Jiro has already
used my disgrace to whip up enemies. He has turned the
dissatisfied Lords in the Nations into a cohesive party of
traditionalists, and Ichindar's reign is imperiled along with
the continuance of the Acoma name. My only heir is dead,
so my ritual suicide offers us no alternative. If all that I have
lived to achieve is to be salvaged, we must spend years in
the planning. Jiro must die by my hand, if not in war, then
in peace, despite the will of the Assembly of Magicians.'

:8

:

_.

4

Adversity

Someone moved.

Atop a stack of baled cloth, partially hidden by the cant
of a crooked bale, Arakasi heard what might be the grate
of a footstep on the gritty boards of the floor. He froze,
uneasy at the discovery he was not alone in the murk of the
warehouse. Silently he controlled his breathing; he forced
his body to relax, to stave off any chance of a muscle cramp
brought on by his awkward position. From a distance, his
clothing would blend with the wares, making him seem like
a rucked bit of fabric fallen loose from its ties. Up close,
the deception would not bear inspection. His coarse-woven
robe could never be mistaken for fine linens. Mindful that he
might have trapped himself by taking refuge in this building
to shake a suspected tail, he shut his eyes to enhance his
other senses. The air was musty from spilled grain and
leakage from barrels of exotic spices. The scented resins
that waterproofed the roof shingles mingled with those
of moldered leather from the door hinges. This particular
warehouse lay near enough to the dockside that its floors
submerged when the river crested in spring and overran
the levee.

Minutes passed. Noise from the dock quarter came
muffled through the walls: a sailor's raucous argument with
a woman of the Reed Life, a barking cur, and the incessant
rumble of wheels as needra drew the heavy drays of wares
away from the riverside landings. The Acoma Spy Master
strained to sort the distant hubbub; one by one, he tagged
the sounds, while the day outside waned. A shouting band
of street urchins raced down the street, and the bustle of

114

Mistress of the Empire

commerce quieted. Nothing untoward met his ears beyond
the calls of the lamplighters who tended the street at the
end of the alley. Long past the point where another man
might conclude he had imagined the earlier disturbance-that
what seemed a footstep was surely the result of stress
and imagination - Arakasi held rigidly still.

The flesh still prickled warning at the base of his neck.
He was not one to take chances. Patience was all, when it
came to any contest of subterfuge.

Restraint rewarded him, finally, when a faint scrape
suggested the brush of a robe against wood, or the catch
of a sleeve against a support beam. Doubt fled before ugly
certainty: someone else was inside the warehouse.

Arakasi prayed silently to Chochocan, the Good God, to
let him live through this encounter. Whoever had entered
this dark building had not done so for innocent reasons.
This intruder was unlikely to be a servant who had stolen
off for an illicit nap in the afternoon heat, then overslept
through supper into night. Arakasi mistrusted coincidence,
always; to presume wrongly could bring his death. Given
the hour, and the extreme stealth exhibited by his stalker,
he had to conclude he was hunted.

Sweating in the still air, he reviewed each step that had
brought him to this position. He had paid an afternoon
call upon a fabric broker in the city of Ontoset, his
purpose to contact a factor of a minor house who was
one of his many active agents. Arakasi made a habit of
irregular personal visits to ensure that such men remained
loyal to their Acoma mistress, and to guard against enemy
infiltrations. The intelligence network he had built upon
since his days as a servant of the Tuscai had grown vast
under Acoma patronage. Complacence on his part invited
any of a thousand possible mishaps, the slightest of which
could spell disaster for his Lady's welfare.

His visit today had not been carelessly made; his guise as

Adversity

115

an independent trader from Yankora had been backed up
by paper work and references. The public announcement
of the Assembly's intervention between the Acoma and the
Anasati had reached this southern city days later; news
tended to travel slowly across provinces as the rivers fell
and deepwater trade barges were replaced by landborne
caravans. Aware that Lady Mara would require his updated
reports by the fastest possible means to guard against
possible countermoves by the Anasati or other foes made
bold by the Assembly's constraints, Arakasi had shortened
his stay to a hurried exchange of messages. On leaving the
premises, he had suspected he was being followed.

Whoever had tailed him had been good. Three times he
had tried to shed his pursuit in the teeming crush of the
poor quarter; only a caution that approached the obsessive
had shown him a half-glimpsed face, a tar-stained hand,
and twice, a colored edge of sash that should not have
been repeated in the random shuffle of late-day traffic.

As well as the Spy Master could determine, there were
four of them, a superbly trained team who were sure
to be agents from another network. No mere sailors
or servants in commoners' clothing could work with
such close coordination. Arakasi inwardly cursed. He
had blundered into just the sort of trap he had set for
informants himself.

His backup plan could not be faulted. He had quickly
crossed the busy central market, where purchase of a new
robe and sudden movement through an inn packed with
roisterers had seen the trader from Yankora vanish and a
house messenger emerge. His skill in altering his carriage,
his movements, the very set of his bones as he walked had
confused many an opponent over the years.
His back trail had seemed unencumbered as he jogged
back to the factor's quarters and let himself in through a
hidden door. There he had changed into the brown of a

116 Mistress of the Empire

common laborer, and taken refuge in the warehouse behind
the trade shop. Crawling atop the cloth bales, his intent had
been to sleep until morning.

Now he cursed himself for a fool. When those following
had lost sight of him, they must have dispatched one of their
number to backtrack to this warehouse, on the off-chance
he might return. It was a move that a less cocky man
might have anticipated, and only the gods' luck had seen
the Acoma Spy Master inside and hidden before the enemy
agent slipped in to wait and observe. Sweat trickled down
Arakasi's collar. The opponent he faced was dangerous; his
entrance had almost gone undetected. Instinct more than
sure knowledge had roused Arakasi to caution.

The gloom" was too deep to reveal his adversary's
location. Imperceptibly slowly, the Acoma Spy Master
inched his hand down to grasp the small dagger in his
belt. Ever clumsy with handling a sword, he had a rare
touch for knives. If he had dear view of a target, this
nerve-rasping wait might be ended. Yet if a wish was his
for the granting, he would not ask the Gods of Tricks and
Fortune for weapons, but to be far from here, on his way
back to Mara. Arakasi had no delusions of being a warrior.
He had killed before, but his preferred defense relied more
on wits, surprise tactics giving him the first strike. This was
the first time he had been truly cornered.

A scuffle sounded at the far end of the warehouse. Arakasi
stopped breathing as a loose board creaked, pulled aside to
allow- a second man to slip inside.

The Spy Master expelled his pent air carefully. The
hope of a stealthy kill was lost to him. Now he had
two enemies to consider. Light flared as a hand-carried
lantern was unshuttered. Arakasi squinted to preserve his
night vision, his situation turned from tense to critical.
While he was probably concealed from the first agent,
the new arrival at the back of the warehouse could

.

Adversity

117

not help but discover him as he walked past holding
a light.
Out of alternatives, Arakasi probed for the gap that
should exist between the stack of bales where he rested
and the wall. Cloth needed space for air circulation, lest
mildew cause spoilage in the dark. This merchant was not
overly generous in his habits; the crack that met the Spy
Master's touch was very narrow. Prickling in awareness of
his peril, he slid in one arm to the shoulder and wiggled until
the bale shifted. The risk could not be avoided, that the stack
might topple; if he did not act, he was going to be discovered
anyway. Forcing himself flat against the wall, and nudging
on the bale, Arakasi wedged himself into the widening gap.
Splinters from the unvarnished boards gouged into his bare
knees. He dared not pause, even to mouth a silent curse, for
the light at ground level was moving.

Footfalls advanced on his position, and shadows swung
in arcs across the rafters. He was only halfway hidden, but
his position was high enough that the angle of illumination
swept above him; had he waited another heartbeat, his
movement would have been seen. His margin for error
was nonexistent. Only the steps of his adversary covered
the slither of his last furtive shove as he nestled downward
into the cranny.

A mutter arose from beyond the bale. 'Look at that!'
As if summarising an inspection, the man rambled on,
'Tossing good cloth as if it were straw bales, and
unworthy of careful packing .

beaten for this-'

The musing was interrupted by the original stalker's
whisper. 'Over here.'

Arakasi dared not raise himself to risk a glance.

The lantern crept on in the hand of its unseen bearer.
'Any sign of him?'

'None.' The first stalker sounded irritable. 'Thought I

.. Someone should be

~l. ~


s
e
s
e

s
l

i
p
3
e
e
ei

118 Mistress of the Empire

heard something a bit ago, but it was probably vermin.
We're surrounded by grain warehouses here.'

Reassured enough to be bored, the newcomer lifted his
lantern. 'Well, he's around somewhere. The factor's slave
insisted he'd come back and gone into hiding. The others
are watching the residence. They'd better find him before
morning. I don't want to be the one to tell our master he's
escaped.'

'You get wind of the gossip? That this fellow's been seen
before, in different guise? He's got to be a courier, at least,
or even a supervisor.' Cheerfully the stalker added, 'He's
not from this province, either.'

'You talk too much,' snapped the lantern bearer. 'And
you remember: things you should forget. If you want to keep
breathing, you'd best keep that sort of news to yourself. You
know what they say: "Men have throats and daggers have
sharp edges."'

The advice was received with a sigh. 'How long must we
keep watch?'

'Unless we're told to leave, we'll stay until just before
daybreak. Won't do to be caught here, and maybe killed
by guards as common thieves.'

An unintelligible grumble ended the conversation.

Arakasi resigned himself to a long, uncomfortable wait.
His body would be cramped by morning, and the splinters
an additional aggravation, but the consequences if
he should be captured did not bear examination. The
loose tongues of his trackers had confirmed his worst
surmise: he had been traced by another spy net. Whoever
commanded the pair who hunted him, whoever they
reported to, the master at the top of their network worked
for someone canny, someone who had constructed a
spy system that had escaped notice until now. Arakasi
weighed this fact and knew fear. Chance and intuition
had spared him when intricate advance precautions had

__

Adversity

119
failed; in discomfort, in warm darkness, he agonised over
his assessment.

The team who sought to capture him were skilled, but
not so polished that they refrained from indulging in idle
talk. It followed that they had been set to catch what
their master presumed must be a low-ranking link in
the operation he sought to crack. Arakasi suppressed a
chill. It was a mark of the deep distrust that drove him,
that he preferred when he could to accomplish occasional
small errands in person. His unseen enemy must have the
chance to know who he was, how highly he was placed, or
the name of the mistress he reported to. Possibly he faced
the most dangerous opponent he had ever encountered.

Somewhere Lady Mara had an enemy, whose subtleties
posed a threat greater than anything she had confronted
in her life. If Arakasi did not escape alive from Ontoset,
if he could not get a message home, his mistress might be
taken unwarned by the next strike. Reminded by the ache
in his chest that his breathing had turned swift and shallow,
the Spy Master forced control.

His security had been compromised, when he had no
inkling of impending trouble. The breach spoke of intricate
planning. The factor's second role must have been
discovered; precisely how could not be surmised, but a
watch had been set over the traffic at Ontoset's docks
closely enough to differentiate between regular traders
and those who were strangers. That the team that lay in
had been clever enough to see through two of Arakasi's
disguises, having marked him as a courier or supervisor,
boded ill.

Arakasi counted the cost. He would have to replace
the factor. A certain slave was going to die of what
must seem natural causes, and the trade shop must be
shut down, a regrettable necessity, for while it doubled
as part of his network, it was one of the few profitable

120

Mistress of the Empire

Acoma undertakings used by the spy ring. It paid for itself
and provided extra funds for other agents.

Grey light filtered through a crack in the wall. Dawn was
nigh, but the men showed no sign of stirring. They had not
fallen asleep, but were waiting against the chance the man
they sought might show himself at the last hour.

The minutes dragged. Daybreak brightened outside.
Carts and wagons rumbled by, the costermongers bringing
produce to be loaded at the riverside before the worst of
the heat. The chant of a team of barge oarsmen lifted in
tuneless unison, cut by the- scolding of a wife berating a
drunken husband. Then a shout raised over the waking
noise of the city, close at hand, and urgent. The words
were indistinct to Arakasi, wedged behind muffling bales
of linen, but the other two men in the warehouse scrambled
immediately into motion. Their footfalls pattered the length
of the building, and the board creaked aside.

Most likely they made good their escape; were they
clever, they might have used the sound of their leaving as
opening gambit for a ruse. A partner could yet be lingering
to see if their quarry flushed in response.

Arakasi held still, though his legs were kinked into knots
of spasming muscle. He delayed a minute, two, his ears
straining for signs of danger.

Voices sounded outside the doubled door, and the rattle
of the puzzle lock that held the warehouse secure warned
of an imminent entry. Arakasi twisted to free himself, and
found his shoulders wedged fast. His arms were pressed flat
to his sides; his legs had slipped too low to gain purchase.
He was trapped.

He knew galvanic desperation. Were he caught here, and
arrested as a thief, the spy who had traced him would hear. A
corrupt city official would then receive a gift, and he would
find himself delivered to his enemy. His chance to make his
way back to Mara would be lost.

Adversity

121

Arakasi jammed his elbows against the bale, to no avail.
The gap that pinned him widened, only causing him to fall
deeper into the cleft. The board walls added the sting of new
splinters to his wrists and forearms. Silently swearing, he
pushed and slipped inexorably beyond hope of unobtrusive
extrication.

The warehouse doors crashed open. The Spy Master
could do nothing now but pray for a chance to innovate as
an overseer bellowed, 'Take all those,- against that wall.'

Sunlight and air heavy with the scent of river mud spilled
into the warehouse; a needra lowed, and harness creaked.
Arakasi deduced that wagons waited outside to be loaded.
He weighed his choices. To call attention to himself now was
to chance that no one from the enemy net waited outside,
a risk he dared not take. He could be followed again, and
luck would not spare him a second time. Then all debate
became moot as a work team hurried into the warehouse,
and the bale that jammed his body suddenly moved.
'Hey,' someone called. 'Careful of that loose bit up
there.'

'Loose bit!' snapped the overseer. 'Which of you dogs
broke a tie when the bales were stacked and didn't report
the lapse?' ~

A muddle of disclaiming replies masked Arakasi's movement
as he flexed aching muscles in preparation for his
inevitable discovery.

Nothing happened. The workers became involved with
making excuses to their overseer. Arakasi seized the moment

to lever himself upward. His thrust jostled the cloth that had
been shifted, and it overbalanced and tumbled downward
to land with a resounding thump against the floor.

The overseer yelled his displeasure. 'Oaf! They're heavier
than they look! Get help before you go trying to push them
about from above.'

So, Arakasi concluded: the factor must have realised his

'~

.~
,

122

Mistress of the Empire

dilemma and arranged a possible cover. No space remained
for mistakes if the impromptu salvage was to work. Hastily
he threw himself prostrate. With his face pressed to the pile
of cloth where he perched, he mumbled abject apologies.

'Well, hurry along!' the overseer cried. 'Your clumsiness
is no excuse to lie about in idleness. Get the wagons
loaded!'

Arakasi nodded, pushed himself off the stack, and fought
against the unsteadiness of stiff muscles to keep his feet.
The shock was too much, after hours of forced inactivity.
He bent before he collapsed, leaning against the fallen bale
and stretching as if examining himself for injuries. A worker
eyed him sourly as he straightened. 'You all right?'

Arakasi nodded vigorously enough to shake loose hair
over his features.

'Then lend a hand,' the worker said. 'We're almost done
at this end.'

Arakasi did as he was bidden and caught the end of the
fallen bale. In tandem with the worker, he joined the team
doing the loading. Head down, hands busy, he used every
trick he knew to alter his appearance. Sweat dripped down
his jaw. He smeared the trickle with his hands, rubbing in
dust and dirt to darken the thrust of his cheekbones. He
ran his fingers through the one lock of hair kept dyed
since a scar had turned it white, then smudged artfully to
extend shadow and lend the illusion of shortening his chin.
He lowered his brows in a scowl, and thrust his bottom
teeth against his upper lip. To an onlooker he should seem
nothing more than a worker of little intelligence; as he
hefted his end of the cloth he stared directly ahead, doing
nothing that might identify him as a fugitive.

Each pass from warehouse to wagon scraped his nerves
raw. By the time the wagons were loaded, he had singled
out a loiterer in the shadows of the shop front across the
street. The man seemed vacant-eyed, a beggar left witless

Adversity

123

by addiction to tateesha; except that his eyes were too
focused. Arakasi repressed a shiver. The enemy was after
him, still.

The wagons were prepared to roll, the workers climbing
on board. Mara's Spy Master hoisted himself up onto the
load as if expected to, and elbowed the man next to him
in the ribs.

'Did the little cousin get that robe she wanted?' he asked
loudly. 'The one with the flower patterns on the hem?'

Whips cracked, and a drover shouted. The needra
leaned into their traces, and the laden wagons groaned
into movement. The worker Arakasi had addressed stared
back in frank surprise. 'What?'

As if the big man had said something funny, Arakasi
laughed loudly. 'You know. Lubal's little girl. The one who
brings lunches down to Simeto's gang at the docks.'

The worker grunted. 'Simeto I've heard of, but not
Lubal.'

Arakasi slapped his forehead in embarrassment. 'You're
not his friend Jido?'

The other man hawked dust from his throat and spat.
'Never heard of him.'

The wagons had reached the corner of the alley and
swung to negotiate the turn. Urchins blocking the way
raised curses from the lead drover, and the overseer waved
a threatening fist. The children returned obscene gestures,

then scattered like a startled flock of birds. Two mangy
hounds galloped after them. Arakasi dared a glance back
at the factor's residence. The tateesha halfwit still drooled
and watched the warehouse doors, which were being closed
and locked by a servant.

The ruse, perhaps had worked.

Arakasi mumbled words of apology to the man he had
bothered, and rested his head on crossed elbows. While
the wagon rolled, jostling over the uneven paving and

124 Mistress of the Empire

splashing through the refuse that overflowed the gutters
by the dockside, he smothered a sigh of relief. He was
not dear of danger, nor would he be safe until he was
miles removed from Ontoset. His thoughts turned to the
future: whoever had arranged the trap at the factor's
would presume that his net was discovered. He would
further surmise that his escaped quarry must guess that
another organisation was at work. Logic insisted that this
unseen enemy would react with countermeasures to foil
just the sort of search that Arakasi must now launch. Ring
upon ring of confusion would befuddle the trail, while the
Ontoset branch of the Acoma network was left a total loss.
Its lines of communication must be dissolved without trace.
Two more levels of operation would have to be engaged,
and swiftly: one to check for leaks in the branches in other
provinces, and another to sift through a cold trail to try and
ferret out this new enemy.

The difficulties were nearly insurmountable. Arakasi had
a touch for difficult puzzles, true enough. But this one was
potentially deadly, like a sword edge buried in sand that any
man's foot might dislodge. He brooded until the wagons
pulled up at the docks. Along with the other workers, he
jumped down onto the wharf and set hands to a hoist. One
after another, the cloth bales were dragged from the wagon
beds and loaded into waiting nets. Arakasi shoved on the
pole with the rest when the hoist was full, lifting the cargo
high and swinging it onto the deck of the barge warped
alongside. The sun rose higher, and the day warmed. At
the first opportunity, he slipped away on the excuse that
he needed a drink of water, and vanished into the poor
quarter.

He must make his way out of Ontoset without help.
To approach any other link in his net was to risk being
rediscovered; worse, he might lead his pursuit to a-fresh
area of endeavor, and expose still more of his undercover

.~
Adversity

12S

workings. There were men in this city who would harbor
fugitives for pay, but Arakasi dared not approach them.
They could be infiltrated by the enemy, and his need to
escape might connect him irrefutably to the incident at the
warehouse. He wished for a bath and a chance to soak out
the splinters still lodged under his skin, but he would get
neither. A slave's grey clothing or a beggar's rags must see
him past the city gates. Once outside the walls, he must hole
up in the countryside until he could be certain he had made
a clean break. Then he might try the guise of a courier and
hasten to make up for his delay.

He sighed, discomforted by the extended time he would
be traveling, left alone with conjecture. He held troubled
thoughts, of an unknown antagonist who had nearly
taken him out of play with one move, and that enemy's
master, an unseen, unassailable threat. With Clan War
between Mara and Lord Jiro decreed forbidden by the
magicians, his beloved Lady of the Acoma was endangered.
As opportunists and enemies banded into alliances
against her, she was going to need the best intelligence
to ward from her yet more underhanded moves in the
murderous intrigues of the Great Game.

,^

The tailor allowed the robe's silken hem to fall to the floor.
Pins of finely carved bone were clenched between his teeth;
he stepped back to admire the fit of the formal garment
commissioned by the Lord of the Anasati.

Lord Jiro endured the craftsman's scrutiny with contained
disdain. His features expressionless, he stood with
his arms held out from his body to avoid a chance prick
from the pins that fastened the cuffs. His posture was so
still that the sequins sewn in the shape of killwings that
adorned the front of the robe did not even shimmer in the
light that fell through the open screen.

'My Lord,' lisped the tailor around the pins pinched

126 Mistress of the Empsre

between his teeth, 'you look splendid. Surely every unmarried
noble daughter who beholds your magnificence will
swoon at your feet.'

Jiro's lips twitched. He was not a man who enjoyed
flattery. Careful with appearances to the point where the
unperceptive might mistakenly think him vain, he well
knew the value of clothing when it came to leaving an
impression. The wrong raiment could make a man seem
stupid, overweight, or frivolous. Since swordplay and the
rigors of battle were not to Jiro's taste, he used every other
means to enhance his aspect of virility. An edge could be
gained, or a contest of wits turned into victory more subtle
than any coarse triumph achieved on the fields of war.

Proud of his ability to master his foes without bloodshed,
Jiro had to restrain himself not to bridle at the tailor's
thoughtless compliment. The man was a craftsman, a
hireling barely worth of notice, much less his anger.
His words were of less consequence than the wind, and
only chance had caused him to jar against a memory Jiro
yet held with resentment. Despite his closest attention to
manners and dress, Lady Mara had spurned him. The awkward,
coarse-mannered Buntokapi had been chosen over
him. Even passing recollection caused Jiro to sweat with
repressed fury. His years of studied effort had availed him
not at all, when all of his wits and schooled charm had been
summarily dismissed by the Acoma. His ridiculous - no,
laughable - lout of a brother had triumphed over him.

Bunto's smirk was unforgiven; Jiro still stung from
remembered humiliation. His hands closed into fists, and
he suddenly had no stomach for standing still. 'I don't like
this robe,' he snapped peevishly. 'It displeases me. Make
another, and have this one torn up for rags.'

The tailor turned pale. He whipped the pins from
his teeth and dropped to the parquet floor, his forehead
pressed to the wood. 'My Lord! As you wish, of

Aduersity



127

course. I beg humble forgiveness for my lack of taste and
judgment.'

Jiro said nothing. He jerked his barbered head for a
servant to remove the robe and drop it in a heap underfoot.
'I will wear the blue-and-red silk. Fetch it now.'

His command was obeyed in a flurry of nervousness.
The Lord of the Anasati seldom punished his slaves and
attendants, but from the day he assumed his inheritance he
had made it clear that anything short of instant obedience
would never be tolerated.

Arriving to make his report, First Adviser Chumaka
noted the near-frenzied obsequious behavior on the part
of the servants. He gave not a twitch in reaction; wisest
of the Anasati retainers, he knew his Lord best of all. The
master did not appreciate overdone obeisance; quite the
contrary. Jiro had matured as a second son, and he liked
things quiet and without fanfare. Yet since he had inherited
a ruler's mantle without having been groomed to expect the
post, he was ever sensitive to the behavior of his underlings
toward him. Should they fail to give him his due respect as
Lord, he would notice, and take instantaneous issue.

The servant who was late to speak his tide, the slave who
failed to bow without delay upon presentation were never
forgiven their lapse. Like fine clothing and smooth manners,
traditional Tsurani adherence to caste was part and parcel of
how Ruling Lords were measured by their peers. Eschewing
the barbaric aspects of the battlefield, Jiro had made himself
a master of civilised behavior.

As if a robe of finest silk did not lie discarded like garbage
under his sandaled feet, he inclined his head while Chumaka
straightened up from his bow. 'What brings you to consult

at this hour, First Adviser? Did you forget I had planned
an afternoon of discourse with the visiting scholars from
Migran?'

Chumaka tipped his head to one side, as a hungry rodent

128

Mistress of the Empire

might fix on moving prey. 'I suggest, my Lord, that the
scholars be made to wait while we take a short walk.'

Lord Jiro was vexed, though nothing showed. He allowed
his servants to tie his robe sash before he replied. 'What you
have to say is that important?' As all who were present well
knew, Jiro held afternoon court to attend to business with
his factors. If his meeting with the scholars was delayed, it
would-have to wait until morning, which spoiled his hour
set aside for reading.

The Anasati First Adviser presented his driest smile ant
deftly handled the impasse. 'It pertains to Lady Mara of the
Acoma, and that connection I mentioned earlier concerning
the vanquished Tuscai.'

Jiro's interest brightened. 'The two are connected?'

Chumaka'',stillness before the servants provided its own
answer. Excited now, Lord Jiro clapped for his runner. 'Find
my hadonra and instruct him to provide entertainment for
our guests. They shall be told that I am detained and will
meet with them tomorrow morning. Lest they become
displeased by these arrangements, it shall be explained that
I am considering awarding a patronage, if I am impressed
by their worthiness in the art of verbal debate.'

The runner bowed to the floor and hurried off about
his errand. Chumaka licked his teeth in anticipation as his
master fell into step with him toward the outer screen that
led into the garden.

Jiro seated himself on a stone bench in the shade by a
fish pool. He trailed languid fingers in the water while
his attention to Chumaka sharpened. 'Is it good news
or bad?'

As always, the First Adviser's reply was ambiguous. 'I'm
not certain.' Before his master could express displeasure,
Chumaka adjusted his robe and fished a sheaf of documents
out of a deep pocket. 'Perhaps both, my Lord. A
small, precautionary surveillance I set in place identified;
someone highly placed in the Acoma spy network.' He
paused, his thoughts branching off into inaccessibly vague
speculation.

'What results?' Jiro prompted, in no mood for cleverness
that he lacked the finesse to follow.

Chumaka cleared his throat. 'He eluded us.'

Jiro looked nettled. 'How could this be good news?'

Chumaka shrugged. 'We know he was someone of
importance; the entire operation in Ontoset was dosed
down as a result. The factor of the House of Habatuca
suddenly became what he appeared to be: a factor.' As
an afterthought, he said, 'Business is terrible, so we may
assume that the goods being brokered by this man were
Acoma, not Habatuca.' He glanced at one of his documents
and folded it. 'We know the Habatuca are not Acoma
minions; they are firmly in the Omechan Clan, and
traditionalists whom we might find useful someday. They
don't even suspect this man is not their loyal servant, but
then they are a very disorganized house.'

Jiro tapped his chin with an elegantly manicured finger
as he said, 'This factor's removal is significant?'

Chumaka said, 'Yes, my Lord. The loss of that agent
will hamper Acoma operation in the East. I can assume
that almost all information coming from that region was
funneled through Ontoset.'

Jiro smiled, no warmth in his expression. 'Well then,
we've stung them. But now they also know we are watching
them with our own agents.'

Chumaka said, 'That was inevitable, my Lord. I am
surprised they hadn't been aware of us sooner. Their
network is well established and practiced. That we observed
them undetected as long as we did was something close to
miraculous.'
Seeing a gleam in his First Adviser's eyes, Jiro said,
'What else?'

130 Mistress of the Empire

'I said this was related to the long-dead Lord of the
Tuscai, from years before you were born. Just before Jingu
of the Minwanabi destroyed House Tuscai, I had unearthed
the identity of one of the dead Lord's key agents, a grain
merchant in Jamar. When the Tuscai natami was buried,
I assumed the man continued his role as an independent
merchant in earnest. He had no public ties to House Tuscai,
therefore no obligation to assume the status of outcast.'

Jiro went still at this implied, venal dishonesty. A master's
servants were considered cursed by the gods if he should die;
his warriors became slaves or grey warriors - or had, until
Lady Mara had despicably broken the custom.

Chumaka ignored his master's discomfort, caught up as
he was in reminiscence. 'My assumption was incorrect, as
I now have cause to suspect. In any event, that wasn't of
significance until recently.

'Among those who came and went in Ontoset were a pair
of men I know to have served at the grain merchant's in
Jamar. They showed me the connection. Since no one beside
Lady Mara has taken grey warriors to house service, we
can extrapolate that the Spy Master and his former Tuscai
agents are now sworn to the Acoma.'

'So we have this link,' Jiro said. 'Can we infiltrate?'

'It would be easy enough, my Lord, to fool the grain merchant,
and get our own agent inside.' Chumaka frowned.
'But the Acoma Spy Master would anticipate that. He is
very good. Very.'

Jiro cut off this musing with a chopping motion.

Brought back to the immediate issue, Chumaka came
to his point. 'At the very least, we've stung the Acoma
by making them shut down a major branch of their
organisation in the East. And far better, we now know the
agent in Jamar is again operative; that man must sooner or
later report to his master, and then we are back on the hunt.
This time I will not let fools handle the arrangements and

Adversity

131

blunder as they did in Ontoset. If we are patient, in time
we will have a clear lead back to the Acoma Spy Master.'

Jiro was less than enthusiastic. 'We may waste all our
efforts, now that our enemy knows his inside agent was
compromised.'

'True, my master.' Incomo licked his teeth. 'But we are
ahead, in the long view. We know the former Tuscai Spy
Master works now for Lady Mara. I had made inroads into
that net, before the Tuscai were destroyed. I can resume
observation of the agents I suspected as being Tuscai years
ago. If those men are still in the same positions, that simple
fact will confirm them as Acoma operatives. I will set more
traps, manned by personnel whom I will personally instruct.
Against this Spy Master we will need our best. Yes.' The
First Adviser's air became self-congratulatory. 'It is chance
that led us to the first agent, and almost netted us someone
highly placed.'

Chumaka wafted the document to fan his flushed cheeks.
'We now watch the house, and I am certain our watchers
are being watched, so I have others watching to see who
is watching us . . .' He shook his head. 'My opponent is
wily beyond comprehension. He-'

'Your opponent?' Jiro interrupted.

Chumaka stifled a start and inclined his head in respect.
'My Lord's enemy's servant. My opposite, if you will. Permit
an old man this small vanity, my Lord. This servant of
the Acoma who opposes my work is a most suspicious and
clever man.' He referred again to his paper. 'We will isolate
this other link in Jamar. Then we can pursue the next-'

'Spare me the boring particulars,' Jiro broke in. 'I had
thought I commanded you to pursue whoever is trying
to defame the Anasati by planting false evidence on the
assassin who killed my nephew?'

'Ah,' Chumaka said brightly, 'But the two events are
connected! Did I not say so earlier?'

132

Mistress of the Empire

Unaccustomed to sitting without the comfort of cushions,
Jiro shifted his weight. 'If you did, only another mind as
twisted as yours would have understood the reference.'

This the Anasati First Adviser interpreted as a compliment. '
Master, your forbearance is touching.' He stroked
the paper as if it were precious. 'I have proof, at last. Those
eleven Acoma agents in the line that passed information
across Szetac Province that were mysteriously murdered
in the same month - they were indeed connected with
five others who also died in the household of Tasaio of
the Minwanabi.'
Jiro wore a stiff expression that masked rising irritation.
Before he could speak, Chumaka rushed on, 'They were
once Tuscai agents, all of them. Now it appears they were
killed to eradicate a breach in the Acoma chain of security.
We had a man in place in Tasaio's household. Though
he was dismissed when Mara took over the Minwanabi
lands, he is still loyal to us. I have his testimony, here.
The murders inside Tasaio's estate house were done by
the Hamoi Tong.'

Jiro was intrigued. 'You think Mara's man duped the
tong into cleaning up an Acoma mishap?'

Chumaka looked smug. 'Yes. I think her far too clever
Spy Master made the error of forging Tasaio's chop. We
know the Obajan spoke with the Minwanabi Lord. Both
were reportedly angry - had it been with each other,
Tasaio would have died long before Mara brought him
down. If the Acoma were behind the destruction of their
own compromised agents, and they used the tong as an
unwitting tool to rid themselves of that liability, then grave
insult was done to the tong. If this happened, the Red
Flower Brotherhood would seek vengeance on its own.'

Jiro digested this with slitted eyes. 'Why involve the tong
in what seems a routine cleanup? If Mara's man is as good
as your ranting, he would hardly be such a fool.'

Adversity

1

1

1:

r
1
133

'It had to be a move of desperation,' Chumaka allowed.
'Tasaio's regime was difficult to infiltrate. For our part, we
placed our agent there before the man became Lord, when
he was Subcommander in the Warlord's army invading
Midkemia.' As Jiro again showed impatience, Chumaka
sighed. How he wished his master could be schooled to
think and act with more foresight; but Jiro had always
fidgeted, even as a boy. The First Adviser summed up.
'Mare had no agents in House Minwanabi that were not
compromised. The deaths therefore had to be an outside
job, and the tong's dealings with Tasaio offered a convenient
remedy.'

'You guess all this,' Jiro said.

Chumaka shrugged. 'It is what I would have done in
his position. The Acoma Spy Master excels at innovation.
We could have made contact with the net in Ontoset, and
traced its operation for ten years, and never once made the
connection between the agents in the North, the others in
Jamar, and the communication line that crossed Szetac. To
come as far as fast as we have is more due to luck than to
my talents, master.'

Jiro seemed unimpressed by the topic that enthralled his
First Adviser. He seized instead on the matter closest to
Anasati honor. 'You have proof that the tong acts on its

own volition,' he snapped. 'Then in planting evidence of
our collusion in Ayaki of the Acoma's assassination, the
Hamoi has sullied the honor of my ancestors. It must be
stopped from this outrage! And at once.'

Chumaka blinked, stopped cold in his thinking. He
quickly licked his lips. 'But no, my worthy master. Forgive
my presumption if I offer you humble advice to the
contrary.'

'Why should we let the Hamoi Tong dogs shame House
Anasati?' Jiro straightened on the bench and glared. 'Your
reason had better be good!'

134 Mistress of the Empire

'Well,' Chumaka allowed, 'to kill Lady Mara, of course.
Master, it is too brilliant. What more dangerous enemy
could the Acoma have, other than a tong of assassins?
They will spoil her peace past redemption, at each attempt
to take her life. In the end, they will succeed. She must die;
the honor of their brotherhood demands it. The Hamoi
Tong do our work for us, and we, meantime, can divert
our interests into consolidation of the traditionalist faction.'
Chumaka wagged a lecturing finger. 'Now that war has
been forbidden to both sides by the magicians, Mara will
seek your ruin by other means. Her resources and allies
are vast. As Servant of the Empire, she has popularity and
power, as well as the ear of the Emperor. She must not be
underestimated. Added to the advantages I have listed, she
is an unusually gifted ruler.'

Jiro spoke in swift rebuke. 'You sing her praises in my
presence?' His tone remained temperate, but Chumaka held
no illusions: his master was offended.

He answered in a whisper that no gardener or patrolling
warrior might overhear. 'I was never overly fond of your
brother, Bunto. So his death was of little consequence
to me personally.' While Jiro's face darkened with rage,
Chumaka's reprimand cut like a knife: 'And you were
never that fond of him, either, my Lord Jiro.' As the
elegant, stiff-faced ruler acknowledged this truth, Chumaka
continued. 'You overlook the obvious: Mara's marriage to
Bunto instead of you saved your life . . . my master.' Short
of wheedling calculation, the First Adviser finished, 'So if
you must entertain this hatred of the Servant of the Empire,
I will seek her destruction with all my heart. But I will
proceed calmly, for to let anger cloud judgment is not
merely foolish - with Mara it is suicide. Ask a shade
gleaner at the Temple of Turakamu to seek communion
with Jingu, Desio, and Tasaio of the Minwanabi. Their
spirits will confirm that.'

Adversity

13S

Jiro stared down at the ripples of water turned by the
orange fish in the pool. After a prolonged moment, he
sighed. 'You are right. I never did care for Bunto; he
bullied me when we were children.' His hand closed into
a fist, which he splashed down, scattering the fish. 'My
anger may be unwarranted, but it burns me nonetheless!'
He looked up again at Chumaka, his eyes narrowed. 'But
I am Lord of the Anasati. I am not required to make sense.
Wrong was done to my House and it will be redressed!'

Chumaka bowed, dearly respectful. 'I will see Mara of
the Acoma dead, master, not because I hate her, but because
that is your will. I am ever your faithful servant. Now we
know who Mara's Spy Master is-'

'You know this man?' Jiro exclaimed in astonishment.
'You've never once said you knew the identity of the Tuscai
Spy Master!'

Chumaka made a deprecatory gesture. 'Not by name, nor
by looks, curse him for the brilliant fiend he is. I have never
knowingly met him, but I recognise the manner of his craft.
It has a signature like that of a scribe.'

'Which is far from solid evidence,' Jiro was fast to
point out.

'Final proof will be difficult to get if I have recognised the
same man's touch. Should this former Tuscai Spy Master
have taken Mara's service, the gods may smile upon us yet.
He may be a master of guile, yet I know his measure. My
past knowledge of the Tuscai operation in Jamar should
enable us to infiltrate his operation. After a few years we
may have access to the man himself, and then we can
manipulate the intelligence in Mara's net as we desire.
Our intent must be made behind diversionary maneuvers
to disrupt Acoma trade and alliances. Meanwhile the tong
will be seeking Mara's downfall as well.'

'Perhaps we could encourage the brotherhood's efforts

a bit,' Lord Jiro offered hopefully.
136 Mistress of the Empire

Chumaka sucked in a quick breath at the mere suggestion.
He bowed before starting to speak, which he only did
when alarmed. 'My master, that we dare not try. Tong are
tight-knit, and too deadly at their craft to meddle with. Best
we keep Anasati affairs as far removed from their doings as
possible.'

Jiro conceded this point with regret, while his First
Adviser proceeded with optimism. 'The Hamoi Brotherhood
is not one to act in hot blood; no. Its works on its
own behalf have ever been slow-moving, and cold. Traffic
has passed between the Hamoi and Midkemia that I did not
understand as it occurred; but now I suspect it has roots in
a long-range attempt to hurt the Acoma. The Lady has a
well-known weakness for barbarian ideas.'

'That is so,' Jiro conceded. His temper fled before
thoughtfulness; he regarded the play of the fish. No adviser
of any house was more adept than Chumaka at stringing
together seemingly unrelated bits of information. And all
the Empire had heard rumors of the Lady's dalliance with
a Midkemian slave. That was a vulnerability well worth
exploiting.

Cued by the softening of his master's manner, and judging
his moment with precision, Chumaka said, 'The Anasati can
bear the tiny slight in the manner of the bungled evidence.
Fools and children might believe inept information. But
the wiser Ruling Lords all know that the tong keeps close
guard on its secrets. The powerful in the Nations will never
seriously believe such transparent ploys to link your name
with a hired killer. The Anasati name is old. Its honor is
unimpeachable. Show only boldness before petty slurs, my
master. They are unworthy of a great Lord's attention. Let
any ruler who dares come forward to suggest the contrary,
and you will correct the matter forcefully.' Chumaka ended
with a quotation from a play that Jiro favored. "'Small acts
partner small houses and small minds."'

Aduersity

137

The Lord of the Anasati nodded. 'You are right. My anger
tends sometimes to blind me.'

Chumaka bowed at the compliment. 'My master, I ask
permission to be excused. I have already begun to consider
snares that may be set for Mara's Spy Master. For while
we appear to blunder about with the one hand revealed
in Ontoset, that will draw the watchful eye away from the
other, silently at work in Jamar to bring the dagger to the
throat of the Lady of the Acoma.'
Jiro smiled. 'Excellent, Chumaka.' He clapped in dismissal.
While his First Adviser bowed again and hurried
away, muttering possible plots under his breath, the Lord
remained by the fish pool. He considered Chumaka's
advice, and felt a glow of satisfaction. When the Assembly
of Magicians had forbidden war between his house and
Mara's, he had been covertly ecstatic. With the Lady
deprived of her army, and the clear supremacy she held
by force of numbers on the battlefield, the stakes between
them had been set even.

'Wits,' the Lord of the Anasati murmured, stirring the
water and causing the fish to flash away in confused
circles. 'Guile, not the sword, w-ill bring the Good Servant
her downfall. She will die knowing her mistake when she
chose my brother over me. I am the better man, rend when
I meet Buntokapi after death in the Red God's halls, he
will know that I gave him vengeance, and also ground
his precious House Acoma under my heel into dust!'

Arakasi was late. His failure to return had the Acoma
senior advisers on edge to the point where Force Commander
Lujan dreaded to attend the evening's council.
He hurried to his quarters to retrieve the plumed helm
he had shed during off-duty hours. His stride was purposeful,
precise in balance as only a skilled swordsman's
would be; yet his mind was preoccupied. His nod to

138 Mistress of the Empire

the patrolling sentries who saluted his passage was
mechanical.

The Acoma estate house had as many armed men in its
halls now as servants; privacy since Ayaki's murder was
next to nonexistent, particularly at night, when extra
warriors slept in the scriptorium and the assorted wings
of the guest suites. Justin's nursery was an armed camp;
Lujan reflected that the boy could hardly play at toy soldiers
for the constant tramp of battle sandals across the floors of
his room.

Yet as the only carrier of the Acoma bloodline, after
Mara, his safety was of paramount concern. Lacking
Arakasi's reliable reports, the patrols walked their beats
in uncertainty. They were starting at shadows, half drawing
swords at the footfalls of drudges secreted in corners to meet
their sweethearts. Lujan sighed, and froze, shaken alert by
the sound of a sword sliding from a scabbard.

'You there!' shouted a sentry, 'Halt!'

Now running, Lujan flung himself around a corner in the
corridor. Ahead, the warrior with drawn sword crouched
down, battle-ready. He confronted a nook deep in shadow
where nothing appeared to be amiss. From behind, the tap
and shuffle peculiar to a man moving in haste on a crutch
warned that Keyoke, Mara's Adviser for War, had also
heard the disturbance. Too long a field commander to
ignore a warrior's challenge, he also rushed to find out who
trespassed in the innermost corridors of the estate house.

Let it not be another assassin, Lujan prayed as he ran.
He strained to see through the gloom, noting that a lamp
that should have been left burning was dark. Not a good
sign, he thought grimly; the council suddenly deferred by
this intrusion now seemed the kinder choice of frustrations.
Snarls in trade and the uneasy shifting of alliances within
Ichindar's court might be maddeningly puzzling without
Arakasi's inside knowledge. But an attack by another tong

Adversity

139

dart man this far inside the patrols was too harrowing a
development to contemplate. Though months had passed,
Justin still had nightmares from seeing the black gelding's
fall . . .

Lujan skidded to a stop by the sword-bearing warrior,
his sandal studs scraping the stone floor. 'Who's there?' he
demanded.

Old Keyoke thumped to a halt on the warrior's other
side, his dry shout demanding the same.

The warrior never shifted his glance, but made a fractional
gesture with his sword toward the cranny between
two beams that supported a join in the rooftree. A long-past
repair had replaced a rotted section of wood. The estate
house Mara and Hokanu inhabited was ancient, and this
was one of the original sections. The slate scored white by
Lujan's battle sandals was close to three thousand years
old, and rubbed into ruts from uncounted generations of
footsteps. There were too many corners to shelter intruders,
Lujan felt as he looked where his sentry pointed. A man
lurked in the shadow. He stood with hands outstretched
in submission, but his face was suspiciously smudged, as
if he had used lamp soot to blacken the telltale pallor of
his flesh. ~

Lujan freed his sword. With inscrutable features, Keyoke
raised his crutch, thumbed a hidden catch, and drew a thin
blade from the base. For all that he had lost one leg, he
balanced himself without discernible effort.

To the intruder now faced with three bared blades, Lujan
said curtly, 'Come out. Keep your hands up if you don't
want to die spitted.'
'I would rather not be welcomed back like a cut of

meat at the butcher's,' replied a voice rust-grained as
neglected iron.

'Arakasi,' Keyoke said, raising his weapon in salute. His
ax-blade profile broke into a rare smile.
'Gods!' Lujan swore. He reached out barehanded and
touched the sentry, who lowered his blade. The Acoma
Force Commander shivered to realise how near Mara's
Spy Master had come to dying at the hands of a house
guard. Then relief and a countersurge of high spirits
made him laugh. 'Finally! How many years have Keyoke
and I attempted to set unpredictable patrols? Can it be
that for once, my good man, you failed to walk right
through them?'

'It was a rough trip home,' Arakasi conceded. 'Not only
that, this estate has more warriors on duty than house
staff. A man can't move three steps without tripping over
someone in armor.'

Keyoke sheathed his concealed blade and replaced his
crutch beneath his shoulder. Then he raked his fingers
through his white hair, as he had never been able to do
when he was a field commander, perpetually wearing a
battle helm. 'Lady Mara's council is due to begin shortly.
She has need of your news.'

Arakasi did not reply, but pushed out from behind the
posts that had hidden him from sight. He was robed as a
street beggar. His untrimmed hair was lank with dirt, his
skin was ingrained with what looked like soot. He smelled
pervasively of woodsmoke.

'You look like something dragged out by a chimney
sweeper,' Lujan observed, gesturing for the sentry to resume
his interrupted patrol. 'Or as if you had been sleeping in
trees for the better part of a sevenday.'

'Not far from the truth,' Arakasi muttered, turning an
irritated glance aside. Keyoke disliked waiting for anyone;
now free to indulge the impatience he had repressed for
years while commanding troops, he had stumped on ahead
toward the council hall. As if relieved by the old man's
departure, Arakasi bent, raised the hem of his robe, and
scratched at a festering sore.

.

Adversity

141

Lujan stroked his chin. Tactfully he said, 'You could
come to my quarters first. My body servant is practiced
at drawing a bath on short notice.'

A brief silence ensued.

At last Arakasi sighed. 'Splinters,' he admitted.

Since one terse word was all he was likely to receive
in explanation, Lujan surmised the rest. 'They're infected.
That means not recent. You've been too much on the run
to draw them out.'

Another silence followed, affirming Lujan's surmise. He
and Arakasi had known each other since before House
Tuscai had fallen, and had shared many years as grey
warriors. 'Come along,' the Force Commander urged. 'If
you sit in Lady Mara's presence in this state, the servants
will need to burn the cushions afterward. You stink like a
Khardengo who lost his wagon.'

Not pleased by the comparison to an itinerant family
member that traveled from city to city selling cheap
entertainment and disreputable odd jobs, Arakasi curled his
lip. 'You can get me a metal needle?' he bargained warily.

Lujan laughed. 'As it happens, I might. There's a girl
among the seamstresses that fancies me. But you'll owe
me. If I ask her for the loan of such a treasure, she is bound
to make demands.'

Aware that few young maids in the household would not
willingly jeopardise their next station on the Wheel of Life

for the promise of Lujan's kisses, Arakasi was unimpressed.
'I can as easily use one of my daggers.'

His apparent indifference set Lujan on edge. 'The news
you bring is not good.'

Now Arakasi faced the Acoma Force Commander fully.
Light from the lamp down the corridor caught on his gaunt
cheekbones and deepened the hollows under his eyes. 'I
think I will accept your offer of a bath,' he responded
obtusely.

142 Mistress of the Empire

Lujan knew better than to tease that his friend the Spy
Master also looked as if he had not eaten or slept for a week.
The observation this time would have held more truth than
jest. 'I'll get you that needle,' he allowed, then hastened on
in an attempt to ease Arakasi's ruffled pride through humor.
'Though you certainly don't need it, if you're carrying your
knives. I doubt my sentry understood when he held you
at swordpoint that you could have killed and carved him
before he had a chance to make a thrust.'
'I'm good,' Arakasi allowed. 'But today, I think, not that
good.' He stepped forward. Only now it became apparent
that he was far from steady on his feet. He awarded
Lujan's startled gasp of concern his blandest expression
of displeasure and added, 'You are on your honor not to
allow me to fall asleep in your tub.'

'Fall asleep or drown?' Lujan quipped back, extending
a fast hand to assist the Spy Master's balance. 'Man, what
have you been up to?'

But badger though he might, the Force Commander
received no explanation from the Spy Master until the
bath was done, and the helm retrieved, and the council
was well on into session.

Keyoke was already seated in the yellow light cast
by the circle of lamps, his leathery hands crossed on
the crutch across his knees. Word of Arakasi's homecoming
had been sent to the kitchens, and servants
hurried in with trays laden with snacks. Hokanu attended
at Mara's right hand, in the place normally occupied
by the First Adviser, while Saric and Incomo sat in
low-voiced conference opposite. Jican huddled with his
arms around his knees behind a mountainous pile of
slates. Bins stuffed with scrolls rested like bastions
at either elbow, while his expression looked faintly
beleaguered.

Arakasi ran his eyes quickly over the gathering and

Adversity

143

surmised in his dry way, 'Trade has not been going well
in my absence, I can see.'

Jican bristled at this, which effectively canceled anyone's
immediate notice of the Spy Master's ragged condition.
'We are not compromised,' the little hadonra swiftly
defended. 'But there have been several ventures in the
markets that have gone awry. Mara has lost allies among
the merchants who also have Anasati interests.' In visible
relief, he finished, 'The silk auctions did not suffer.'

'Yet,' Incomo supplied, unasked. 'The traditionalists
continue to gain influence. Ichindar's Imperial Whites more
than once had to shed blood to stop riots in Kentosani.'

'The food markets by the wharf,' Arakasi affirmed in
spare summary. 'I heard. Our Emperor would do more to
stop dissension if he could manage to sire himself an heir
that was not a daughter.'

Eyes turned toward the Lady of the Acoma as her staff
all waited upon whatever she might ask of them.

Thinner than she had been on the occasion of Ayaki's
funeral, she was nonetheless immaculately composed. Her
face was washed clean of makeup. Her eyes were focused
and keen, and her hands settled in her lap as she spoke.
'Arakasi has revealed that we are confronted' by a new
threat.' Only her voice showed the ongoing strain she yet
hid behind the Tsurani facade of control; never before
Ayaki's loss had she spoken with such a hard-edged clarity
of hatred. 'I ask you all to grant him whatever aid he may
ask without question.'

Lujan flashed Arakasi a sour glance. 'You had already
dirtied her cushions, I now see,' he murmured with injured
irritation. Keyoke looked a touch disgruntled. The discovery
was belated that the patrol which had finally caught the
Spy Master lurking in the corridors had done so only after
he had held a conference with the mistress, undetected by
any. Aware of the byplay, but obliged by code of conduct

144 Mistress of the Empire

to ignore it, the other two advisers inclined their heads in
acceptance of the mistress's wishes. Only Jican fidgeted,
aware as he was that Mara's decree would create additional
havoc in the Acoma treasury. Arakasi's services came at high
costs of operation, which caused the hadonra unceasing,

hand-wringing worry.

A breeze wafted through the open windows above the
great hall of the Acoma, carved into the side of the hill
against which the estate house rested. Despite the brilliance
of the lamps, the room was thrown into gloom in the
farthest corners. The cho-ja globes on their stands stayed
unlit, and the low dais used for informal conference
remained the only island of illumination. Those servants
in attendance waited a discreet distance away, within call
should they be needed but out of earshot of any discussion.
Mara resumed, 'What we speak of here must be kept in our
circle alone.' She asked Arakasi, 'How much time do you
need to spend upon this new threat?'

Arakasi gave a palms-upward shrug that revealed a
yellow bruise on one wristbone. 'I can only surmise,
mistress. My instincts tell me the organisation I encountered
is based to the east of us, probably in Ontoset. We have light
ties between there and Jamar and the City of the Plains,
since the cover was a factor's business. An enemy who
discovered our workings to the west would see nothing
beyond coincidence in the eastern connection. Yet I do not
know where the damage originated. The trace could have
started somewhere else.'

Mara chewed her lip. 'Explain.'
'I did some cursory checking before I returned to Sulan-Qu.'
More nervelessly cold than Keyoke could be before
battle, the Spy Master qualified. 'On the surface, our:
trading interests seem secure to the west and north. That
recent expansion I have regrettably been forced to curtail:
was located south and east. Our unknown opponent ma,

Adversity

145

have stumbled onto some operation we just set in place;
or not. I cannot say. His effect has been felt very clearly.
He has detected some aspect of our courier system, and
deduced of our methods to establish a network to observe
us. This enemy has placed watchers where they are likely
to trap someone they hope they can trace back to a
position of authority. From this I extrapolate that our
enemy has his own system to glean advantage from such
an opportunity.'

Hokanu settled an arm- around Mara's lower back,
though her manner did not indicate she needed comfort.
'How can you be certain of this?'

Baldly Arakasi said, 'Because it is what I would have
done.' He smoothed his robe to conceal the welts the
splinters had marked on his shins. 'I was almost taken,
and that is no easy feat.' His flat phrases implied a total
lack of conceit as he raised one finger. 'I am worried because
we have been compromised.' He lifted a second finger and
added, 'I am relieved to have made a clean escape. If
the team that gave me chase ever guessed whom they
had cornered, they would have taken extreme measures
to be thorough. Subterfuge would have been abandoned
in favor of my successful capture. Therefore, they must
have expected to net a courier or supervisor. My identity as
Acoma Spy Master most likely remains uncompromised.'

Mara straightened in sudden decision. 'Then it seems a
wise course to absent yourself from this problem.' Arakasi
all but recoiled in surprise. 'My Lady?'

Misinterpreting his reaction for hurt feelings that his
competence lay questioned, Mara attempted to soften her
pronouncement. 'You are too critical to another problem
that needs attention.' She waved her dismissal to Jican,
saying, 'I think the trade problems can wait.' While the

little man bowed his acquiescence and snapped fingers to
call his secretaries to help gather his tallies and scrolls,

146 Mistress of the Empire

Mara commanded all the other servants to leave the great
hall. When the great doubled doors swept dosed, leaving
her alone with the inner circle of her advisers, she said to
her Spy Master, 'I have something else for you to do.'

Arakasi spoke his mind plainly. 'Mistress, there exists
a great danger. Indeed, I fear the master in command
of this enemy's spy works may be the most dangerous
man alive.'

Mara betrayed nothing of her thoughts as she nodded
for him to continue.

'Until this encounter I had the vanity to consider myself
a master of my craft.' For the first time since discussion had
opened, the Spy Master had to pause to choose words. 'This
breach in our security was in no way due to carelessness.
My men in Ontoset acted with unimpeachable discretion.
For that reason, I fear this enemy we face could possibly
be my better.'

'Then I am decided on the matter,' Mara announced. 'You
shall turn this difficulty over to another that you trust. That
way, if this unspecified enemy proves worthy of your praise,
we suffer the loss of a man less critical to our needs.'

Arakasi bowed, his movement stiff with distress. 'Mistress-'
Sharply Mara repeated, 'I have another task for

you.'

Arakasi fell instantly silent: Tsurani custom forbade a
servant questioning his sworn ruler; and moreover the
Lady's mind was set. The hardness in her since the loss
of her firstborn was not to be reasoned with; this much
he recognised. That Hokanu sensed it also was plain, for
even he refrained from speaking out against his Lady's
chosen course of action. The uncomfortable truth remained
unsaid: that no one else in Arakasi's vast network was either
careful or experienced enough to counter a threat of this
magnitude. The Spy Master would not disobey his mistress,
though he were in mortal fear for her safety. All he could do

Adversity

147

was work in convoluted patterns, obeying her command in
the literal sense, but evading what he could through general
action. For the first, he must ensure that the man placed in
nominal charge of digging out this new organisation could
report to him on a regular basis. Disturbed as he was that
Lady Mara should dismiss this dire threat with such ease,
he respected her well enough to at least hear her reasons
before he came to judgment against her. 'What is this other
matter, my Lady?'
His attentive manner smoothed Mara's sharpness. 'I
would have you discover as much as may be learned about
the Assembly of Magicians.'

For the first time since taking service with Mara, Arakasi
seemed startled by her audacity. His eyes widened and his
voice dropped to a whisper. 'The Great Ones?'

Mara nodded toward Saric, since the slant the explanation
must take had been his particular study.

He spoke up from the far side of the circle. 'Several
events over the last few years have caused me to question
the Black Robes' motives. By tradition we take for granted
that they act for the good of our Empire. But would it
not shed a different light on things if, in fact, that were
not so?' Saric's wry humor dissolved before a burning
intensity of unease as he added, 'Most critically, what
if the Assembly's wisdom is pointed toward their own
self-interest? The pretext is stability of the nations; then
why should they fear the Acoma crushing the Anasati in
the cause of just revenge?' The Acoma First Adviser leaned
forward with his elbows braced on crossed knees. 'These
magicians are hardly fools. I can't believe they don't realise
that by allowing the Lord who murders by treachery to

live unpunished, they plunge the Empire into strife most
extreme. An unavenged death is an express contradiction
of honor. Without the political byplay of the High Council,
deprived of the constant give-and-take between factions as

148 Mistress of the Empire

a leavening agent, we are left with every house cast adrift,
dependent upon the goodwill and promises of others to
survive.'

To her Spy Master, Mara qualified, 'Within a year's time,
a dozen houses or more will cease to exist, because I am
forbidden to take the field against those who would return
us to the Warlord's rule. I am rendered powerless in the
political arena. My clan cannot raise sword against the
traditionalists, who now use Jiro as their front man. If I
cannot make war upon him, I can no longer keep my pledge
to protect those houses who are dependent upon Acoma
alliance.' Shutting her eyes for a moment, she seemed to
gather herself.

Arakasi's regard of his Lady sharpened as he understood
something: she had recovered from her mourning enough
to have regained reason. She knew in her heart that the
evidence against Jiro was too obvious to take seriously.
But the cost of her loss of control at the funeral must be
met without flinching: she had shamed her family name,
and Jiro's guilt or lack of it was moot point. To admit his
innocence now was to make public admission of her error.
This she could not honorably do without a worse question
arising. Did she believe her enemy was clean of Ayaki's
blood, or was she simply backing down from exacting
retribution for Ayaki? Not to avenge a murder was an
irrevocable forfeit of honor.

Regret as she might the heat of her rage and her wrong
thinking, Mara could do nothing but manage the situation
as if all along she believed in the Anasati's treachery. To do
other was not Tsurani, and a weakness that enemies would
immediately exploit to bring her downfall.

As if to escape distasteful memories, Mara resumed,
'Within two years, many we would count allies will be
dead or dishonored, and many more who are neutral
might be persuaded or driven by political pressure into

.

1.

1

Adversity
149

the traditionalist camp. The depleted Imperial Party will
face off, but, without us, with the disastrous probability
that a new Warlord will reinstate the Council. Should that
sad day dawn, the man to wear the white-and-gold mantle
would be Jiro of the Anasati.'

Arakasi rubbed his cheek with a knuckle, furiously
thinking. 'So you think the Assembly may be tinkering
in politics for the reason of its own agenda. It is true that
the Black Robes have always been jealous of their privacy.
I know of no man who has entered their city and spoken of
the experience. Lady Mara, to pry into that stronghold will
be dangerous, and very difficult, if not outright impossible.
They have truth spells that make it impossible to insinuate
someone into their ranks. I have heard stories . . . though I
might not be the first Spy Master to attempt an infiltration,
no one who crosses a Great One with deceit in his heart
lives to a natural end.'

Mara's hands twisted into fists. 'We must find a way to
know their motives. More, we must discover a way to stop
their interference, or at least to gain a clear delineation of
what parameters they have set us. We must know how much
we may accomplish without raising their wrath. Over time,
perhaps a means can be found to negotiate with them.'

Arakasi bowed his head, resigned, but already at work
on the grand scale the problem required. He had never
expected to live to old age; puzzles, even dangerous ones,
were all the delight he understood, though the one his Lady
had proposed was all too likely to invite a swift destruction.
'Your will, mistress. I shall begin at once to realign the
interests of our agents to the northwest.' Negotiation was a

futile hope, one Arakasi rejected at the outset. To bargain at
all, one must have either force to command or a persuasive
reward as enticement. Power and popularity Mara had, but
he, too, had witnessed the display of a single magician's
might when the Imperial Games had been disrupted by

150

Mistress of the Empire

Milamber. Lady Mara's thousands of warriors, and those
of all her friends and allies, were as nothing compared to
the arcane forces the Assembly commanded. And what in
the world under heaven could anyone have that a Great
One could desire and not simply take for the asking?

Chilled, Arakasi considered the last alternative to effect
coercion: extortion. If the Assembly held a secret that
it would sHl favors to keep any others from knowing,
something it would be willing to grant concessions for, to
ensure Mara kept her silence . . . The very idea was sheer
folly. The Great Ones were above any law. Arakasi judged
it more likely that even should he be lucky enough to find
such a secret, the Black Robes would simply seal Mara's
permanent silence by putting her horribly to death.

Saric, Lujan, and Keyoke understood this, he sensed, for
their eyes were upon him most closely as he rose and made
his final bow. This time, Mara dared too much, and they
all feared for the outcome. Cold to the core of his spirit,
Arakasi turned away. Nothing about his manner indicated
that he cursed a savage fate. Not only must he sidetrack
what instinct warned might be the most perilous threat to
target Lady Mara so far, but he would even have to abandon
any effort at effecting a countermeasure. Whole sections of
his vast operation must be rendered dormant until after he
had cracked an enigma no man had ever dared attempt.
The riddle waited to be unraveled, beyond the shores of
a nameless body of water, known only as the lake that
surrounds the isle of the City of the Magicians.

Machinations

Two years passed.

No renewed attempts to assassinate the Lady of the
Acoma came, and while all remained watchful, the sense
of immediate risk had diminished.

The tranquility that settled over the estate house as
predawn light rinsed the sleeping chamber was all the more
to be treasured. Pressures brought on by recent unfavorable
developments in trade and the friction between political
factions steadily brought more stresses to bear upon House
Acoma's resources.

But now, only patrols were stirring, and the day's messengers
bearing news had yet to arrive. A shore bird called
off the lake. Hokanu tightened his arms around his beloved
Lady. His hands touched the ivory-smooth skin over her
belly and a slight fullness there alerted him. Suddenly, the
mornings she had closeted herself away from him and even
her most trusted advisers made sense. An ecstatic flush of
pleasure followed the obvious deduction. Hokanu smiled,
his face pressed into the sweet waves of her hair.

'Have the midwives told you yet whether the new Acoma
heir is to be a son or a daughter?'

Mara twisted in his arms, her eyes wide with indignation.
'I did not tell you I was pregnant! Which of my maids
betrayed me?'

Hokanu said nothing; only his smile widened.

The Lady reached down, grasped his two wrists, which
were locked around her still, and concluded, 'I see. My
maids were all loyal, and I still cannot keep any secrets
from you, husband.'

1S2

Mistress of the Empire

But she could; as clear as the rapport between them could
be, there were depths to her that even Hokanu could not
fathom, particularly since the death of her firstborn, as if
grief had laid a shadow on her. Although her warmth as
she laid her face against her husband was genuine, and her
pleasure equally so as she whispered formally into his ear
that he was soon going to be a father by blood, as well
as through adoption, Hokanu sensed a darker undertone.
Mara was troubled by something, this time not related
to Ayaki's loss, or to the Assembly's intervention in her
attempt to bring vengeance on Jiro. Equally, he sensed that
this was not the moment to broach any inquiry into her
affairs.

'I love you, Lady,' he murmured. 'You had better
accustom yourself to solicitude, because I'm going to
spoil you shamelessly every day until the moment you
give birth.' He turned her in his arms and kissed her.
'After that, we both might find I had acquired a habit
too fine to break.'

Mara snuggled against him, her fingers trailing across his
chest. 'You are the finest husband in the Empire, beloved far
better than I deserve.'
Which was arguable, but Hokanu held his peace. He
knew she loved him deeply and gave him as much care and
satisfaction as any woman was capable of; the profoundly
sensed certainty that something indefinable was missing
from her side of the relationship was a feeling he had
exhausted himself trying to fathom. For the Lady never
lied to him, never stinted in her affections. Still she had
moments when her thoughts were elsewhere, in a place
he could never reach. She needed something his instincts
warned him he lacked the means to provide.

A pragmatic man, he did not try to force the impossible,
but built upon their years together a contentment and a
peace that were enduring and solid as a monument. He had

Machinations

1S3

succeeded in giving her happiness, until the dart struck the
horse that killed her son.

She shifted against him, her dark eyes apparently fixed
upon the flower garden beyond the opened screen. Breezes
caused her favorite kekali blossoms to nod, and their heavy
perfume swirled through the chamber. Far off, the bread
cook could be heard berating a slave boy for laziness; the
sounds of the dispatch barge being loaded at dockside
reached here, strangely amplified by still water and the
mist-cloaked morning quiet.

Hokanu caught Mara's fingers and stroked them, and
by the fact that they did not immediately respond knew
she was not thinking of ordinary commerce.

'Is it the Assembly on your mind again?' he asked,
knowing it was not, but also aware that an oblique
approach would break the cold space around her thoughts
and help her make a start at communicating.

Mara closed her grip on his hand. 'Your father's sister has
two boys, and you have a second cousin with five children,
three of them sons.'

Unsure where this opening was leading, but also catching
her drift, Hokanu nodded. He reflexively followed up on
her next thought. 'If something were to happen to Justin
before your child was born, my father could choose among
several cousins and relations to find a successor after me
for the Shinzawai mantle. But you should not worry, love;
I fully intend to stay alive and keep you safe.'

Mara frowned, more troubled than he had originally
guessed. 'No. We've been through this. I will not see the
Acoma name merged with that of the Shinzawai.'
Hokanu drew her close, aware now of what lay beneath
her tenseness. 'You fear for the Acoma name, then I
understand. Until our child is born, you are the last of
your line.'

Her tenseness as she nodded betrayed the depths of a fear

~:~


:

;


154 Mistress of the Empire

she had wrestled with and kept hidden for the intervening
span of two years. And after all she had gone through to
secure the continuance of her ancestors' line, only to suffer
the further loss of her son, he could not fault her.

'Unlike your father, I have no remaining cousins, and no
other option.' She sucked a quick breach, and plunged ahead
to the heart of the matter.

'I want Justin sworn to the Acoma natami.'

'Mara!' Hokanu said, startled. 'Done is done! The boy
is almost five years of age and sworn already to the
Shinzawai!'

She looked stricken. Her eyes were- too large in her
face, and her bones too prominent, the result of grief and
morning sickness. 'Release him.'

There was an air of desperation about her, of determined
hardness he had seen only in the presence of enemies; and
gods knew, he was not an enemy. He stifled his initial
shock, reached out, and again drew her against him. She
was shaking, though her skin was not chilled. Patiently,
carefully, he considered her position. He tried to unravel
her motivations and achieve an understanding that would
give him grounds to work with her; for he realised, for his
father's sake, that he would be doing no one any favors
by changing Justin's house loyalty - least of all the boy.
By now the child was old enough to begin to comprehend
the significance of the name to which he belonged.

The death of an elder brother had fallen hard enough on
the little one without his becoming the pawn of politi=cs.
Much as Hokanu loved Mara, he also recognised that Jiro's
enmity was more threat than he would wish to place on the
shoulders of an innocent child. '
The rapport shared between the Lady and her consort
cut both ways; Mara also had the gift of tracking Hokanu's
inner thoughts. She said, 'It is a lot more difficult to murder
a boy who is able to walk, talk, and recognise strangers

Machinations

lSS

than an infant in a crib. As Shinzawai heir, our new baby
would be safer. A house, a whole line, would not be ended
by one death.'

Hokanu could not refute such logic; what cost him
peace and prevented his agreement was his own affection
for Justin, not mentioning that his foster father, Kamatsu,
had come to dote on the boy. Did a man take a child old
enough to have tasted the joys of life, and thrust him
into grave danger? Or did one set an innocent infant
at risk?

'If I die,' Mara said in a near whisper, 'there will be
nothing. No child. No Acoma. My ancestors will lose their
places on the Wheel of Life, and none will remain to hold
Acoma honor in the eyes of the gods.' She did not add,
as she might have, that all she had done for herself would
have gone for nothing.

Her consort pushed himself upright against the pillows,
drew her to lean against him, and combed back her dark
hair. 'Lady, I will think on what you have said.'

Mara twisted, jerking free of his caress. Beautiful, determined,
and angry, she sat up straight and faced him. 'You
must not think. You must decide. Release Justin from his
vows, for the Acoma must not go another day without an

heir to come after me.'

There was an edge of hysteria to her. Hokanu read past
that, to another worry, one she had not yet mentioned,
that he had missed in the turmoil. 'You are feeling
cornered because Arakasi has been so long at the task
you set him,' he said on a note of inspiration.

The wind seemed to go out of Mara's sails. 'Yes. Perhaps
I asked too much of him, or began a more perilous course
than I knew when I sent him to attempt to infiltrate the
affairs of the Assembly.' In a rare moment of self-doubt, she
admitted, 'I was hotheaded, and angry. In truth, things have
gone more smoothly than I first feared. We have handled the

156 Mistress of the Empire

upsurge of the traditionalist offensive without the difficulty
I anticipated.'
Hokanu heard, but was not deceived into belief that she
considered the affair settled. If anything, the quiet times
and the minor snarls that erupted in trade transactions
were harbingers of something deeper afoot. Tsurani Lords
were devious; the culture itself for thousands of years had
applauded the ruler who could be subtle, who could effect
convoluted, long-range plotting to stage a brilliant victory
years later. All too likely, Lord Jiro was biding his time,
amassing his preparations to strike. He was no Minwanabi,
to solve his conflicts on the field of war. The Assembly's
edict had effectively granted him unlimited time, and license
to plot against the Acoma through intrigue, as was his
penchant. ~

Neither Mara nor Hokanu chose to belabor this point,
which both of them feared. An interval of quiet stretched
between them, filled with the sounds of the estate beginning
to wake. The light through the screen changed from grey to
rose-gold, and birdsong filtered in over the call of officers
overseeing the change in the guard - warriors who had not
patrolled so near the estate house before Ayaki's death.

Unspoken also was the understanding that the Anasati
might in fact have been the target of the faked evidence carried
by the tong. Jiro-and the old-line traditionalists wished Mara
dead, which made his enmity logical. Yet a third faction might
be plotting unseen, to create this schism between the Acoma
and Anasati alliance that had been sealed with Ayaki's life.
The attempt had been against Mara; had she died according
to plan, her son would have inherited, as heir. Hokanu, in
the vulnerable position of regent, would have been left to
manage a sure clash between the Acoma, in an attempt to
retain their independence as his Lady would have desired,
and the Anasati, who would seek to annex that house on
the strength of their blood tie to the boy.

Machinations

157

But if the contract with the tong that had seen Ayaki killed
had not been under Jiro's chop, all that had transpired since
might be playing into the hands of some third party, perhaps
the same Lord whose spy net had breached Arakasi's
security.

'I think,' said Hokanu with gentle firmness, 'that we
should not resolve this issue until we have heard from
Arakasi, or one of his agents. If he has made headway in
his attempt to gain insight into the Great Ones' council, his
network will send word. No news is best news, for now.'

Looking pale and strained, and feeling chilled as well,
Mara nodded. The discomforts of her pregnancy were
shortly going to make conversation difficult, in any event.
She lay, limp in her husband's arms, while he snapped
his fingers and called for her maids. It was part of his
singular devotion that kept him at her side through her
early hours of illness. When she offered protest that he
surely had better things to do with his time, he only
smiled.

The clock chimed. Mara pushed damp hair from her brow
and sighed. She closed her eyes a moment, to ease the
ongoing strain of reviewing the fine print of the trade
factor's reports from Sulan-Qu. Yet her interval of rest
lasted scarcely seconds.

A maid entered with a tray. Mara started slightly at the
intrusion, then resigned herself to the interruption as the
servant began laying out a light lunch on the small lap
table beside the one she had left cluttered with unfinished
business.

As the mistress's regard turned her way, the maid bowed,
touching forehead to floor in obeisance very near to a
slave's. As Mara suspected, the girl wore livery trimmed
in blue, Shinzawai colors.

'My Lady, the master sent me to bring you lunch. He says

158

Mistress of the Empire

you are too thin, and the baby won't have enough to grow
on if you don't take time to eat.'

Mara rested a hand on her swollen middle. The boy child
the midwives had promised her seemed to be developing
just fine. If she herself looked peaked, impatience and
nerves were the more likely cause rather than diet. This
pregnancy wore at her, impatient as she was to be done
with it, and to have the question of heirship resolved. She
had not realised how much she had come to rely upon
Hokanu's companionship until strain had been put upon
it. Her wish to name Justin as Acoma heir had exacted a
high cost, and she longed for the birth of the child, that the
altercation with Hokanu could be set behind them both.

But the months until her due date seemed to stretch into
infinity. Reflective, Mara stared out the window, where the
akasi vines were in bloom and slaves were busy with shears
trimming them back from the walk. The heavy perfume
reminded her of another study, on her old estate, and a day
in the past when a red-haired barbarian slave had upset her
concept of Tsurani culture. Now, Hokanu was the only man
in the Empire who seemed to share her progressive dreams
and ideas. It was hard to speak to him, lately, without the
issue of progeny coming between.
The maid slipped out unobtrusively. Mara regarded the
tray of fruit, bread, and cold cheeses with little enthusiasm.
Still, she forced herself to fill up a plate and eat, however
tasteless the food seemed on her tongue. Past experience
had taught her that Hokanu would come by to check on
her, and she did not wish to face the imploring tenderness
in his eyes if she followed her inclinations and left the meal
untouched.

The report that had occupied her was far more serious
than it appeared at first glance. A warehouse by the river
had burned, causing damage to the surplus hides held off
the spring market. The prices had not been up to standard

Machinations

r

.~

lS9

this season, and rather than sell leather at such slight
profit, Jican had consigned them for later delivery to the
sandalmaker's. Mara frowned. She set her barely touched
plate aside, out of habit. Although it was no secret that,
of all the houses in the Empire, hers was the only one
to provide sandals for its bearer slaves and field hands,
until now the subject only made her the butt of social
small talk. Old-line traditionalist Lords laughed loudly
and long, and claimed her slaves ran her household;
one particularly cantankerous senior priest in the temple
service of Chochocan, the Good God, had sent her a tart
missive cautioning her that treating slaves too kindly was
an offense against divine will. Make their lives too easy, the
priest had warned, and their penance for earning heaven's
disfavor would not be served. They might be returned on
the Wheel of Life as a rodent or other lowly beast, to make
up for their lack of suffering in this present life. Saving the
feet of slaves from cuts and sores was surely a detriment
to their eternal spirits.

Mara had returned a missive of placating banalities to the
disaffected priest, and gone right on supplying sandals.

But the current report, with her factor's signature and
impression of the battered chop used on, the weekly
inventories, was another matter. For the first time an
enemy faction had sought to exploit her kind foible to the
detriment of House Acoma. The damaged hides would be
followed, she was sure, with a sudden, untraceable rumor
in the slaves' barracks that she had covertly arranged the
fire as an excuse to spare the cost of the extra sandals.
Since possession of footwear gave not only comfort, but

also considerable status to the slaves in Acoma service, in
the eyes of their counterparts belonging to other houses,
the privilege was fiercely coveted. Though no Tsurani slave
would ever consider rebellion, as disobedience to master
or mistress was against the will of the gods, even the

160 Mistress of the Empire

thought that their yearly allotment of sandals might be
revoked would cause resentment that would not show
on the surface but would result in sloppy field work, or
tasks that somehow went awry. The impact on Acoma
fortunes would be subtle, but tangible. The sabotage to the
warehouse could become an insidiously clever ploy, because
in order to rectify the shortage of leathers, Mara might draw
the attention of more than just an old fanatic in the temple
likely to write a protest to her. It could be seen in certain
quarters that she was vulnerable, and temples that were
previously friendly to her could suddenly become 'neutral'
to a point just short of hostility.

She could ill afford difficulties from the priesthood at this
time, not with the Emperor's enemies and her own allied in
common cause to ruin her.

The lunch tray remained neglected as she took up dean
paper and pen and drew up an authorisation for the factor
in Sulan-Qu to purchase new hides to be shipped to the
sandalmaker's. Then she sent her runner slave to fetch Jican,
who in turn was ordered to place servants and overseers on
the alert for rumors, that the question of footwear for the
slaves might never become an issue. ~

By the time the matter was resolved, the fruit sat in
a puddle of juices, and the cheeses-had warmed on the
plate in the humid midafternoon air. Involved with the
next report in the file, this one dealing with a trade
transaction designed to inconvenience the Anasati, Mara
heard footsteps at the screen.

'I am finished with the lunch tray,' she murmured without
looking up.

Presuming the servant would carry out the remains of her
meal with the usual silent solicitude, she held her mind on
its present track. But however many caravans were robbed,
however many Anasati hwaet fields burned, no matter how
many stacks of cloth goods were diverted on their way to

Machinations

~:'

.:

,
.,

~:

~.

.
.

l
:N
1_
161

market, or ships were sent to the wrong port, Mara found
little satisfaction. Her heartache did not lessen. She gripped
the parchments harder, searching the penned lines for some
way to make her enemy feel her hatred in the place that
would hurt the most.

Hands reached over her shoulder, pulled the report from
her grip, and gently massaged her neck, which had grown
sore from too little movement. 'The cooks will be asking
to commit suicide by the blade when they see how little
you cared for their lunch tray, my Lady,' Hokanu said in
her ear. He followed the admonition with a kiss on the
crown of her head, and waited while Mara reddened with
embarrassment at mistaking him for a servant.

She went on to ruefully regard the uneaten meal. 'Forgive
me. I became so involved that I forgot.' With a sigh, she
fumed in her husband's embrace and kissed him back.

'What was it this time, more mildew in the thyza sacks?'
he asked, a twinkle in his eyes.

Mara rubbed her aching forehead. 'No. The hides for
the sandalmaker's. We'll purchase replacements.'

Hokanu nodded, one of the few men in the Empire who
would not have argued that sandals for slaves were a waste
of good funds. Aware how lucky she was to have such a
husband, Mara resumed his embrace and heroically reached
for the food tray.

Her husband caught her wrist with a firmness beyond
argument. 'That meal is spoiled. We'll have the servants
bring a fresh tray, and I'll stay and share it with you. We've
spent too little time together lately.'

He moved around her cushion, his swordsman's grace
as always lending beauty to what Mara knew were a lethal
set of reflexes. Hokanu wore a loose silk robe, belted with
linked shells and a buckle inlaid with lapis lazali. His hair
was damp, which meant he had come in from the bath he
customarily took after working out with his officers.
162 Mistress of the Empire

'You might not be hungry, but I could eat a harulth. Lujan
and Kemutali decided to test whether fatherhood had made
me complacent.'

Mara returned a faint smile. 'They are both soaking
bruises?' she asked hopefully.

Hokanu's reply was rueful. 'So was 1, until a few
minutes ago.'

'And are you complacent?' Mara pressed.

'(gods, no,' Hokanu laughed. 'Never in this house. Justin
ambushed me twice on the way to my bath, and once again
when I got out.' Then, unwilling to dwell on the subject of
the son that had become a bone of contention between
them, he hurried to ask what kept the frown line between
her eyes so prevalent. 'Unless you're scowling to test my
complacency also,' he ended.

Mara was surprised into a laugh. 'No. I know how lightly
you sleep, dear heart. I'll know you're getting complacent
on the night you stop starting up and tossing pillows and
bedclothes at the slightest hint of a strange noise.'

Happy to see even a moment of mirth from her, Hokanu
clapped for a servant to attend to the spoiled lunch tray,
and to send to the kitchen for a fresh one. By the time he
had disposed of even so brief a detail, he looked back at
Mara and, by the faraway look in her eyes, knew he had
lost her to contemplation. Her hands had gone tense in
her lap, interlocked in the habitual way she assumed when
thinking upon the task she had laid for her Spy Master.

His hunch was confirmed presently when she said, 'I
wonder how far Arakasi has gotten in his attempt to
infiltrate the City of the Magicians.'

'We shall not discuss the question until after you have
eaten,' Hokanu said in mock threat. 'If you starve yourself
anymore, there will be nothing left to you but an enormous
belly.'

'Filled with your son and future heir!' Mara retorted,

Mac/7inations

163

equally playful, but not at all her unusually perceptive self,
by her reference to a sensitive topic.

Hokanu let the reference pass, in favor of keeping her
peaceful enough to enjoy the fruits and light breads and
meats he had sent for. On second thought, Arakasi's
attempt upon the security of the Assembly of Magicians
was probably the safer choice of conversation.

.:
_

Arakasi at that moment sat in a noisy roadside tavern in the
north of Neshka Province. He wore the striped robe of a free
caravan drover, authentically scented with needra, and his
right eye seemed to have acquired a cast. The left squinted
to compensate, and also to disguise the tendency it had to
water at the burning taste of the spirits reputedly brewed
by Thun from tubers that grew in the tundra. Arakasi wet
his tongue again with the vile liquor, and offered the flask
to the caravan master he had spent the last hours attempting
to cajole into intoxication.

The caravan master had a head for spirits like a rock.
He was a bald man, massively muscled, with a thunderous
laugh, and a regrettable tendency to slap his companions
on the back: probably the reason why the benches on
either side of him stayed empty, Arakasi reflected. He
had bruises across his rib cage from being' slammed
against the table edge by the man's boisterous thumps.
He could have chosen a better subject to pump for
information, he realised in hindsight. But the other caravan
masters tended to band together with their crews, and

he needed one who stood apart. To insinuate himself
among a tight-knit group, and to pry a man away from
his fellows was likely to take too much time. He had
the patience, had many times spent months gaining the
confidence of targeted individuals to gain the intelligence
Mara required. But here, in the deserted northern tavern, a
man with close-knit friendships would be apt to remember

164 Mistress of the Empire

a stranger who asked things that a local driver would
already know.

'Argh,' the huge caravan master bawled, entirely too
loudly for Arakasi's liking. 'Don't know why any man
would choose t'drink such piss.' The man hefted the flask
in one ham fist and squinted dubiously at the contents.
'Tastes poisonous enough to sear out yer tongue.' He ended
his diatribe by taking another huge swallow.

Arakasi saw another comradely slap coming, and braced
his palms against the plank table barely in time. The blow
struck him between the shoulder blades, and the trestle
shook, rattling cheap clay crockery.

'Hey!' shouted the owner of the hostelry from behind
the counter bar. 'No brawling in here!'

The caravan master belched. 'Stupid man,' he confided
in a spirit-laden whisper. 'If we were of a mind to wreck
things, we'd heave the tables through the walls and bring
the stinkin' roof down. Wouldn't be losing much. There's
webspinners in the rafters and biting bugs in the loft
bedmats, anyway.'

Arakasi regarded the heavy lumber that made up the
trestle's construction, and conceded that it could serve as
a battering ram. 'Heavy enough to crack the gates to the
City of Magicians,' he murmured on a suggestive note.

'Hah!' The burly man slammed the flask down so hard
the boards rattled. 'Fool might try that. You heard about
the boy who hid out in a wagon, last month? Well, I tell
you, the servants of those magicians searched though the
goods, and didn't find the kid. But when the wain rolls
through the arches of the gates nearside o' the bridge to the
island, well, this beam of light shoots down from the arch
an' fries the cover off the wool bale the boy was huddled in.'
The drover laughed and hit the table, causing the crockery
to jump. 'Seven hells! I tell you. The magicians' servants are
all running around yelling out a warning, shoutin' death 'n'

Machinations

165

destruction. Next we know, the boy's ahowlin' loud enough
to be heard clear to Dustari, and then he's sprintin' down the
road back into the forest like his butt's on fire. Found him
later, hiding out in a charcoal burner's shed. Not a mark
on him, mind, but it was days before he'd stop crying.' The
caravan master put his finger to his temple and winked
knowingly. 'They scrambled his head, you see. Thought
he was being eaten by fire demons or some such.'

Arakasi digested this while the caravan master took
another pull from the flask. He wiped his lips on his hairy
wrist and peered at Mara's Spy Master. His voice lowered
to a tone of menace. 'Don't even joke about trying to cross
the gate to the magician's city. Mess with the Assembly, and
all of us lose our jobs. I've got no wish to end my life as a
slave, none at all.'

'But the boy who tried to sneak in as a prank did not
lose his freedom,' Arakasi pointed out.

'Might as well have,' the caravan master said morosely.
He drank another draught. 'Might as well have. He can't
sleep for getting nightmares, and days he walks around like
one already dead - still got a scrambled head.'

Lowering his voice out of fear the caravan master said,
'I hear they have ways of knowing what's in the minds of
those who try to come to the island. 'Cause ''t was this
prankish lad, they let him live. But I've heard tales that if
you mean them harm -' he held his hand out, thumb turned
down -'you find yourself at the bottom of that lake.' Now
whispering, he went on, 'The lake bottom is covered with
bodies. Too cold down there for them to bloat up and rise.
The dead just stay down there.' With a nod to affirm his
statement, the caravan master concluded in normal tone,
'Magicians don't like to be messed with, there's a fact.'

'Here's to letting them be,' Arakasi hooked back the
flask and drank in an unusual fit of pique. The assignment
Mara had set him was damned near impossible. Caravans

166

Mistress of the Empire

traveled only as far as the gate to the river bridge. There,
the crews surrendered their reins to servants from the inner
city, and each load was vigorously searched before the goods
rolled forward. The bridge did not go all the way across the
lake, but ended in a water landing, where inbound supplies
were offloaded into boats, and inspected a second time.
Then polemen ferried them across, into the City of the
Magicians.

This was the third man to relate the fate of intruders:
no one infiltrated the City of Magicians, and any who
tried were transported magically to a watery grave or else
driven mad.

Confronted by a bleak conclusion, Arakasi sucked from
the flask to fortify himself. Then he surrendered the remains
of the liquor to the hairy caravan master, and slipped
unobtrusively out to use the privy.

In the stinking dimness of the road hostel's privy, Arakasi
studied the coarse board walls where passing caravan teams
had scribbled or scratched a motley assortment of initials,
derisive comments on the quality of the hostel's beer, the
names of favored ladies of the Reed Life left behind in
bordellos to the south. Among them was the mark he
sought, done in white chalk: a simple stick figure, standing.
By the drawing's knees was what looked to be a stray line,
as if the artist's hand had skipped a beat, in his haste. But
seeing this, Arakasi closed tired eyes and breathed a sigh
of relief.

His agent, who happened to be a charcoal burner's errand
boy, had been by, and the news was good. The warehouse
operation where he had nearly been netted by enemies had
been out of the message network for two and half years and
at long last the dyer across the street had promoted his eldest
apprentice. The tradesman's son who applied for the now
vacant position would be an Acoma agent. At last Arakasi

Machinations

167

could begin to rebuild his network. The warehouse had been
operating solely as a business since the disaster of his near
capture. The proprietor had accepted his demotion from
spy to business factor with stone-faced resignation. Both
he and Arakasi were anxious to start laying off various staff
members and stevedores, but this could not be done in too
much haste; the men were valuable, some useful as agents
in some better distant post, but not if the trade house was
still under enemy scrutiny. And, judging by the smoothness
of the net that had nearly caught him, Arakasi dared not
assume otherwise. Slowly, painstakingly, he must come at
the problem from another angle. An agent at the dyer who
could observe who still watched the warehouse would tell
him much.

Abruptly aware that he must not spend overlong in the
privy, he performed the expected ablutions and departed
through the creaky wooden door. It occured to him, on
unpleasant intuition, that the vacancy in the dyer's shop
might not be so fortuitous, after all. If he were that clever
enemy, might he not be trying to set his own agent into the
position? What better way to keep watch on the warehouse,
after all, since loiterers and beggars on corners were far
more conspicuous as plants. ~

Chilled by cold certainty, for he believed his enemy to
be as clever as himself, Arakasi cursed and spun around.
Muttering as if he had forgotten something, he barged past
the drover's boy who crossed the yard toward the privy,
and slammed back in through the door.

'There it is, gods be praised,' he muttered, as if misplacing
important items in stinking public facilities were an everyday
occurrence. With one hand he twisted a mother-of-pearl
button off his cuff, and with the other he erased the head
of the chalk figure and scratched an obscene mark beside
it with his nail.

He hurried out and, confronted by the furious boy whose

168 Mistress of thc Empire

errand he had interrupted, shrugged. He flashed the button
in apology. 'Luck charm from my sweetheart. She'd kill me
if I lost it.'

The drover's boy grimaced in sympathy and rushed on
toward the privy; he'd had more of the hostel's beer than
was healthy, by the look of him. Arakasi waited until the
door banged fully closed before he slipped off into the wood
by the roadside. With any luck, the charcoal burner's lad
would happen by within the week. He would see the altered
chalk mark, and the obscenity that signaled for an abort
on the placement of the agent as dyer's apprentice. As
Arakasi moved soundlessly through tree needles, under
an unseasonally grey sky, he ruminated that it might
indeed be more profitable to have the lad who finally
took the apprenticeship watched; if he was innocent of
any duplicity, no harm would result, and if he was a double
agent, as Arakasi's intuition told him, he might lead back
to his master . . .

Later, Arakasi lay belly down in dripping bushes, shivering
in the unaccustomed chill of northern latitudes. Light rain
and a wind off the lake conspired to make him miserable.
Yet he had spent hours here, on several different occasions.
From this vantage point in the forest, on a jutting peninsula,
he could observe both the bridge gate and the boat landing
where servants loyal only to the magicians loaded inbound
goods into skiffs and ferried them across to the city. He
had long since concluded that a smuggled entry by way of
the trade wagons was a doomed enterprise. The caravan
master's tale had only confirmed his suspicion that inbound
goods were also surveyed by magical means for intruders.
What he looked for now was a way to gain entrance to the
city by stealth, avoiding the apparently all-seeing arch over
the bridgeway.

The isle lay too far across the water to swim over to it.

Machinations

169

From where Arakasi hid, its buildings appeared blended
together into a mass of pointed towers, one of which was tall
enough to pierce into the clouds. Through the ship's glass
he had bought from a shop on the seacoast, he could make
out steep-walled houses and looping, arched walkways that
cut through the air between. The lakeshore was crammed
with stone-fronted buildings, oddly shaped windows, and
strange arched doorways. There were no walls and, as far
as he could tell, no sentries. That did not rule out defences
of arcane means; but plainly the only way an intruder might
enter the city was a night crossing by boat, and then the
scaling of some garden wall, or seeking some cranny to
gain access.

Arakasi sighed. The job was a thief's work, and he needed
a boat in a place where there were neither habitations
nor fishing settlements. That meant smuggling one in on
board a wagon, no easy task where inbound caravans were
comprised of men who all knew one another intimately.
Also, he would require a man trained in stealth, and such
were not found in honest trades. Neither problem promised
a fast or an easy solution. Mara would have a long wait
for information that might, in all honesty, be impossible to
acquire. ,

Ever a practical man, Arakasi arose from his damp
hollow and turned into the forest. He rubbed a crick in his
neck, shook moisture from his clothing, and made his way
back toward the road hostel. As he walked, he pondered
deeply, a habit that more times than not had given rise
to accurate intuition. He did not press the issue that
immediately frustrated him, but pursued instead another
problem, one that had not seemed significant at first, but
was becoming an increasing aggravation.

Try as he might, he could not seem to get a start at placing
new agents in the Anasati household. Only one operative
remained active, and that one was elderly, an old confidant

170 Mistress of the Empire

of Jiro's father's that the young Lord had taken a dislike
to. The servant had been relegated to a position of little
importance, and what news he heard was only slightly
more informative than street gossip. For the first time,
Arakasi wondered whether his failed attempts to replace
that agent might be significant beyond coincidence.

They had appeared innocuous, certainly, each of seven
tries foiled by what had seemed ill luck or poor timing:
Jiro in a temper, a factor in too belligerent a mood to
grant an old friend favors; and most lately, an illness of
the stomach that prevented a trusted servant from making
a recommendation for recruiting a newcomer.

Arakasi stopped dead, unmindful of the rain, which had
begun to fall much harder. He did not feel the cold and
the wet that slid in droplets down his collar, but shivered
instead from inspiration.

He had been a fool, not to suspect sooner. But chance may
not have been behind such a string of seemingly unrelated
misfortunes. What if, all along, his attempts to infiltrate
the Anasati household had been blocked by a mind more
clever than his own?

Chilled to the bone, Arakasi started forward. He had long
admired the enemy's First Adviser, Chumaka, whose flair
for politics had benefited the Anasati since Jiro's father's
time. Now Arakasi wondered whether it was Chumaka's
cleverness he fenced with, as unseen antagonist.

The thought continued, inexorably: was it possible that
an Anasati presence was behind the byplay at the silk
warehouse? The elegance of this possibility appealed to
Mara's Spy Master. One gifted enemy made more sense
than two unrelated foes with equal brilliance.
Deeply disturbed, Arakasi hurried his step. He needed
to get himself warm and dry, and to find a comfortable
corner where he could think undisturbed. For each balked
effort showed that he faced a rival equal to his best efforts.

Machinations

171

It was distressing to consider that a connection might exist
between such a man and Mara's gravest enemy, even more
by the possibility that this rival might exceed his talents.

Getting a spy into the City of the Magicians was
an impossible enterprise and its importance paled to
insignificance before the threat posed to Mara's spy network
by Jiro's adviser. For Arakasi had no illusions. His
grasp of the Game of the Council was shrewd and to the
point. More than a feud between two powerful families was
at play here. Mara was a prominent figure in the Emperor's
court, and her fall could touch off civil war.

.,

(

Gambits

6

Gambits

Chumaka frowned.

With increasing irritation, he scanned the reports stuffed
between the sheafs of notes he had prepared for his master's
forthcoming court session. The news was none of it good.
He raised a hand and chewed a fingernail, frustration
making him savage. He had been so dose to tracing the
Spy Master behind the original Tuscai network! It had been
predictable that the net in Ontoset would be shut down as
a result of the bungling chase at the silk warehouse. But
what made no sense at all was that after a passage of time
approaching three years, the seemingly unrelated branch
in Jamar should still be kept dormant as well.

Those ruling houses who undertook the trouble and
expense of spy nets tended to become addicted to them. It
was simply inconceivable that any Lord grown accustomed
to staying informed by covert means should suddenly, for
the discovery of one courier, give up his hard-earned
advantage. Lady Mara most of all; she was bold or cautious
as circumstance dictated, but never one to be unreasonably
fearful. The death of her son could not have changed her
basic nature so radically. She could be depended upon to use
every means at her disposal, and never be deterred by one
minor setback. Chumaka flinched slightly as tender flesh
tore under the worrying gnaw of his teeth. He blotted the
bleeding hangnail on his robe and shuffled his papers into
order in disturbed preoccupation. The situation bothered
him. Each day Jiro was closer to demanding his answers
outright. The First Adviser to House Anasati was loath to
admit he was growing desperate. He had no choice but to

173

consider the unthinkable: that this time he might have run
up against an opponent who outmatched him.

The idea rankled, that any mind in the Empire could
outmaneuver Chumaka.

Yet such a possibility could not be dismissed. In his gut he
knew that the network was not disbanded, merely dormant
or turned toward an unexpected quarter. But where? And
why? Not knowing was costing Chumaka sleepless nights.
Black circles and pouches under his eyes gave his already
angular visage a careworn look.

The scrape of oiled wood roused Chumaka from distressed
reverie. Already servants were pulling aside the
screens in the grand hall in preparation for Jiro's public
court. Omelo had the Lord's honor guard in place beside
the dais, and the hadonra was overseeing disposition of
his factors and secretaries. Within minutes, those allies or
houses seeking court with the Lord of the Anasati would
be arriving, escorted to their places in order of rank. Lord
Jiro would enter last, to hear petitioners, exchange social
that, and, sometimes, negotiate new business.

Chumaka snapped the papers in his hand into a roll and
stuffed them into his satchel. Muttering, he stalked to the
dais to be sure his preferred cushions were arranged to his
satisfaction. The list of Jiro's guests was a long one, and this
court could last into the evening. A skinny man with lanky
bones, Chumaka liked plenty of padding under his rump
through extended sessions. Physical aches he regarded as a
distraction to his thinking, and with this rival Spy Master
so far adept at eluding him, he could not afford to miss
any nuance of what transpired.

The grand hall slowly filled. Servants hurried in and out
bringing refreshments and directing the placement of fan
slaves. The day outside was hot, and Jiro's subde habit
was to be sure his guests were cool and comfortable.
He catered to them to extend their patience, and they,

174 Mistress of the Empite

believing he spoiled them to win their favor, felt their egos
stroked enough that they often granted him concessions
more magnanimous than they had intended at the outset.
Lord Jiro entered with little fanfare. His scribe called
out his name, and only two warriors marched on either
side, a half step behind their master. Today his clothes
were simply cut, though sewn of the finest silk. He chose
carriage and clothing that were rich but not ostentatious,
and that could be interpreted as firm and manly, or boyishly
innocent, depending on the advantage he wished to press.
Chumaka regarded the ambivalent effect and stroked his
chin, thinking: were Jiro not chosen by the gods to wear the
Anasati mantle, he might have made a superb field agent.

Then such frivolous speculation was cut short as the
young master ascended the dais. His warriors flanked him
as he took his place on his cushions and made formal
pronouncement. 'The court begins.'

Then, as his steward moved among the guests to announce
the first on the roster,Jiro leaned over to confer in quiet tones
with Chumaka. 'What need I pay close attention to, this day,
my First Adviser?'

Chumaka tapped his chin with a knuckle. 'To endeavor
to compromise the Xacatecas' support of Lady Mara, we'll
need allies. More to the point, we'll need their wealth.
Consider the offer of the Lord of the Matawa to ship our
grains to the South in exchange for certain concessions.'
He pulled the appropriate note from the many sheaves that
jammed his satchel and swiftly scanned the lines. 'The Lord
wishes a favorable match for his daughter. Perhaps that
bastard nephew of your cousin's might suffice? He's young,
but not ill-favored. Marriage into a noble house would
redirect his ambition and, down the line, provide us with
another ally.' Chumaka lowered his voice as others began
to approach the dais. 'Rumor has it that this Lord Matawa
is trading with Midkemians from the city of LaMut.'

Gambits

175

Jiro heard this with a look askance. 'Rumor? Or the
gleanings of one of your listeners?'

Chumaka cleared his throat, keeping this point deliberately
ambiguous. 'I remind my Lord that many of
those involved in LaMutian merchant consortiums were
born in Tsuranuanni, and they may provide us with
the same advantage the Acoma enjoy in their exclusive
trading concessions.' He finished in a thick whisper, 'Mare
anticipated well when she got her dispensation from the
Keeper of the Imperial Seal. She acted on an outside guess
and tied up the obvious goods coming through the rift from
Midkemia. But because she moved on the generalities of a
wild hunch, she didn't anticipate everything. There are a
half-dozen items we can import that would make us rich,
and while Mara might successfully block Anasati attempts
to traffic goods from Midkemia, there's little she can do to
prevent the LaMutians from selling across the rift to the
Lord of the Matawa.'

Jiro smiled. 'How badly does Lord Matawa wish an
exclusive shipping license? And how ugly is his daughter?'

Chumaka smiled broadly. 'His daughter takes after a
mother who looks like a dog, a particularly ill-aspected
dog, in fact. There are two younger sisters also. Both of
these have crooked teeth, and only the eldest can be given
away with the title. Their father needs a bigger treasury if
his youngest children are to escape the fate of becoming
the consorts of low-born merchants. That means the Lord
of the Matawa desires this trading concession very badly
indeed.'

As a delegate from the most minor house approached the
dais and gave his bow of respect, Jiro concluded his conference
with Chumaka. 'Your counsel seems sound. I will
proceed to make the Lord of the Matawa a happy man.'

He faced politely forward to hear his first petitioner,
when a disturbance at the rear of the hall turned half the

176 Mistress of the Empire

heads in the room. A florid man in a purple robe had thrust
his way past the door servants. These were slaves, and in
fear of their master's displeasure, they cast themselves face
down in obeisance at their lapse. The man who had intruded
paid no heed but rushed headlong into the hall, ignoring the
astonished protest of the Anasati house servants in relentless
pursuit on his heels. He swept past the seated rows of Jiro's
guests, with no more heed of them than if he had been alone
in the great hall. Striding directly down the long approach to
the dais, and causing the war banners to swing in the rafters
in a wake of disturbed air, he skidded to a stop before Jiro.
Too agitated for manners or ceremony, he shouted, 'Do you
have any idea of what she has done!'

The delegate he had displaced looked ruffled; Jiro himself
was discommoded, but he covered this with a swift glance
at Chumaka, who murmured the appropriate name behind
his hand in a tone only his master could hear.

To control this startling confrontation, Lord Jiro said in
his chilliest tone, 'Welcome, Lord Dawan. You seem .. .
discommoded.'

The thick necked man thrust his head forward, looking
like a needra bull attempting to shove through a fence to
reach a cow in full season. Nearly spitting with anger, he
waved both hands in the air. 'Discommoded? My Lord, I
am ruined!'
Aware of muttering in the hall, as Lords and delegates
were made to wait through this blatant breach of good
manners, Jiro raised a placating voice. 'Lord Dawan, please,
be seated lest your distress cause you to be overcome by the
heat.' At a signal from their Lord, Anasati servants rushed
forward to bring the distraught man cold refreshment.

Disdaining to appear to show favoritism, Lord Jiro
spoke quickly, aware he must bridle the other petitioners'
resentment, and to quickly assess whether he could gain
impromptu advantage from the interruption. Dawan of

::

.~
:~

Gambits

177

the Tuscobar was an occasional business associate and
an unsure ally. Jiro's inability to win him clearly to his
cause had been an irritation, but the inconvenience was
minor. The far-reaching ramifications of this byplay were
anything but small. House Tuscobar held influence with
the Lord of the Keda, whose support in any confrontation
with Mara would net the Anasati a solid advantage. Jiro
judged the alliance would be critical in the future, when
the traditionalist plot to reinstate the High Council finally
met with success.

Above the disgruntled murmurs of his petitioners, Lord
Jiro called, 'Let all who seek aid of the Anasati take
heed. My house listens with sympathy to the difficulties
of established friends. My Lord of the Tuscobar, what has
happened?'

The heavyset Lord took a swallow from the glass of cold
juice he had been handed by Jiro's staff. He gulped in an
effort to compose himself. 'My entire fleet, carrying every
last grain of my year's harvest, was sunk!'

Jiro's eyes widened in astonishment. 'Sunk? But how?'

'Some malignant spell spun by that witch,' Dawan
answered.

'Witch?' Jiro raised his eyebrows. ~i ~

Dawan set his juice aside in favor of the wine offered
by a hovering servant. He drank deeply and wiped his
mouth before he felt fortified enough to qualify. 'Mare

of the Acoma. Who else? Everyone knows that as Servant
of the Empire she has unlimited luck, and the gods' favor.
She has ruined me by sending false directions to my fleet
master, ordering him to ship this year's harvest to Dustari
instead of the grain market at Lepala!' Lord Dawan nearly
wept in frustration as he said, 'That would have been bad
enough. I would merely have been reduced to penury. But
an unseasonal storm hit a week out of Jamar, and every last
ship was sunk! I am ruined.' He eased his sorrows by taking

178 Mistress of the Empire

another heroic drink of wine. 'I swear by my ancestors, Jiro:
I will never again shirk my support of your efforts to end
this woman's evil influence.' ~

Jiro rested his chin on his fist. After deep thought, he said,
'I thank you for acknowledging the risks inherent in Lady
Mara's departures from tradition but had you said nothing,
I would still help an old family friend.' He turned at once
to Chumaka. 'Have our hadonra write a letter of credits
for Lord Tuscobar.' To Dawan he added, 'Freely borrow
as much as you need. Take as long as you wish to repay
us, on whatever terms you think fair.'

Dawan stiffened, the wine forgotten as he regarded Jiro
with suspicion. 'Interest?'

As if granting largesse to the needy were a daily occurrence,
Jiro waved his hand. 'None! I will make no profit
from a friend's misfortune.' Quietly he added, 'Especially
if that distress is caused by my enemy.'

Dawan rose. He made an extravagant bow. 'Jiro, let
everyone present stand as witness! You are a man of
unceasing nobility and generosity. Your ancestors look
down and are proud.' He bowed again, belatedly deferential
to the patience of the others awaiting the Anasati Lord's
attention. 'And I beg forgiveness for interrupting this
worthy gathering.'

Jiro rose. Indicating Chumaka should join him, he
personally escorted the Lord of the Tuscobar to a side door,
where he murmured in comradely farewell, 'Nonsense.
There is nothing to forgive. Now, retire to one of my baths
and refresh yourself. Remain for the evening meal, even
spend the night if you'd like and return home tomorrow.'
He appointed a slave to lead the flattered and slightly
intoxicated Lord of the Tuscobar away.

As he moved to return to his dais, playing the role of
magnanimous Lord to perfection, Chumaka murmured,
'It's strange, don't you think? Why would Mara wish to

Gambits

179
harm a fence-sitter like Dawan? This makes no sense by
any measure.'

Jiro glanced at his First Adviser in immense amusement.
'But she didn't. I arranged the forger myself. It was I who
sent those false orders to Dawan's shipmaster.'

Chumaka bowed low, chuckling silently. Quietly, so not
one of the petitioners could hear, he said, 'You surprise me,
my Lord. You are growing into a seasoned player, both in
shah and in the Game of the Council. How did you contrive
to cast blame on Mara?'

Jiro seemed smug. 'Our hadonra spread rumors, at my
order. Dawan and others were made aware of the insults
and misdeeds done us by the Lady over the past several
years. I merely copied her methods and let Dawan draw
his own conclusions.' Stepping decisively back toward the
dais, he added, 'Oh, and by making sure Dawan heard that
Acoma grain is being shipped this season to the markets at
Lepala.'

Chumaka flushed with obvious pleasure. 'Admirable, my
master. Clever enough to have been an idea I wish I had
thought of first.'

As the Lord and his First Adviser mounted his dais,
they shared the identical thought: each considered himself
fortunate to have the other, for they worked remarkably
well together. When the old High Council was restored
and the secret of Mara's spy net was cracked, then would
the Lady have cause to worry, for not even the formidable
luck of a Servant of the Empire was going to spare her
house from destruction.

Mara paced in frustration. For weeks the coolness between

herself and her husband separated them like a wall.
Hokanu's resistance to her desire to see Justin renounce
his ties to Shinzawai to become the Acoma heir was
understandable. Hokanu's affections were as deep as if

180

Mistress of the Empire

the boy had been his own. Ayaki's death had turned him
more protective as a parent, and, reminded of that IQSS,
Mara felt bitterness that never seemed to lessen.

She paused between restless steps, one hand on the screen
that overlooked her private garden. Oh, for one hour with
old Nacoya and her wisdom, she wished in vain. Her
onetime nurse, foster mother, and First Adviser had always
offered insight straight to the heart of any difficulty. Even
when Mara had refused advice or persisted in taking risks
unacceptable to the old woman, Nacoya had always seen
clear and true. In matters of the heart, her perception had
been unmatched. Mara sighed. It had been Nacoya who had
noticed her mistress's growing affection for the barbarian
slave Kevin, long before Mara admitted the possibility of
love to herself. The old woman's counsel was sorely needed
now. Mara attempted to conjure Nacoya's voice, but the
beloved woman's shade rested far away this day.

A kick inside her belly ended her reverie. She gasped,
pressed a hand to her swollen middle, and met the discomfort
with a smile. Her unborn child had the strength of a
barbarian tiger cub. Surely Hokanu would feel differently
when he beheld his newborn first child. The pride of
fatherhood would soften him, and he would cease his
stubbornness and give in to her demand that Justin be
named Acoma heir. The flesh that was of his own blood
would make him understand that this was the gods' will,
that this babe whose begetting they had shared was the
proper heir to the title Lord of the Shinzawai.

Mara leaned against the lintel of the screen, anticipating
the happiness of the occasion. She had borne two children,
one by a man she loathed and another by a man she
adored. Both little ones had given her something completely
unexpected; what had begun as a duty of honor in
the begetting of Ayaki, the necessity of ensuring Acoma
continuance, had been transformed to a joyous reality

Gambits

181

as she came to love the heir for whom she labored. It
was her offspring that would inherit the greatness of the
Acoma. Once a child was held, his baby laughter giving
her delight, never again could family honor seem a distant,
abstract thing.

Mara keenly awaited the moment when Hokanu would
feel this magic for himself. The birth of their son would
bring them closer, and end this cold contention of wills.
Peace would return between them, and both Acoma and
Shinzawai children would grow into the greatness of
their future.

While Mara had never been consumed by passion for the
man she cherished as husband, she had come to rely on his
closeness. His understanding was a comfort, his wisdom
a shelter, his wit a relief from danger and worry, and
his quiet, intuitive understanding a tenderness she could
not live without. She missed him. His love had become
the linchpin of her happiness, all unnoticed until she had
been forced to go without. For while he was ever close by,
he was increasingly absent in spirit. More deeply than she
could have imagined, that lack caused her pain.

The reminders were unceasing; the casual touch of his
hand to her face that had not happened as she wakened; the
slight upturning of his mouth that indicated humor during
court that today had been nowhere in evidence. They no
longer shared their afternoon tray of chocha, while Hokanu
scanned reports from military advisers and she reviewed
the commerce lists from far-flung trading factors presented
daily by Jican. Their relationship had grown silent and
strained and though Hokanu had made no issue of the
matter, he had extended his practice at arms to keep busy
through the hours they had once spent in companionship.
No sharp words were exchanged, nor anything dose
to heated argument, yet the disagreement over Justin's

heirship was a presence that poisoned everything they did.

::

::

182 Mistress of the Empire

Mara stroked the taut flesh over her womb, praying this
estrangement would end once their new son was born.

Besides Nacoya, Hokanu was the only soul she had met
who could follow her thoughts without misunderstandings.
Another kick slammed her innards. Mara laughed. 'Soon,
little one,' she whispered to the baby.

A servant who waited in attendance started at the sound
of her voice. 'Mistress?'

Mara stepped heavily away from the screen. 'I want for
nothing but this child, who seems as anxious as I am to see
himself born.'

The servant tensed in alarm. 'Should I call for-'

Mara held up her hand. 'No, there is time yet. The
midwife and the healer say another month at least.' She
furrowed her brow. 'But I wonder if perhaps this baby
could be early.'

A polite knock sounded at the inner doorway. Mara
pulled her robe more comfortably over her gravid body,
and nodded for the servant to open the screen to the
hall. Jican, her hadonra, bowed from outside the portal.
'Mistress, a trader is here seeking permission to bargain.'

That Jican would trouble her for a matter he would normally
attend to himself, was unusual. He had managed her
vast holdings long enough that he could anticipate almost
any decision she might make, even those he disagreed with.
Anxious to know what had arisen, Mara said, 'What do
you wish?'

Always diffident in situations outside of the ordinary,
Jican replied carefully, 'I think you should see this man's
wares, mistress.'

Glad for the diversion on yet another afternoon without
Hokanu's company, Mara clapped for her maid to bring her
a robe more suitable for a stranger's company. Tucked into a
long-sleeved, loose-waisted garment of shimmering silk, she
motioned for her hadonra to lead the way. The guest trader

_

Gambits

183

waited in the shaded, pillared hall in the wing that housed
the scribes. Mara and Jican passed through the cavernous
corridors that tunneled partially through the hillside from
the sunny quarters she shared with Hokanu. Made aware
by Jican's quick step that he was fidgety, Mara asked, 'Are
the wares this trader offers something special?'

'Perhaps.' The little hadonra gave a sideways glance that
confirmed his uneasiness. 'I think your judgment is needed
to appraise this man's offer.'

Years of his loyal service had taught Mara to heed her
hadonra's hunches. When he did not immediately launch
into a description of the offered goods, the Lady was moved
to prompt, 'What else?'

Jican halted. '1. . .' Uncertainty blossomed into hesitation.
He bobbed an apologetic bow, then blurted, 'I am not
sure how to treat this man, mistress.'

Familiar enough with the hadonra's foibles to realise that
questions would distress him further, Mara simply strode
on in receptive silence.

In another few steps, the explanation was forthcoming.
Jican said, 'Because he is . . . was Tsurani.'

Mara pondered this detail. 'From LaMut?' LaMut was
ruled by Hokanu's brother, and most trading delegations
from the Kingdom included a former Tsurani soldier, to act
as translator. Jican nodded, transparently relieved he had
not needed to coach her further. 'A Tsurani who prefers
Kingdom ways.'

The reason for the hadonra's uneasiness was plainer:
while Mara might bend tradition and swear masterless
men to Acoma service, the concept of anyone preferring
to remain without house ties on a foreign world - no
matter that one of them was Hokanu's brother, Kasumi was
too alien to understand, even for her. And that such a
man headed the trading delegation made negotiations more
delicate than usual.

184 Mistress of the Empire

The long, interior corridor opened at last into a colonnaded
portico that fronted the south side of the estate
house. The gravel path leading to the main doorway ran
alongside, and there, shaded by ancient trees, waited the
visiting merchant's retinue, a small group of bearers and
ten bodyguards. Mara's eyes widened. She did not note
at first that there were more guards than usual because
they were so tall! More careful study revealed them to be
Midkemians all, a rare enough detail that the sentries on
duty at the estate entrance stared surreptitiously as they
kept watch. Scraps of a conversation in foreign speech
reached Mara's ears, and the accent, so familiar, made
her pause a fraction between steps. Memories of Kevin
of Zun flooded through her, until Jican's hand-wringing
impatience recalled her to present obligations. Mastering
herself instantly, she hastened on into the service wing,
toward the hall where the merchant awaited.

That man sat correctly beneath the informal dais she
used while negotiating with outsiders. Sacks and carry
boxes of sample wares were arrayed by his side, while
his hands rested in plain sight upon his knees. He wore
a splendid silk robe recognisably of foreign manufacture:
the sheen was different, and the dyes blended in patterns
never seen in Tsuranuanni. The effect was bold just barely
short of insolent, Mara decided, watching the man through
narrowed eyes as she approached. Although this man had
presented himself as a merchant, he outfitted himself as
befitted the highest Ruling Lord of the Empire. Yet the
man was no noble; in place of the customary house chop
embroidered on sash or shoulder, the barbarous symbol of
LaMut, a doglike creature called a wolf, was displayed. The
man was arrogant, Mara decided as she allowed Jican to
help her up the shallow stair and to her cushions.

Still, the stranger had impeccable manners. When the
Lady was comfortable, he bowed until his forehead touched

Gambits

185

the mat upon which he knelt. He paused long enough to
imply deep respect, while Jican gave his name to the
mistress. 'My lady, this is Janaio, of the city of LaMut.'

Janaio straightened with grace and smiled. 'Honors to
your house, Good Servant. Are you well, Lady Mara?'
Mara inclined her head. 'I am well, Janaio of ...
LaMut.'

A detail leaped out at her. This man wore gold! Mara
pinched back a breath of undignified surprise. By imperial
edict, all jewelry and personal effects made of metal
were carefully cataloged upon entry through the rift from
Midkemia. Traders from the barbarian world were often
outraged as their boots were confiscated and plain sandals
loaned to them while they embarked on their travels within
the Empire; but the impounded items were always returned
when they left. The imperial treasury had learned a rough
lesson when the first entourage of Midkemians resumed
home without their boots, and the economy of Lash
Province had been turned on its head by the iron nails
drawn from the soles and changed for centis.

The trader fingered the chain about his neck. 'I have given
surety that I will not leave this behind, Lady Mara,'`he said,
in response to her notice. This reminded her of his Tsurani
origins, as no barbarian would have been trusted to keep
his word in the face of temptation. Midkemians professed
no belief in the Wheel of Life, so honor did not bind them
to fear loss of the gods' favor.

Mara maintained an outward calm. The man was bold!
While such an ornament might be a modest possession for
a wealthy man beyond the rift, in Kelewan it was equal to
the income of a minor house for a year. As well this man
knew. His public display of such treasure was a calculated
ostentation. Mara waited in reserved expectancy to see just
what this trader wished to gain with his bargaining.

When she had determined that a suitable interval had

186 Mistress of the Empire

passed to remind him of his place, she asked, 'Now, what;
may I do for you?'

The man did not miss nuance: that the Tsurani phrase was
translated from the King's Tongue. Mara's clever opening
informed him without undue fuss that she had arranged
affairs with Midkemian traders before. He gave her bade
impeccable Tsurani protocol. 'I am a modest broker in
certain spices and delicacies, mistress. Given my history'_~
he gestured broadly-'! am advantageously placed to know
those products unique to my adopted homeland that would
prove profitable in the Empire.'

Mara nodded, conceding his point. Janaio resumed in
ingratiating fashion. 'But rather than waste your valuable
hours speaking, I would beg your indulgence to let my wares
speak for themselves.'
Stirred to curiosity, Mara said, 'What do you propose?',

Janaio indicated the various carry boxes and sacks at,
his elbow. 'Here I have samples. As it is near the hour
when many within the Empire cease activities to indulge;
in a cup of chocha, perhaps you would care for something;
more exotic?'

Unhappily reminded that Hokanu customarily shared
such a moment to take refreshment with her, Mara
repressed a sigh. She was tired, and in need of a nap,
for the baby-inside her interrupted her sleep at nights
'There is little time for this.'

'Please,' Janaio said quickly. He bowed in attempt to
ease her mind. 'I will not keep you overlong. You will be
rewarded, both in pleasure and in riches, I assure you.'

Jican bent close to his Lady. 'Let me call for a food taster
mistress,' he advised.

Mara regarded her hadonra closely. He also was intrigued,
but more, he had something else to tell about this mysterious
trader from beyond the rift. She reached down and drew out'
the fan tucked behind her sash. Flipping it open and using it

.

.

Gambits

187

to hide her lips from her visitor, she whispered, 'What else
should I know of this man?'

Jican looked uncomfortable. 'A suspicion,' he murmured
so that only she could hear. 'I received word from a factor
who is friendly to us. This Janaio has also made overtures
to the Lord of the Matawa.'

'Who is a firm supporter of the traditionalists and Jiro.'
Mara fluttered her fan. 'Do you think he hopes that our
rivalry will help him to drive a tough bargain?'

The hadonra pursed his lips, thinking. 'That I cannot say.
It is possible. Should he have wares of unusual worth, the
house that gains concessions will benefit greatly.'

That settled Mara's mind on the matter. She must not
allow the fatigue of pregnancy to cede any advantage to
the Anasati uncontested. She clapped for her runner and
dispatched him to the kitchens to fetch a cook who would
serve her as taster. She also asked for Saric and Lujan, since
further counsel might be required of them later.
Janaio met her precautions with obsequious approval.
'Most wise, Lady Mara. Though I assure you, my intentions
are only honest.'

Mara crossed her hands over her middle without comment.
No precautions were too stringent when she was so
near to term with Hokanu's child. She waited, unresponsive

to Janaio's attempts to make conversation, until her adviser
arrived at her summons.

Saric's look of surprise as he entered revealed he had
taken the man to be Midkemian, sporting Empire fashion.
One glance at the Acoma First Adviser caused Janaio to
straighten where he sat. As if his instincts warned that
Saric's insights were to be respected, he crisply listed his
sureties. 'For the sake of easing your worry, great Lady,
since the foodstuffs I carry are so exotic that no one in this
land will be familiar enough with their taste to detect any
tampering, I propose that I share each cup with you.'

' 88 Mistress of the Empire

Unimpressed by gold chain and grand rhetoric, Saric met
this pronouncement with a lack of expression. He watched
intently as the trader made a display of pushing back his
sleeves, to show that he wore no ring or bracelet, and that
nothing was contained within his robe. 'If you will have
your servants prepare hot water, three pots, and cups from
your own stores, I will provide the ingredients. Then you
may choose which cup I am to taste and which you will.'
Smiling in the teeth of Saric's quiet, he said, 'If it please
you, Lady, I will bear the risk equally.'

Intrigued in spite of her First Adviser's reserve, Mara
said, 'What are you attempting to bring to our Empire?'

'Fine beverages, mistress. A wonderful assortment of
flavors and pungent drinks that will astonish your palate.
Should this venture prove profitable, and I assure you it will,
then I will also bring exotic wines and ales to the Empire
from the finest vintners and brewers in the Kingdom of
the Isles.'

Mara weighed her impressions. No wonder this man had
remained on Midkemia. He might have served as a house
soldier before the final battle of the Riftwar, but he was a
born merchant. She cast a sidelong glance as Lujan arrived
and marched smartly to take his place behind her. If fate
had cast him on the other side of the rift, given his glib
tongue and facile mind, he might perhaps have been the
one to sit here, selling exotic wares.

The surmise was somehow reassuring. Still, it was not her
nature to trust readily, particularly when Saric had given no
word in favor of this stranger's proposal. Mara chose to
challenge the connection with her Anasati enemy. 'What
was your arrangement with the Lord of the Matawa?'

Janaio flashed her a grin in the manner of a born
Midkemian. Where another Tsurani ruler might be put
off by such openness, Mara had known Kevin too well
to misunderstand; if anything, the foreign mannerism set

Gambits

189

her at ease. Janaio went on, 'You heard about my talks, but
I assure you they are no secret. The wares I carry are luxuries
and need delicate handling and skillful negotiators to place
them in the proper markets. I would be a poor merchant if
I failed to examine all options. The Lord of the Matawa has
sent many emissaries through the rift seeking to establish a
brokerage.'

Mara's lips thinned as she pondered the implications
of this. Jican whispered something to Saric, who nodded
and quietly touched her arm. 'My Lady, we know that
the Matawa wish to make inroads in your trade market.
They cannot disturb your imperial patent that gives you
exclusive license for certain items, but they hope to become
a rival presence to lure any nonexclusive trade they can
wean away from our factors. They could legally establish
exclusive trade rights beyond the rift, where we have no
control. Arakasi's report holds that funding for the venture
might well come from Jiro.'

Sick that politics should increasingly come to drive even
the most innocuous of ventures, Mara inclined her head to
Janaio. 'Send for what you need.'

Her servants were devotedly efficient. Proud to uphold
their Lady's honor, they swiftly brought in stays with
several pots and porcelain cups. A slave hurried after,
bearing a kettle of steaming water.

Janaio set out his various packets and vials with a
theatrical flourish. 'First,' he announced, 'something pun

gent and savvy.' He poured water into one of the small
pots and dropped in a small pouch. 'This delicacy grows
on a shrub in the southern part of the Kingdom, mistress.
The leaves are costly to dry and ship, and because they are
susceptible to mold, only the very wealthy can afford to buy
the small supply that reaches the northern lands. For this
reason, the drink I prepare has not gained much popularity
in my city of LaMut. Once you have tasted, I think you must

190 Mistress of the Empire
agree that this is likely due to lack of familiarity.' He raised
the top of the pot, sniffed at the steam, and dosed his eyes.
'I believe you will concur that this fine beverage will find
approval from Tsurani nobles of taste.'

With this, he poured, filling the room with an exotic,
spicy scent. When three cups were full, he nodded to Mara's
servant, who lifted the tray and bore it to the dais for the
Lady to choose her preference. She motioned for the slave
who had carried the pot to taste one. The servant handed
her one of the pair that remained, and bore the tray back
to Janaio.

The merchant lifted his cup, saying, 'Sip cautiously, lest
you scald your tongue, mistress.'

The alien aroma fascinated Mara. Unlike anything else
she had known, she found it wildly enticing. She sipped the
brew. The first taste was acrid and strange, yet bracing and
flavorful. She considered a moment, then said, 'I suspect a
little honey would cut the bitterness.'

The trader smiled. 'You skip ahead of me, Good Servant.
In Midkemia we also use white sugar made from a plant
called beets. Some folk prefer a dash of milk; yet others, the
juice of a tart fruit similar to the Kelewanese ketundi.'

Mara sipped again and found her appreciation increasing. '
What do you call this?'

The man smiled. 'It is tea, Good Servant.'

Mara laughed. 'Many things are called "tea," Janaio of
LaMut. What is the herb you have brewed?'

The merchant gave back a Tsurani shrug. 'That is the
name of the herb, or rather the leaves of the shrub. When
someone in LaMut says "tea," this is what they speak of,
not the blends of plantstuffs steeped in hot water you drink
here. Yet of this delicacy there are a multitude of varieties
as well, robust, subtle, sweet, and bitter. One selects to suit
the occasion.'

Now fascinated, Mara nodded. 'What else?'

Gambits

191

Janaio selected another pot from the Acoma supply and
prepared a second hot beverage. 'This is a far different
drink.'

A black liquid that smelled rich and heady was presently
handed to Mara. This time, Jican supplanted her taster, his
excitement overcoming caution. Mara could barely wait for
her hadonra to try his share before she sipped at her sample.
The drink was bitter and yet piquant. 'What do you call
this? It reminds me vaguely of chocha.'

Janaio bowed at her evident pleasure. 'This is coffee,
mistress. And like the tea, it has a thousand different
cousins. This you drink grows on plants high upon the
hillsides of Yabon. Good, robust, but hardly a delicacy.'
He clapped, and one of his servants brought forth another
basket, smaller, and tied with festive ribbons. 'Let me offer
a gift. Here are a dozen samples for you to consume at your
leisure. Each is clearly labeled as to the type of bean used
to make the drink and instructions for preparation.'

Mara set aside her half-empty cup. While this sampling
was diverting her from her troubled marriage, the day was
waning while she tarried. She was reluctant to forgo the
hour she always spent with her son while he took his
supper. Justin was recently five years of age, the young
to understand delays.

Sensing her impatience, Janaio raised a hand in appeal.
'The most astonishing drink remains yet to be sampled.'
Quickly, before the Lady could rise and take her leave, he
asked her servant, 'Please, may I have needra milk?'

Mara might have taken issue at this man's presumption,
except that Midkemians could be expected to act
impetuously. She hid her tiredness and motioned for the
servant to run the requested errand. In the interval, Saric
bent close to his Lady's ear. 'Don't miss the subtleties,' he
advised. 'This man was Tsurani-born. He apes Midkemian
brashness, almost as if he knows that you had a fondness,

192 Mistress of the Empire

once, for such behavior. I do not like the smoothness of this
play upon your sympathies, my Lady. You will be cautious,
please?'

Mara tipped her fan against her chin. Her adviser was
right to wish restraint. 'This Janaio drinks from the same
pot as 1. Surely there will be no harm in enduring one more
sample. After that the interview will be ended.'

Saric returned a half nod, but a glance exchanged with
Jican caused the little hadonra to pause. When the servant
returned with a small pitcher of milk, Jican suggested that
he also would like a cup to taste, separate from the slave
that would continue to perform his office.

'But of course,' Janaio agreed in pleasant tones. 'You are
a shrewd man, who wishes to understand every nuance
of the trade your house may undertake.' While Mara's
councilors looked on in wonderment, the trader poured
equal portions of milk and hot water into the final pot. His
chain sparkled as he leaned toward his basket, speaking all
the while. 'Occasionally, you may wish to use only milk, as
it-gives added richness to this drink.'

His preparations were completed with yet more flourish
than before. Again he passed the tray of filled cups to the
servant, indicating Mara should choose hers first. She did
not, but waited until Jican and the taster had selected. The
smell of this drink was intoxicating. The little hadonra shed
his anxiety and sipped. He recoiled with a smothered yelp
as he burned his tongue.

The trader had the grace not to laugh. 'My apologies, my
Lady. I should have thought to warn: this drink is served
very hot.'

Jican recovered his aplomb. 'My Lady,' he said excitedly,
'the taste of this rarity is incredible.'

Both hadonra and Lady looked at the slave who served
as taster. More careful than Jican, he had not burned his
tongue, and he was slurping the drink with such evident

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193

relish that Mara motioned for the servant to pass her
the tray.

As she chose from the last two cups, Janaio said, 'If coffee
reminds you of chocha, then this wonder may remind you
of the chocha-la you make for your children. But I humbly
submit, that chocha-la is to chocolate as my humble station
is to your grandeur.'

Mara sipped and closed her eyes at the marvelous taste.
Unable to hide her surprise and pleasure, she sighed in pure
happiness.

Grinning, Janaio accepted the last cup from the tray and
drank deep. 'This is chocolate, mistress.'

Unable to help herself, Mara thought of Kevin, who had
commented on more than one occasion that he missed the
chocolate sweets of festivals in his homeworld. At last she
understood.

Blinking back the moisture that gathered in her eyes, and
passing off the indiscretion as if she avoided steam from the
cup, Mara said, 'This is a wonderful thing.'

Janaio set aside his emptied cup and bowed. 'I wish
permission to be granted exclusive license to import,
mistress.'
Mara shook her head with open regret. 'I cannot grant
that, Janaio of LaMut. My patent from the Imperial
Government is limited to certain items.'

Obviously disappointed, the trader gestured expansively.
'Then perhaps a trading agreement. If exclusivity is beyond

your means, then at least let me broker through the
mightiest trading house in the Empire.'

Mara drank more of the delightful liquid, recalled to
caution at last. 'What of the Matawa?'

Janaio gave a deprecating cough. 'Their offer was insulting,
no, demeaning, and they lack the experienced factors
you have in your employ. They require interpreters, still, to
transact business, an uneasy situation for one in the luxury

194 Mistress of the Empire

market, as I am. I desire no avenue that is ripe for misunderstanding,
or even the outside chance of exploitation.'

Savoring the dregs of her drink, Mara said, 'That much
I can grant.' Regret tinged her tone as she added, 'I can't
limit others in bringing these beverages to us, but perhaps
some shrewd buying in LaMut might hamper others from
competing effectively against our interests.' Then, content
to entrust the disposition of final details to Jican, she
prepared to take her leave.

The trader bowed, touching his forehead to the ground.
'Mistress, your wisdom is legendary.'

Mara stood up. 'When we are both made rich from
the importation of chocolate to our Empire, then I will
accept the compliment. But now other matters require my
presence. Jican will draw up the documents sealing the
partnership you request.'

While servants hurried in to collect the dirtied cups,
and Jican's brow furrowed as he confronted the intricate
issues of trade, Mara left the room, helped by Lujan
and Saric.

Outside, screened from view by the gloom of an inner
corridor, Saric turned a sour eye on his mistress. 'You took
grave risks, my Lady. Any trader from Midkemia who was
originally Tsurani-born could once have been sworn to the
Minwanabi.'

Left short-tempered from missing her rest, Mara answered
tartly. 'You all saw. He drank equal portion.' then she softened. '
And those rare drinks have made me feel wonderful.'

Saric bowed, his silence indicative of displeasure.
Mara moved on toward the nursery, where, even one
wing distant, enraged yells could be heard from Justin. Her
sigh turned into a laugh. 'I am late, and the servants plainly
have their hands fall.' She laid a hand on her uncomfortably
swollen middle. 'I am anxious for this baby to get himself
born, though with another, there v`rill none of us get any

Gambits

195

peace.' She headed in the direction of Justin's ruckus with
a girlish smile. 'I may well come to miss being pampered
when once again I must sit without the aid of two healthy
young men.'

Lujan grinned in sly appreciation, his expression mirrored
by Saric. 'Hokanu will do his best, I am sure, to
keep you with child indefinitely.'

Mara laughed, the bitter undertone not missed by her
councilors. 'He will, I am sure, if we-can be made to agree
that Justin should be the Acoma heir.'

:

'Stubborn,' Saric mouthed to his cousin over his Lady's
bent head.

Past nightfall, the trader called Janaio of LaMut returned
with his retinue of hired Midkemian guards to a deserted
warehouse in the city of Sulan-Qu. The hour was late. The
wicks in the lamps in the rich quarter had burned down,
while in the crumbling tenements near the riverside only
the setting quarter moon cast any light. The streets lay
under inky darkness, wreathed with mist off the Gagajin.
Where once the disreputable population of the city had
preyed as they pleased on what traffic dared to move
abroad without guard, now the Emperor's patrols drove
Kentosani's malcontents and vagrants into the deepest back
alleys. The only skulkers in the open were the mongrel dogs,
scavenging garbage from the markets.

Though calm by the standards of Tsuranuanni, to
Midkemian ears the city was far from peaceful. Even

from inside the warehouse, the shouts of a madam of the
Reed Life could be heard insulting a client who had been
rough with one of her girls. Dogs barked, and a wakeful
jigabird crowed. Somewhere nearby, an infant wailed. The
mercenaries hired to attend Janaio's retinue shifted uneasily,
the dank mud of the river flats an alien smell in their nostrils.
They did not know why they had been brought to this empty,

196 Mistress of the Empire
half-rotted building; nor did they understand precisely why
they had been paid to cross the rift. Their employer had
interviewed them carefully and required that they speak
no Tsurani. But work in the Kingdom had slowed since the
battle at Sethanon, and for men with few ties to home, the
offered money had been good.

The bearers put down their bundles and waited for
orders, while the bodyguards maintained their formation
behind Janaio. Without sound, silk cords with weighted
ends suddenly coiled down from the rafters. They caught
and whipped tight, each encircling the throat of an unwary
barbarian soldier

Assassins in black followed, leaping from their unseen
perches and using their weight and momentum to jerk the
guards off their feet. Four men's necks snapped instantly,
while the others hung kicking and gagging as they were
hoisted and slowly strangled.

The bearers watched in horror as the Midkemian
mercenaries died. Wide-eyed, frozen in terror, they knew
better than to dare raise an outcry. Their fear was
short-lived. Two more black-clad assassins flitted out of
the shadows and moved through their unarmed ranks
like wind through standing rushes. In less than a minute,
Janaio's ten bearers lay dead, blood from their slashed
throats pattering on the wood floor. The assassins who
held the armed guards aloft released their cords. Dead
Midkemians thumped in sprawled heaps, here one with his
knuckles crumpled under his hip, and another there with his
bitten-through tongue oozing blood through his beard.

Janaio removed his rich clothing and tossed it amid the
corpses. One of the black-clad assassins bowed to him and
offered a small bag. From this Janaio withdrew a dark robe
and cast it over his shoulders. Quickly he took a vial from
his pocket and lathered sweet-smelling ointment upon his
hands. The grease dissolved a layer of concealing paint;

Gambits

197

were there more light, the red dye and tattoo of a Hamoi
assassin would now be revealed.

From the thickest gloom of a comer a deep voice said,
'Is it done?'

The man who was no trader, who called himself Janaio
for convenience, bowed his head. 'As you commanded,
honored master.'

A heavyset man with a too-light tread stepped from
concealment. His person clicked and clinked as he moved,
as bone ornaments dangling from leather thongs jostled
against the instruments of death he wore affixed to his
belt. His robe was studded with bosses cut from the skulls
of victims; his sandals had straps of cured human flesh. He
cast no glance at the bodies littering the floor, though he
disdained to step in the puddles. The Obajan of the Hamoi
Tong nodded, the scalplock that hung from his otherwise
shaved head twisting down his back. 'Good.' He raised a
hugely muscled arm and plucked a vial from the breast of
his robe. 'You are certain she drank?'

'As did 1, master.' The erstwhile trader bowed low yet
again. 'I placed the potion in the chocolate, knowing that
drink to be the most irresistible. Her hadonra escaped,
by luck of a burned tongue. But the Lady drank hers
to the dregs. She swallowed enough slow poison to kill
three men.' This speech ended, the assassin licked his lips.
Anxious, sweating, he controlled his nerves and waited.

The Obajan rolled the vial containing the antidote for
the rare poison mixed with the chocolate between his thick
palms. He watched with stony gaze as the eyes of his minion
followed it; but the afflicted held in his desperation. He did
not crack, and beg.

The Obajan's lips parted in a smile. 'You did well.' He

surrendered the vial, which was colored green, symbol of
life. The man who had called himself Janaio of LaMut
took the promise of reprieve in shaking hands, snapped

198 Mistress of the Empire

off the wax seal, and drank the bitter draft down. Then
he smiled also.

A second later, his expression froze. Fear touched him,
and what at first appeared to be a spasm of uncertainty. His
eyes widened as pain stabbed through his abdomen, and he
glanced down at the emptied vial. Then his fingers lost their
grip. The container with its false offer of life dropped and
his knees wobbled. A groan escaped his lips. He fell to the
floor, doubled over.

'Why?' His voice emerged as a croak, pinched between
spasms of agony.

The Obajan's reply was very soft. 'Because she has seen
your face, Kolos, as have her advisers. And because it suits
the needs of th', Hamoi. You die with honor, serving the
tong. Turakamu will welcome you to his halls with a great
feast, and you will return to the Wheel of Life in a higher
station.'

The betrayed man fought his need to thrash in agony.
Dispassionately the Obajan observed, 'The pain will pass
quickly. Even now life is departing.'

Beseeching, the dying man rolled his eyes up to seek the
other's face in the darkness. He fought a strangled, gasping
breath. 'But... Father . ..'

The Obajan knelt and laid a red-stained hand upon the
forehead of his son. 'You honor your family, Kolos. You
honor me.' The sweating flesh under his touch shuddered
once, twice, and fell limp. Over the stink as the bowel
muscles loosened in death, the Obajan stood up and sighed.
'Besides, I have other sons.'

The master of the Hamoi Tong signaled, and his bladkclad
guard closed around him. Swiftly, silently, they slipped
from the warehouse at his order, leaving the dead where
they lay. Alone amid the carnage, unseen by living eyes,
the Obajan took a small bit of parchment from his robe
and cast it at the feet of his murdered son. The gold
chain on the corpse would draw the notice of scavengers;
the bodies would be found and pilfered, and the paper
would surface in later investigation. As the tong chief
turned on his heel to leave, the red-and-yellow chop of
House Anasati fluttered down onto floorboards sticky with
new blood.

The first pain touched Mara just before dawn. She awoke
curled into a ball and stifled a small cry. Hokanu jerked
out of sleep beside her. His hands found her instantly in
concerned comfort. 'Are you all right?'

The discomfort passed. Mara levered herself up on one
arm and waited. Nothing happened. 'A cramp. Nothing
more. I am sorry to have disturbed you.'

Hokanu looked at his wife through the predawn greyness.
He stroked back her tangled hair, the smile that had been
absent for so many weeks lifting the corners of his mouth.
'The baby?'

Mara laughed for joy and relief. 'I think. Perhaps he
kicked while I slept. He is vigorous.'

Hokanu let his hand slide across her forehead and down
her cheek, then softly let it rest on her shoulder; He frowned.
'You feel chilled.'

Mara shrugged. 'A little.'

His worry deepened. 'But the morning is warm.' He
brushed her temple again. 'And your head is soaked in
perspiration.'

'It is nothing,' Mara said quickly. 'I will be all right.'
She closed her eyes, wondering uneasily whether the alien
drinks she had sampled the evening before might have left
her indisposed.

Hokanu sensed her hesitation. 'Let me call the healer to
see to you.'

The idea of a servant's intrusion upon the first moment
of intimacy she had shared with Hokanu in weeks rankled

200 Mistress of the Empire

Mara. 'I've had babies before, husband.' She strove to
soften her sharpness. 'I am fine.'

Yet she had no appetite at breakfast. Aware of Hokanu's
eyes on her, she made light conversation and ignored the
burning tingle that, for a moment, coursed like a flash fire
down her leg. She had pinched a nerve from sitting, she
insisted to herself. The slave who had served as her taster
seemed healthy as he carried out the trays, and when Jican
arrived with his slates, she buried herself in trade reports,
grateful, finally, that the mishap over the cramp before
dawn seemed to have banished Hokanu's distance. He
checked in on her twice, as he donned his armor for his
morning spar with Lujan and again as he returned for
his bath. ~

Three hours later, the pain began in earnest. The healers
hurried to attend the Lady as she was carried, gasping, to
her bed. Hokanu left a half-written letter to his father to
rush to her side. He stayed, his hand twined with hers,
and flawlessly kept his composure, that his fear not add
to her distress. But herbal remedies and massage gave no
relief. Mara's body contorted in spasms, wringing wet from
the cramps and pains. The healer with his hands on her
abdomen nodded gravely to his helper.

'It is time?' Hokanu asked.

He received a wordless affirmative as the healer continued
his ministrations, and the assistant whirled to send
Mara's runner flying to summon the midwife.

'But so early?' Hokanu demanded. 'Are you sure nothing
is amiss?'

The healer glanced up in harried exasperation. His bow
was a perfunctory nod. 'It happens, Lord Consort. Now,
please, leave your Lady to her labor, and send in her maids.
They will know better than you what she needs for her
comfort. If you cannot stay still or find a diversion, you
may ask the cooks to prepare hot water.'
Hokanu ignored the healer's orders. He bent over, kissed
his wife's cheek, and murmured in her ear, 'My brave Lady,
the gods must surely know how I treasure you. They will
keep you safe, and make your labor light, or heaven will
answer to me for their failing. My mother always said
that babes of Shinzawai blood were in a great rush to be
born. This one of ours seems no different.' Mara returned
his kindness with a squeeze of her hand, before his fingers
were torn from hers by servants who, at the healer's barked
directive, firmly pushed the consort of the Acoma out of his
own quarters.

Hokanu watched his wife to the last instant as the
screens were dragged dosed. Then, abandoned to himself
in the hallway, he considered calling for wine. He instantly
changed his mind as he recalled Mara's telling him once that
her brutish first husband had drunk himself into a stupor
upon the occasion of Ayaki's birth. Nacoya had needed to
slap the oaf sober to deliver the happy news of a son.

Celebration was called for, certainly, but Hokanu would
not cause Mara an instant of unhappy memory by arriving
at her side with the smell of spirits on his breach. So he
paced, unable to think of any appropriate diversion. He
could not help listening avidly, to identify each noise that
emerged from behind the closed screens. The rush of hurried
steps told him nothing, and he worried, by the quiet, what
Mara might be enduring. He cursed to himself and raged
inwardly that the mysteries of childbirth held no place for
him. Then his lips twitched in a half-smile as he decided
that this ugly, twisting frustration of not knowing must be
very near what a wife felt when her husband charged off
into battle.

In time, his vigil was disrupted as Lujan, Saric, Incomo,
and Keyoke, arrived in a group from the great hall, where
Mara had not appeared for morning council. One look at
Hokanu's distraught manner, and Incomo grasped what no

202 Mistress of the Empire

servant had taken time to inform them of. 'How is Lady
Mara?' he asked.

Hokanu said, 'They say the baby is coming.'

Keyoke's face went wooden to mask worry, and Lujan
shook his head. 'It is early.'

'But these things happen,' Incomo hastened to reassure.
'Babies do not birth by any fast rule. My eldest boy was
born at eight months. He grew healthy and strong, and
never seemed the worse.'

But Saric stayed too still. He did not intervene with his
usual quip to lighten the mood when the others grew edgy
with concern. He watched Hokanu with dark careful eyes,
and said nothing at all, his thoughts brooding darkly upon
the trader who had worn fine gold as if it were worthless.
Hours went by. Neglected duty did not call Mara's
councilors from their wait. They held together, retiring
in unstated support of Hokanu to the pleasant chamber
set aside for the Lady's meditation. Occasionally Keyoke
or Lujan would dispatch a servant with an order for the
garrison, or messages would come from Jican for Saric to
answer, but as the day grew hot, and servants brought the
noon meal at Hokanu's request, none seemed eager to eat.
News of Mara's condition did not improve, and as the
afternoon wore on toward evening, even Incomo ran out
of platitudes.

Fact could no longer be denied: Mara's labor was proving
very difficult. Several times low groans and cries echoed
down the hallway, but more often Mara's loved ones heard
only silence. Servants came in careful quiet and lit the lamps
at evening. Jican arrived, chalk dust unscrubbed from his
hands, belatedly admitting that there remained no more
account scrolls to balance.

Hokanu was about to offer companionable sympathy
when Mara's scream cut the air like a blade.

He tensed, then spun without a word and sprinted off

Gambits

:

.

203

down the corridor. The entrance to his Lady's chamber
lay half opened; had it not, he would have smashed the
screen. Beyond, lit to clarity by the brilliance of lamps, two
midwives held his wife as she convulsed. The fine white
skin of her wrists and shoulders was reddened from hours
of such torment.

Hokanu dragged a sick breath of fear. He saw the healer
bent on his knees at the foot of the sleeping pallet, his
hands running red with her blood. Panic jolted him from
concentration as he glanced up to ask his assistant for cold
rags, and he saw who stood above him in the room.

'Master, you should not be here!'

'I will be no place else,' Hokanu cracked back in the
tone he would have used to order troops. 'Explain what
has gone amiss. At once!'

'I. . .' The healer hesitated, then abandoned attempt at
speech as the Lady's body arched up in what seemed a
spasm of agony.
Hokanu raced at once to Mara. He shouldered a straining
midwife aside, caught her twisting, thrashing wrist, and
bent his face over hers. 'I am here. Be at peace. All will
be well, my life as surety.'

She wrenched out a nod between spasms. H›r features
were contorted in pain, the flesh ashen and running with

perspiration. Hokanu held her eyes with his own, as much
to reassure her as to keep from acknowledging damage he
could do nothing about. The healer and midwives must be
trusted to do their jobs, though his beloved Lady seemed
awash in her own blood. The bedclothes pushed up around
her groin were soaked in crimson. Hokanu had seen but had
not yet permitted himself to admit the presence of what the
sobbing servants had been too slow to cover up: the tiny
blue figure that lay limp as rags near her feet. If it had ever
been a child, it was now only a tom bit of flesh, kicked and
bruised and lifeless.

204

Mistress of the Empire

Anger coursed through him, that no one had dared to
tell him when it happened, that his son, and Mara's, was
born dead.

The spasm passed. Mara fell limp in his grasp, and he
tenderly gathered her into his arms. She was so depleted that
she lay there, eyes dosed, gasping for breath and beyond
hearing. Swallowing pain like a hot coal, Hokanu turned
baleful eyes toward the healer. 'My wife?'

The servant quietly shook his head. In a whisper, he
said, 'Send your fastest runner to Sulan-Qu, my Lord.
Seek a priest of Hantukama, for' - sorrow slowed him
as he ended- 'there is nothing more I can do. Your wife
is dying.'

7

Culprit

The runner swerved.

Only half mindful of the fact that he had narrowly
missed being run down, Arakasi stopped cold in the
roadway. The sun stood high overhead, too close to noon
for an Acoma messenger to be moving in such haste unless
his errand was urgent. Arakasi frowned as he recalled the
courier's grim expression. Fast as reflex, the Spy Master
spun and sprinted back in the direction of Sulan-Qu.

He was fleet of foot, and dressed as a small-time
merchant's errand runner. Still it took him several minutes
to overtake the runner, and at his frantic question the man
did not break stride.

'Yes, I carry messages from House Acoma,' the runner
answered. 'Their content is not your business.'

Fighting the heat, the dusty, uneven footing, and the
effort it took to flank a man who did not wish to be
delayed, Arakasi held his ground. He studied the runner's
narrow eyes, full nose, and large chin and out of memory
sought the man's name.

'Hubaxachi,' he said after a pause. 'As Mara's faithful
servant, it is certainly my business to know what need
sends you racing for Sulan-Qu at high noon. The Lady
does not ask her runners to risk heat stroke on a whim.
It follows that something is wrong.'

The runner looked over in surprise. He identified Arakasi
as one of Mara's senior advisers, and at last slowed to a jog.
'You!' he exclaimed. 'How could I recognise you in that
costume? Aren't those the colors of the Keschai's traders'
association?'

~L

206

Mistress of the Empire

'Never mind that,' Arakasi snapped, short of both wind
and temper. He tore off the headband that had misled the
servant. 'Tell me what's happened.'

'It's the mistress,' gasped the runner. 'She's had a bad
childbirth. Her son did not survive.' He seemed to gather
himself before speaking the next line. 'She's bleeding,
dangerously. I am sent to find a priest of Hantukama.'

'Goddess of Mercy!' Arakasi almost shouted. He spun
and continued at a flat run toward the Acoma estate house.
The headband that had completed his disguise fluttered,
forgotten, in his fist.

If the Lady's fleetest runner had been sent to fetch a priest
of Hantukama, that could only mean Mara was dying.

Breezes stirred the curtains, and servants walked on silent
feet. Seated by Mara's bedside, his face an impassive mask
to hide his anguish, Hokanu wished he could be facing
the swords of a thousand enemies rather than relying
upon hope, prayer, and the uncertain vagaries of healers.
He could not think of the stillborn child, its lifeless
blue form racked in death. The babe was lost, gone to
Turakamu without having drawn breath. The Lady lived
yet, but barely.
Her face was porcelain-pale, and the wraps and cold
compresses the midwives used to try to lessen her bleeding
seemed of little avail. The slow, scarlet seep continued,
inexorably. Hokanu had seen fatal wounds on the battlefield
that bothered him less than the creeping, insidious
stain that renewed itself each time the dressings were
changed. He bit his lip in quiet desperation, unaware of
the sunlight outside, or the everyday horn calls of the
dispatch barge that brought news from Kentosani.

'Mara,' Hokanu whispered softly, 'forgive my stubborn
heart.' Though not a deeply religious man, he held with the
temple belief that the wal, the inner spirit, would hear and

Cuiprit

e

:

..
:_
207

record what the ears and the conscious mind could not. He
spoke as though Mara were aware and listening, and not
statue-still in a coma on the bed.

'You are the last Acoma, Lady, all because I would not
yield to your request to swear Justin in as your heir. Now
I regret my selfishness, and my unwillingness to concede
the danger to the Acoma name.' Here Hokanu paused to
master the unsteadiness in his voice. 'I, who love you, could
not conceive of an enemy who would dare reach past me to
strike you down. I did not allow for nature herself, or for
the perils of childbirth.'

Mara's lashes did not stir. Her mouth did not tremble
or smile, and even the frown between her brows was
absent. Hokanu fingered her dark, loose hair, spread over
the silken pillows, and battled an urge to weep. 'I speak
formally,' he added, and now his voice betrayed him. 'Live,
my strong, beautiful Lady. Live, that you might swear in a
new heir for the Acoma over your family natami. Hear me,
beloved wife. I do this moment release Kevin's son, Justin,
from his obligations to House Shinzawai. He is yours, to
make strong the Acoma name and heritage. Live, my Lady,
and together we will make other sons for the future of both
our houses.' -,

Mara's eyes did not open to the light of her victory. Limp
beneath the coverlet, she did not stir as her husband bowed
his head and at last lost his battle to hold his tears. Neither

did she start at a near-silent step and a voice like silk that
said, 'But she does have an enemy who would strike her
down, and the child in her womb as well, in cold blood.'

Hokanu coiled like a spring and turned to confront
a shadowy presence: Arakasi, recently arrived from the
message barge, his eyes impenetrable as onyx.

'What are you talking about?' Hokanu's tone was edged
like a blade. He took in Arakasi's dusty, exhausted,
sweating appearance, and the rust-and-blue headband

208

Mistress of the Empire

still clenched in a hand that shook. 'Is there more to
this than a bad miscarriage?'

The Spy Master seemed to gather himself. Then, without
flinching, he delivered the news. 'Jican told me as I came
in. Mara's poison taster did not awaken from his afternoon
nap. The healer saw him and says he appears to be in
a coma.'

For an instant Hokanu seemed a man made of glass, his
every vulnerability evident. Then the muscles in his jaw
jerked taut. He spoke, his voice unyielding as barbarian
iron. 'You suggest my wife was poisoned?'

Now it was Arakasi who could not speak. The sight of
Mara Lying helpless had unmanned him, and he could only
mutely nod.

Hokanu's face went white, but every inch of him was
composed as he whispered, 'There was a spice dealer from
beyond the rift who came yesterday, offering Mara trade
concessions on exotic drinks brewed from luxury herbs
and ground plantstuffs from Midkemia.'

Arakasi found his voice, 'Mare tasted them?'

Her consort choked out an affirmative, and, as one, both
men sprang for the doorway.

'The kitchens,' Hokanu gasped as they almost bowled
over the midwife who had returned to change Mara's
compresses.

'My thought exactly,' Arakasi said, swerving to avoid the
runner slave^who waited at his post in the hallway. 'Is there
any chance the utensils may not have been washed?'

The estate house was huge, with rooms jumbled together
from centuries of changing tastes. As Hokanu ran full tilt
through the maze of servants' passages, archways, and
short flights of stone stairs, he wondered how Arakasi
could know the shortest route to the kitchens, since he
was so seldom home; and yet the Spy Master ran without
taking any cue from Mara's consort.

-~_

Culprit

~
..

..
:]

e

._

209

As the two crossed a foyer that had a five-way intersection
between wings, Arakasi unerringly chose the correct doorway.
Hokanu forgot his fear enough to be amazed.

Even through his concern, Arakasi noticed. 'Maps,' he
gasped. 'You forget, this was once the dwelling of Mara's
greatest enemy. It would be a poor Spy Master who did
not know the lay of such a man's house. Agents had to
be told which doors to listen at, not to mention the time
that a guild assassin had to be given explicit directions as
to which five servants were to be killed-'

Arakasi broke off his reminiscence, his eyes turned deep
with thought.

'What is it?' Hokanu demanded as they ran down a
stone-flagged portico, silk curtains rippling with the wind
of their passage. 'What are you thinking? I know it pertains
to Mara.'

Arakasi shook his head in a clipped negative. 'I had a
hunch. When I can substantiate it, I will tell you more.'

Respectful of the man's competence, Hokanu did not
press for answer. He poured his heart and energy into
running, and reached the kitchen a half step ahead of the
Spy Master.

Startled servants looked up from preparing supper for
the field hands. Wide-eyed, they took in the disheveled
presence of the master, then instantly fell prostrate upon
the floor.

'Your will, master,' cried the head cook, his brow pressed
to the tiles.
'Dishes, cups,' Hokanu gasped disjointedly. 'Any utensil
my Lady used when the foreign spice dealer was here. Have
everything out for the healer's inspection.'

The back of the chief cook's neck turned white. 'Master,'
he murmured, 'I have-already failed in your request. The
cups and the dishes from yesterday were cleaned and put
away, as always, at sundown.'
What garbage had not been thrown to the jigabirds would
have been burned, to discourage insects.

No trace remained of what variety of poison the spice
seller from Midkemia might have carried. And unless they
could discover what potion had stricken Mara, there could
be no hope of finding an antidote.

Instinctively knowing Hokanu was on the verge of
explosive, useless action, Arakasi gripped him hard by
the shoulders. 'Listen to me!' the Spy Master said in a tone
that made the prone servants flinch upon the floor. 'She is
dying, yes, and the baby is dead, but all is not yet lost.'

Hokanu said nothing, but his body stayed taut as strung
wire in Arakasi's grasp.

More gently, the Spy Master continued. 'They used a
slow poison-'

'They wanted her to suffer!' Hokanu cried, anguished.
'Her murderers wanted us all to watch, and be helpless.'

Daring unspeakable consequences, both for laying hands
on a noble and also for provoking a man near to
breaking with fury and pain, Arakasi gave the master
a rough shake. 'Yes and yes!' he shouted back.
'And it is that very cruelty that is going to save her
life!'

Now he had Hokanu's attention; and much of that
warrior's rage was directed at himself. Sweating, aware
of his peril, Arakasi pressed on. 'No priest of Hantukama
can be found in time. The nearest-'

Hokanu interrupted. 'The bleeding will take her long
before the poison is finished working.'

'Pity her for it- no,' Arakasi said brutally. 'I spoke with
the midwife on the way in. She has sent to Lashima's temple
for golden crown flower leaves. A poultice made from them
will stop the bleeding. That leaves me a very narrow span
of time to track the spice merchant.'
Reason returned to Hokanu's eyes, but he did not soften.
'That merchant had barbarian bearers.'

Arakasi nodded. 'He dressed ostentatiously, also. All that
gold would have drawn notice.'
Through his overwhelming concern, Hokanu showed
surprise. 'How did you know? Did you pass the man on
the road?'

'No.' Arakasi returned a sly grin as he released his hold
on Mara's consort. 'I heard the servants gossiping.'

'Is there any detail you don't miss?' Mare's husband said
in wonder.

'Many, to my everlasting frustration.' Arakasi glanced,
embarrassed, toward the floor, both he and the master
that moment recalling that the kitchen staff still abased
themselves at their feet.

'For the good gods' sake!' Hokanu exclaimed. 'All of

you, please, get up and go about your duties. The mistress's
ills are not your fault.'

While the slaves and servants arose from the floor and
turned back to tasks at chopping block and cooking spit,
Arakasi dropped to his knees before Hokanu. 'Master, I
request formal leave to pursue this seller of alien spices
and find an antidote for my Lady Mara.' -,

Hokanu gave back the curt nod a commander might give
a warrior on the field. 'Do so, and waste no more time on
obeisance, Arakasi.'

The Spy Master was back on his feet in an eye's blink
and moving for the door. Only when he was safely past, at
one with the shadows in the corridor, did his rigid control
slip. Openly anxious, he considered the probabilities of the
situation he had not disclosed to Hokanu.

The spice seller had been conspicuous indeed, with
his barbarian bearers and his ostentatious jewelry; and
certainly not by chance. A man born in Kelewan would
never wear metal on a public roadway without a driving
reason. Already Arakasi knew that the man's trail would
be easy to follow: for the man had intended to be tracked.
The Spy Master would find only what the man's master
wished, and the antidote for Mara would not be part of
that knowledge.

In the portico between the great hall and the stairways
to the servants' quarters, Mara's Spy Master broke into a
run. Already he had a suspicion: he expected to find the
spice seller and his bearers all dead.

In a tiny, wedge-shaped room in the attic over the
storerooms, Arakasi opened a trunk. The leather hinges
creaked as he rested the lid against the thin plaster wall,
then rummaged within and pulled forth the hwaet-colored
robes of an itinerant priest-of a minor deity, Alihama,
goddess of travelers. The fabric was smudged with old
grease stains and road dust. Swiftly Mara's Spy Master
flung the garment over his bare shoulders, and fastened
the cord loops and pegs. Next he dragged up a cracked
pair of sandals, a purple-striped sash, and a long, hooded
headdress with tassels. Lastly he selected a ceramic censer,
strung with earthenware bells and twine clappers.

His guise as a priest of Alihama was now complete; but
as Spy Master, he added seven precious metal throwing
knives, each keenly balanced and thin as a razor. Five of
these he tucked out of sight under the broad sash; the last
two were slid between the soles of his needra-hide sandals,
under rows of false stitching.

When he passed through the doorway from his narrow
dormer room, he walked with a lanky, rolling stride and
peered about carefully as he took the stair, for one of his
eyes appeared to have developed a cast.

So thorough was his transformation as he made his exit
from the estate house that Hokanu nearly missed him. But
the broad, gaudy sash caught the Shinzawai heir's eye, and
since he had seen no priest of Alihama being fed in the
kitchens, he realised with a start that Arakasi had almost
slipped past him.

'Wait!' he called.

The Spy Master did not turn but continued to shuffle
down toward the landing, with intent to catch the next
dispatch barge to Kentosani.

Dressed in the high boots and close-fitting breeches that
Midkemians wore while riding horses, Hokanu had to run
in discomfort and catch up. He caught the Spy Master by
the shoulder, and was startled into a warrior's leap back
as the man whirled under his touch, almost too fast for
credibility.

Arakasi's hand fell away from his sash. He squinted
walleyed at Hokanu and said, soft as velvet, 'You startled
me.'

'I see that.' Uncharacteristically awkward, Hokanu gestured
toward the priest's robe. 'The barge and the roads
on foot are too slow. I am coming with you, and both of
us are going to ride horses.'

The Spy Master stiffened. 'Your place is by your Lady's
side.'

'Well I know it.' Hokanu was anguished, and his hand
twisted and twisted at the leather riding crop thrust
through his sash. 'But what can I do here but watch
as she wastes away? No. I am coming.' He did not say
what lay upon both of their minds - that Arakasi was an
Acoma servant. As Mara's consort, Hokanu was not his
legal master; Arakasi's loyalty was not his to command.
'I am reduced to asking,' he said painfully. 'Please, allow
me to come along. For our Lady's sake, let me help.'

Arakasi's dark eyes assessed Hokanu without mercy,
then glanced away.

'I see what it would do to you to refuse your request,'
he said quietly. 'But horses would not be appropriate. You
may travel, if you wish, as my acolyte.'
Now Hokanu was sharp. 'Outside of these estates how
many have seen a horse from the barbarian lands beyond
the rift? Do you think anyone will have eyes for the riders?
By the time they have finished staring at the beasts, we will
have passed by in a great cloud of dust.'

'Very well,' Arakasi allowed, though the incongruity
between his costume and Hokanu's preference for transport
worried him. All it would take was one clever man
to connect his face with a priest who behaved outside of
doctrine, and with an exotic creature from beyond the
rift, and all of his work would be compromised. But as
he considered the risks to Mara, he realised: he loved her
better than his work,- better than his own life. If she died,
his stake in the future, and in the formation of a better,
stronger Empire, was as dust.

On impulse, he said, 'It shall be as you wish, my Lord.
But you will bind me to the saddle, and I shall be driven
before you as your prisoner.'

Hokanu, already starting briskly for the stables, glanced
in surprise over his shoulder. 'What? For your honor, I
could never abuse you like that!'

'You will.' In a stride, Arakasi caught up with him.
The cast was still in his eye; it seemed no distraction
could make him break out of his disguise. 'You must.
I will need these-priest's robes for later; thus, we must
tailor our circumstances to fit. I am a holy man who
was dishonorable enough to try thievery. Your servants
caught me. I am being escorted back to Kentosani to be
delivered to temple justice.'

'That's reasonable enough.' Hokanu impatiently waved
away the servant who hurried to open the gate, and climbed
the fence to gain time. 'But your word is sufficient. I will
not see you bound.'

'You will,' Arakasi repeated, faintly smiling. 'Unless you
want to stop six times every league to pick me up out of the
dust. Master, I have tried every guise in this Empire, and
more than a few that are foreign, but I sure as the gods
love perversity never tried straddling a beast. The prospect
terrifies me.'

They had reached the yard, where at Hokanu's orders a
hired Midkemian freeman stood with two horses, saddled
and ready for mounting. One was a strapping grey, the
other chestnut, and though they were less spirited than the
flashy black that had belonged to Ayaki, Hokanu watched
Arakasi eye the creatures with trepidation. Through his
worry for Mara, still he noticed: the Spy Master's squint
stayed pronounced as ever.

'You're Lying,' the Shinzawai accused, affection in his
tone robbing the words of insult. 'You have ice water for
blood, and if you weren't so inept with a sword, you would
have made a formidable commander of armies.'

'Fetch out some rope,' Arakasi replied succinctly. 'I am
going to instruct you how sailors make knots, Master
Hokanu. And for both of our sakes, I hope you will tie
them tightly.'

:

i

._

The horses thundered at a gallop, dust billowing in ocher
clouds on the noon air. Traffic on the roadway suffered.
Needra pulling goods wagons huffed and shied in a
six-legged scramble for the safety of the verge. Their
drivers shouted in rage, and then in awed fear, as the
four-legged beasts from beyond the rift shot past. Runners

sprang aside, wide-eyed, and trade caravans scattered out
of formation, their drovers and road masters gaping like
farmers.

'You've never had these creatures off the estates,' Arakasi
surmised in a tight voice. Bound by his wrists to the saddle
horn and by his ankles to a cord that looped underneath
the gelding's girth, he endured indescribable discomfort as
he tried to keep his posture and his dignity. His priest's
robe flapped like a flag against the restriction of his sash,
and the censer whacked him in the calf at each thrust of
the gelding's stride.

'Try to relax,' Hokanu offered in an attempt to be
helpful. He sat his saddle with what seemed liquid ease,
his dark hair blowing free and his hands steady on the
reins. He did not look like a man chafed by blisters in
unmentionable places. If not for his concern for his wife,
he might have enjoyed the commotion his outlandish beasts
were causing on the roadway.
'How do you know to start in Kentosani?' Hokanu asked
as he drew rein along a forested stretch of roadway to give
the horses a breather.

Arakasi closed his eyes as he endured the jolt while
his gelding responded to the jerk on the leading rein
and shifted from a canter, to a long trot, and finally to
a smoother walk. The Spy Master sighed, knocked the
censer away from his bruised ankle, and gave a sideways
look that spoke volumes. But his voice held no disgust as
he answered Hokanu's question.

'The Holy City is the only place in the Empire that
already has Midkemians in residence, where Thuril and
even desert men walk about in native costume. I expect
that our spice dealer wished to be conspicuous, and then
blend his trail into one more difficult to follow, so that we
find him, but not too soon. For I believe he has a master
who gave him his orders concerning your Lady, and that
man, that enemy, will not want to keep his secrecy.'

The Spy Master did not add a second, more telling
conjecture. Best not to voice his suspicions until he had
proof. The two men rode on in silence, beneath a canopy
of ulo trees. Birds swooped from the branches at the sight
and smell of the alien beasts. The horses switched at flies,
and ignored them.

Hokanu's comfort in the saddle stayed deceptively
at odds with the emotion he wrestled inside. At each
bend in the road, under the shadow of every tree, he
imagined threat. Memory haunted him, of Mara's pale
face against the pillow, and her hands so unnaturally
still on the coverlet. Often as he chastised himself for
the worry that wasted his energy, he could not marshal
his thoughts. He fretted in his warrior's stillness,
that he could do nothing more than provide horses
to hurry Arakasi on his errand. The Spy Master was
competent at his art; companionship in all likelihood
hindered his work. Yet, had Hokanu remained behind,
he knew the sight of Mara Lying helpless would have
enraged him. He would have mustered warriors and
marched against Jiro, and be damned to the Assembly's
edict. A frown marred his brows. Even now he had to
restrain himself from grasping his crop and lashing the
animal under him. To give free rein to his inner rage, his
guilt, and his pain, he would make the beast gallop until
it dropped.

'I am glad you are with me,' Arakasi said suddenly,
unexpectedly.

Hokanu recoiled from his unpleasant thoughts and saw
the Spy Master's enigmatic gaze fixed upon him. He
waited, and after an interval filled with the rustle of wind
through the trees, Arakasi qualified.
'With you along, I cannot afford to be careless. The
added responsibility will steady me, when, for the first
time in my life, I feel the urge to be reckless.' Frowning,
self-absorbed, Arakasi regarded his bound hands.
His knuckles flexed, testing the knots. 'Mara is special
to me. I feel for her as I never did for my former
master, even when his house was obliterated by his
enemies.'

Surprised, Hokanu said, 'I did not realise you had served
another house.'
As if wakened to the fact that he had shared a confidence,
Arakasi shrugged. 'I originally established my network for
the Lord of the Tuscai.'

'Ah,' Hokanu nodded. That stray fact explained much.
'Then you took service with the Acoma at the same time
as Lujan and the other former grey warriors?'

The Spy Master nodded, his intense eyes following
every nuance of Mara's consort's bearing. He seemed
to arrive at some inner decision. 'You share her dreams,'
he stated.

Again Hokanu was startled. The man's perception was
almost too keen to be comfortable. 'I want an Empire free
of injustice, sanctioned murder, and slavery, if that is what
you refer to.'

The horses plodded on, making confusion of an approaching
caravan as drovers and the reinsman of a cook wagon
all started shouting and pointing. Arakasi's quiet reply cut
without effort through the din. 'Her life is more important
than both of ours. If you go on with me, master, you must understand:
I will risk your life as ruthlessly for her as I
would my own.'

Aware somehow that the Spy Master spoke from the
heart, and that he was uncomfortable sharing confidences,
Hokanu did not attempt a direct reply. 'It's
time for us to move out again.' He thumped his heels
into his gelding's ribs, and dragged both mounts to
a canter.

The back alleys of Kentosani reeked of refuse and runoff
from the chamber pots of the poor. Spy Master and
Shinzawai Lord had left the horses in the care of a
trembling hostel owner, who bowed and scraped and
stuttered that he was unworthy of caring for such rare
beasts. His face showed stark fear as the pair left; and the
stir the horses' presence caused among the hostel's staff
masked Arakasi and Hokanu's departure=. Every servant
was still outside, along with every patron, staring and
pointing at the Midkemian horses as stablehands used to
dull-tempered needra fumbled with the much more active
animals.

In a change of roles like irony, now the Spy Master
affected the upper hand, and Hokanu, wearing only his
loincloth, played the part of a penitent on a pilgrimage
as the priest's servant, to appease the minor deity he
had reputedly offended. They blended into the afternoon
crowd.

On foot instead of carried in a litter, and for the first
time in his life not surrounded by an honor guard,
Hokanu came to realise how much the Holy City had
changed since the Emperor had assumed absolute rule in
place of the High Council. Great Lords and Ladies no
longer traveled heavily defended by warriors, for Imperial
Whites patrolled the streets to keep order. Where the
main thoroughfares had generally been safe, if crowded
with traffic - farm carts, temple processions, and hurrying
messengers - the darker, narrow back lanes where
the laborers and beggars lived, or the fish-ripe alleys
behind the warehouses at the wharf, had not been a
place for a man or woman to venture without armed
escort.

And yet Arakasi had a knowledge of these dim byways
acquired years before Ichindar's abolishment of the War

lord's office. He led a twisted path through moss-damp
archways, between tenements too close-packed to admit
sunlight, and, once, through the malodorous, refuse-choked
channel of a storm culvert.

'Why such a circuitous route?' Hokanu inquired in a
pause when a shrieking mob of street children raced by,
in pursuit of a bone-skinny dog.

'Habit,' Arakasi allowed. His smoking censer swung

220 Mistress of the Empire

at his knee, its incense only a partial palliative against
the assault of stinks from the gutter. They passed a
window where a wrinkled crone sat peeling jomach with
a bone-bladed knife. 'That hostel where we left the beasts
is an honest enough house, but gossipmongers congregate
there to swap news. I didn't wish to be followed; when we
left there was an Ekamchi servant on our.tail. He saw the
horses at the main gate, and knew we were of the Acoma
or Shinzawai households.'

Hokanu asked, 'Have we lost him?'

Arakasi smiled faintly, his slim hand raised in a sign
of benediction over the crown of a beggar's head. The
man was wild-eyed and mumbling, obviously touched
to madness.,by the gods. With a twirl of the cord that
spun the censer and clouded the air with incense, the
Spy Master replied, 'We lost him indeed. Apparently he
did not wish to soil his sandals in the garbage pit we
crossed two blocks back. He went around, lost sight of
us for a second . . .'

~ 'And we ducked through that culvert,' Hokanu concluded,
chuckling.

They passed the shuttered front of a weaver's shop,
and paused at a baker's, while Arakasi bought a roll and
spread sa jam in zigzags across the buttered top. The
bread seller attended another customer and waved to his
apprentice, who showed the apparent priest and penitent
into a curtained back room. A few minutes later, the bread
seller himself appeared. He looked the pair of visitors over
keenly and finally addressed Arakasi. 'I didn't recognise
you in that garb.'

The Spy Master licked jam off his fingers and said,
'I want news. It's pressing. A spice seller ostentatiously
dressed, and wearing metal jewelry. He had barbarian
bearers. Can you find him?'

The bread seller scrubbed sweat off his fat jowls. 'If you
can wait until sundown, when we toss the dough scraps
out for the beggar children, I could have an answer
for you.'

Arakasi looked irked. 'Too late. I want the use of
your messenger runner.' Like sleight of hand, a twist of
parchment appeared in his fingers. Perhaps the Spy Master
had hidden it all along in his sleeve, Hokanu thought, but
he could not be sure.

'Get this delivered to the sandalmaker's on the comer
of Barrel Hoop Street and Tanner's Alley. The proprietor
is Chimichi. Tell him your cake is burning.'

The bread seller looked dubious.

'Do this!' Arakasi said in an edged whisper that raised
hairs on Hokanu's neck.

The bread seller raised floury hands, palms out in
submission, then bellowed for his apprentice. The boy
left with the parchment, and Arakasi paced like a caged
sarcat the entire interval he was gone.

The leather worker Chimichi proved to be a whip-thin
man with desert blood, for he wore sweat-greasy tassels
with talismans under his robe. His lank hair fell into his
eyes, which were shifty. His hands had scars that might
have been made by a slip of the knife at his craft, but more
likely, Hokanu thought, from their number and location,
by the skilled hand of a torturer. He ducked through
the curtain, still blinking from sunlight, a roll decked
with jam in the precise pattern of Arakasi's gripped in
one fist.

'Fool,' he hissed at the priest. 'You risk my cover,

sending an emergency signal like that, and then summoning
me here. The master will see you bum for such carelessness.'

'
The master will certainly not,' Arakasi said drily.

The leather craftsman jumped. 'It's you yourself! Gods,
I didn't recognise you in those temple rags.' Chimichi's

222

Mistress of the Empire

brows knotted into a scowl worthy of his Tsubarian
heritage. 'What's amiss?'

'A certain spice seller, decked with a gold chain and
carried by Midkemian bearers.'

Chimichi's expression lightened. 'Dead,' he stated flatly.
'His bearers with him. In a warehouse on Hwaet Broker's
Lane, if the footpad who tried to exchange chain links for
centis at the money changers can be relied on to tell the
truth. But that such a man had gold at all belies the chance
he fabricated his tale.'

'Does the imperial patrol know about the corpses yet?'
Arakasi broke in.

'Probably not.' Chimichi laid his roll aside, and rubbed
a jammy knuckle on his apron. The deepset, shifty eyes
turned to the Spy Master. 'Ever see a money changer report
what he didn't have to? The taxes on metals are not small,
these days, with our Light of Heaven needing to increase his
army against the threat of the hard-line traditionalists.'

Arakasi cut short the man's rambling with a raised hand.
'Seconds count, Chimichi. My companion and I are going
on to that warehouse to inspect the bodies. Your task is to
stage a diversion that will occupy the Emperor's patrol long
enough to see us in and out of the building. I don't want
an Imperial White left free to investigate chose murders
beforetime.'

Chimichi flipped back dark hair to reveal a grin, and
startlingly perfect white teeth. The front ones had been
filed into points, deep desert fashion. 'Keburchi, God
of Chaos,' he swore in evident delight. 'It's been long
time since we had a good riot. Life was starting to get
boring.'
Yet by the time he had finished his sentence, he was
speaking to an empty room. He blinked, startled, and
muttered, 'The man's mother was a damned shadow.'
Then his face knitted in concentration. He hurried off

Culprit

223

about the business of turning an ordinary, peaceful day of
business in the trade quarter into unmitigated chaos.

Dusk fell, deepening the gloom in the already dim warehouse.
Hokanu crouched beside Arakasi, a burning spill in
his hand. Outside, shouts and the sounds of breakage echoed
from the adjacent streets; someone howled obscenities over
the din of shattering crockery.

'The wine merchants' stores,' Hokanu murmured. 'In
a very few minutes we're going to have company.' He
paused to shift the rolled cloth spill, which had burned
nearly down to his fingers. 'The doors on this building
were not very stout.'

Arakasi nodded, his face invisible beneath his priest's
cowl. His fingers moved, furtively fast, over the body of
the bearer, which was well past rigor mortis and already
starting to bloat. 'Strangled,' he murmured. 'All of them.'

He slipped forward through the dark, while lines of
bright light from wildfire or torches shone through the gaps
in the wall boards. His concentration never wavered.

Hokanu flinched as the flame in his hands crept lower.
He shifted grip, and lit the last wad of linen he could spare
from his already scanty loincloth. By the time he looked
up, Arakasi was searching the spice seller's corpse.

The man's chain and fine silk robes were all gone,
looted by the footpad Chimichi had mentioned. The
illumination cast by the spill picked out enough details
to establish that the man had not died by strangulation
. His hands were contorted, and blind, dry eyes
showed rings of white. The mouth hung open, and
the tongue inside had been bitten through. Blood blackened
the boards and his still combed and perfumed
beard.

'You've found something,' Hokanu said, aware of Arakasi's
stillness.

224 Mistress of the Empire

The Spy Master looked up, his eyes a faint glint under
his hood. 'Much.' He turned over the man's hand, revealing
a tattoo. 'Our culprit is of the Hamoi Tong. He bears the
mark. His posing as a man in residence across the rift
speaks of long-range planning.'

'Not Jiro's style,' Hokanu summed up.

'Decidedly not.' Arakasi squatted back on his heels,
unmindful of the bang of a plank striking the cobbles
close outside the warehouse. 'But we're meant to think

so.'

Out in the night, a sailor cursed, and somebody else
roared back in outrage. The din of an irate populace surged
closer, overlaid by the horn call of one of the Emperor's
Strike Leaders.

Hokanu also had discarded the parchment with the
Anasati seal as a plant. No son of Tecuma's, and no
Lord advised by a devil as clever as Chumaka, would
ever condescend to the obvious. 'Who?' Hokanu said,
the sharpness of his desperation cutting through. Every
minute that passed increased the chance that he would
never again see Mara alive. Memory of her as he had
left her, pale, unconscious, and bleeding, all but paralysed
his reason. 'Can the tong even be bought to do more
than assassinate? I thought they took on their contracts
in anonymity.'

Arakasi was once again busy sorting through the spice
seller's underclothes. The fact they were fouled in death
did not deter him, nor did the stench upset his thoughts.
'The telling word, I suspect, is "contract." And does any
hard-line traditionalist in this Empire have riches enough
to toss golden chains to beggars just to make sure we
have a trail to follow?' His hands paused, pounced, and
came up with a small object. 'Ah!' Triumph colored the
Spy Master's tone.

Hokanu caught a glimpse of green glass. He forgot the

.

:

Culprit

225

stink of dead men, hitched closer, and thrust the spill
toward the object that Arakasi held.

It proved to be a small vial. Dark, sticky liquid coated
the inside; the cork, had there been one, was missing.

'A poison vial?' Hokanu asked.
Arakasi shook his head. 'That's poison on the inside.'
He offered the item for Hokanu to sniff. The odor was
resinous, and stingingly bitter. 'But the glass is green.
Apothecaries generally reserve that color container for
antidotes.' He glanced at the spice seller's face frozen in
its hideous rictus. 'You poor bastard. You thought you
were being given your life at your master's hand.'

The Spy Master left off his musing and stared at
Hokanu. 'That's why Mara's taster never suspected. This
man ingested the very same poison that she did, knowing
it was a slow-acting drug and sure that he was going to
get the antidote.'

Hokanu's hand trembled, and the spill flickered. Outside,
the shouts reached a crescendo, and the snap and
rattle of swordplay drew closer.

'We must leave,' urged Arakasi.

Hokanu felt firm fingers close over his wrist, tugging
him to his feet. 'Mara,' he murmured in an outburst of
uncontrollable pain. 'Mara.'

Arakasi yanked him forward. 'No,' he said sharply. 'We
have hope now.'

Hokanu turned deadened eyes to the Spy Master.
'What? But the spice seller is dead. How can you claim
we have hope?'

Arakasi's teeth flashed in fierce satisfaction. 'Because
we know there's an antidote. And the poison vial has a
maker's mark on the bottom.' He tugged again, hauling
a numbed Hokanu toward the loosened board by the
dockside through which they had originally made entry.
'I know the apothecary who uses that stamp. I have bought

226

Mistress of the Empire

information from him in the past.' The Spy Master bent
and ducked out into the steamy, odorous dusk of the alley
behind the fishmonger's. 'All we have to do is avoid this
ruckus that Chimichi started for our benefit, find the man,
and question him.'

8

Interrogation

Hokanu ran.

The streets were a bedlam of noise and fleeing citizens,
with Arakasi a shadow among them distinguishable only
by his voluminously flapping priest's robe. Hardened to a
warrior's fitness as he was, Hokanu was not accustomed
to bare feet. After stubbing his toes on raised bits of
cobblestone, sliding precariously through slime in the
gutters, and once landing heel first on a broken bit of
crockery, he would have welcomed even ill-fitting sandals
despite the resulting blisters. Yet if Arakasi was aware of
his difficulty, he did not slacken pace.

Hokanu would have died rather than complain. Mara's
life was at stake, and every passing minute made him fear
that she might already be beyond help, that the hideous slowacting
poison might have damaged her beyond healing.

'Don't think,' he gasped aloud to himself. Just run.'

They passed a pot seller's stall, the proprietor rushing
about in his nightshirt, shaking a fist at passersby. Arakasi
pressed the Shinzawai to the right.

'Warriors,' he murmured, scarcely out of breath. 'If we
go straight, we'll run right into them.'

'Imperials?' Hokanu obeyed the direction change, a
grimace on his face as his toes squished through something
that stank of rotted onions.

'I don't know,' Arakasi replied. 'The light plays tricks
and all I see are helmet plumes.' He took a deep breath.
'We won't stay to find out.'

He ducked left into an alley yet more narrow and noisome
than the last. The sounds of the riot were fading, replaced

228

Mistress of the Empire

by the furtive skitter of rats, the dragging steps of a lame
lamplighter on his way home from work, and the creak
of a costermonger's cart being hitched to a bone-skinny
needra.

Arakasi drew up his hood and ducked into a moss-crusted
doorway. 'We're here. Mind the portal - the arch is
very low.'

Hokanu had to bend over to enter. Beyond lay a cramped
courtyard, choked with weeds and what looked to be a
physician's garden, overgrown with medicinal herbs. There
was a fish pool at the center, also overrun with weeds and
sedges; Hokanu stole a moment to wash his feet. The water
was piss-warm, and noisome. He wondered in disgust if
people or dogs had used the spot for a privy.
'That was originally a cistern,' Arakasi whispered, as if
in answer to his thought. 'Korbargh dumps his wash water
in it, by the smell.'

Hokanu wrinkled his nose. 'What sort of a name is
Korbargh?'

'Thuril,' the Spy Master answered. 'But the fellow's no
native of the highlands. By blood, I'd say he has more of
the desert in him. Don't be deceived. He's smart, and he
speaks as many tongues as I do.'

'How many is that?' Hokanu whispered back.

But Arakasi had already raised his hand to knock at the
plank that served Korbargh as front door.

The panel opened with a jerk that caused Hokanu
a start.

'Who's there?' A gruff voice snarled from within.

Unhzed, Arakasi said something in the gutturals of the
desert tongue. Whoever he addressed tried to yank the door
closed, but the stout wood jammed ajar as the Spy Master
shoved his censer in the opening. 'Let us in t'see your master,
skulking dwarf, or your tongue I'll have out'f your face!' he
said in a gutter Tsurani dialect used by thieves and beggars.

Interrogation

229

His tone was one that Hokanu had never heard from him,
but that made his flesh crawl.

The dwarf said something back that sounded like an
obscenity.

'Not good enough,' Arakasi replied, and with a swift
inclination of his head invited his supposed penitent to
help him storm the door.

Frantic with concern for his wife, Hokanu fell to with
a will. He slammed his shoulder against the panel with
such force that the dwarf was knocked backward, and the
leather hinges burst inward. Over a boom of downed wood,
Arakasi and Hokanu fetched forward into what appeared
to be a foyer, tiled in terra-cotta, and decorated with
friezework left over from times when the neighborhood
had been more prosperous. The dwarf was yammering in
a mixture of languages, that his fingers felt crushed, and his
head was bruised by the door bar, which had been kicked
from its brackets, and now lay in splinters on the floor.

'It was rotten anyway,' Hokanu observed, scraping
splinters from his shoulder. 'In no condition, certainly,
to keep out as much as a rat.'

A touch from Arakasi urged quiet. Hokanu obeyed rather
than bridle at the presumption. As a huge, toweringly
muscled stranger in a robe embroidered in li birds entered,
the Shinzawai noble's eyes widened. 'Desert blood, did you

say?' he murmured sotto voce.

Arakasi disregarded the comment and instead said something
in desert tongue to the dwarf, whereupon the creature
stopped howling, scrambled to his feet like a hunted gazen,
and fled through a nook in a side wall.

'Gods above,' boomed the giant in the effeminate robe.
'You're no priest.'

'I'm glad you see that,' said the Spy Master. 'It saves us
unnecessary preamble.' He moved as though to push back
his hood, and his sleeves fell back, revealing a crisscross

230 Mistress of the Empire

of leather ties. The knife sheaths they secured were empty,
their contents a silver flash in Arakasi's hands as he lowered
his arms.

Hokanu's gasp of surprise that Mara's Spy Master should
own weapons of precious metal was canceled by a bull
bellow from Korbargh. 'So! You're the one who killed my
apprentice.'

Arakasi licked his teeth. 'Your memory works well, I
see. That's good.' His knives might have been gripped by
a stone statue, they were so steady. 'You'll recall, then, that
I can strike you through the heart before you can think, let
alone run.' To Hokanu the Spy Master said, 'Unwind my
belt and tie him, wrist and ankle.'

The giant drew breath to protest, and quit at a twitch of
Arakasi's wrist Hokanu took the greatest care not to come
between the two as he unknotted the priestly cincture; it
was braided needra hide, and tougher than spun cordage.
Hokanu tied the knots tightly, fear for Mara canceling any
mercy he might have felt for the man's comfort.

A huge wooden beam braced the ceiling, with horn hooks
inset for hanging the oil lamps preferred by the rich; they
held only cobwebs now, but unlike the leather loops used
by the poor for the same purpose, they had neither rotted
nor weakened.

Following Arakasi's glance, Hokanu almost smiled in
vindication. 'You wish him strung up by the wrists?'
At Arakasi's nod, the giant screeched in a tongue
Hokanu did not recognise. The Spy Master replied in
equally guttural accents, then switched language out of
politeness to his master. 'There is no help for you, Korbargh.
Your wife and that lout of a bodyguard you sent with her
are detained. There is a riot going on, and Imperial Whites
are out in force, barricading off the streets where she was
shopping. If she is wise, she will shelter the night in a
hostelry and return home in the morning. Your servant
Mekeh is currently hiding under the ale barrel in your
back shed. He saw how your last apprentice died, and as
long as I am here, he will not dare to show his face, even
to summon help for you. So I ask, and you will answer,
what the antidote was that should have filled the vial my
companion will show you.'

Hokanu hauled the cord taut, half hitched it secure, and
produced the green flask retrieved from the dead trader in
the warehouse.

Already pale from having his arms wrenched upward,
Korbargh turned white. 'I know nothing of this. Nothing.'

Arakasi's brows rose. 'Nothing?' His tone sounded
regretfully mild. 'Ah, Korbargh, you disappoint me.' Then
his expression hardened and his hand moved, fearfully
fast.

Steel arced in a blur across the room. The blade grazed
past Korbargh's cheek, shearing off a lock of greasy hair,

and stuck with a thunk in the support beam.

In changed intonation, Arakasi said, 'There are three
ciphers, in desert script, on that vial. The hand is your own.
Now speak.' As the prisoner raised his chin for renewed
denial, Arakasi interrupted. 'My companion is a warrior.
His wife is dying of your evil concoction. Shall be describe
his more inventive methods of extracting information from
captured enemy scouts?'

'Let him,' Korbargh gasped, afraid but still stubborn. 'I
won't say.'

Arakasi's dark eyes flicked to Hokanu. He gave a
half-smile that was mercilessly cold. 'For your Lady's
sake, tell the man how you make prisoners talk.'

Grasping the Spy Master's drift, Hokanu set his shoulder
against the wall. As if he had all the time in the world,
he described methods of torture cobbled together from
hearsay, old records found in the Minwanabi house as it was
being cleansed for Mara's arrival, tales told to unsettle new

232
Mistress of the Empire

recruits, and a few things he improvised. Since Korbargh
did not appear an imaginative man, Hokanu lingered with
unholy relish over the grisly bits.

Korbargh began to sweat and shiver. His hands worked
at his bonds, not out of hope of escape, but in mindless,
desperate fear. Gauging his moment to a nicety, Hokanu
turned to Arakasi. 'What method should we try first, do
you think, the heated needles or the levers and ropes?'

Arakasi scratched his chin, considering. His eyes seemed
to caress the alchemist's quivering body. Then he smiled. It
was a smile that caused Hokanu to suppress a shiver. 'Well,'
he drawled. His eyes were ice. 'You want to know what I
think?'

Korbargh bucked against his bonds. 'No!' he said
hoarsely. 'No. I'll tell you what you wish to know.'

'We're waiting,' Hokanu cut back. 'I think that tapestry
rod in the next room would serve very nicely as a lever.
And I know where we can find those flesh-eating insects
close by-'

'Wait! No!' Korbargh screamed.

'Then,' Arakasi interjected reasonably, 'you will tell us the
recipe for the antidote that should have gone in this vial.'

Korbargh's head twitched frantic affirmative. 'Leaves of
sessali steeped in salt water for two hours. Sweeten the
mixture with generous amounts of red-bee honey so your
Lady doesn't vomit the salty herbs. A small sip. Wait a
minute. Another. Wait again. Then as much as she can
take. The more she swallows, the faster she'll heal. Then,
when her eyes dear and the fever leaves her, a small cup
of the mix every twelve hours for three days. That's the
-antidote.'

Arakasi spun to face Hokanu. 'Go,' he said curtly.
'Take the horses and run for home. Any healer will have
sessali herb in his stores, and for Mara, time is of the
essence.'

Interrogation

,

233

Anguished, Hokanu glanced at the strung-up figure of
Korbargh, sobbing now in hysterical relief.

'I will pursue his connections,' Arakasi said urgently, and
found himself addressing empty air. Hokanu had already
disappeared through the broken door.

Night air wafted through the opening. Chilling Korbargh's
sweating flesh. Down the block, two drunken comrades
reeled their way homeward, singing. Someone threw a pot
of wash water out of a window, the splash of its fall broken
by a startled yelp from a street cur.

Arakasi stood motionless.

Unnerved by the silence, Korbargh stirred in his bonds.
'Y-you are g-going to let me g-go?' He finished on a note
of crispness. 'I did tell you the antidote.'

A shadow against the darkened wall, Arakasi turned
around. His eyes gleamed like a predator's as he said,
'But you haven't said who purchased the poison, in the
bottle disguised as an antidote.'

Korbargh jerked against his bonds. 'It's worth my life to
tell you that!'

Cat-quiet, Arakasi stepped up to his prisoner and
wrenched the knife out of the beam; of incalculable value
in the metal-poor culture of Kelewan, the blade flashed in

the dimness. The Spy Master fingered the steel, as if testing
the edge. 'But your life is no longer a bargaining point. What
has yet to be determined is the manner of your death.'

'No.' Korbargh whimpered. 'No. I cannot say anymore.
Even were you to hang me, and the gods cast my spirit off
the Wheel of Life for dishonor.'

'I will hang you,' Arakasi said quickly, 'unless you talk:
that is certain. But a blade can do hurtful damage to a
man, before a rope is used to dispatch him. The question
is not honor or dishonor, Korbargh, but a merciful end,
or lingering agony. You know the drugs that can bring
blissful death.' Touching the tip of the knife to the fat of

234

Mistress of the Empire

the prisoner's upper arm, he said, 'And you know which
drugs on your shelves make you writhe in torment before
death, drugs that heighten pain, keep you alert, and make
time seem to pass slowly.'

Korbargh hung from his wrists, his eyes huge with fear.

Arakasi tapped his knife point, thoughtful. 'I have all
the time I need, but none I'm willing to waste listening to
silence.'
'my wife-' began the desperate poison seller.

The Spy Master cut him off. 'If your wife gets home before
you have told what I need to know, she will join you. Your
bodyguard will die before he can cross the portal, and you
will watch me test my methods on her. I will dose her with
drugs to keep her conscious, then carve the flesh from
her body in strips!' As the big man began to weep with
terror Arakasi asked, 'Will your dwarf apprentice sack
your house, or give you both an appropriate funeral rite?'
Arakasi shrugged. 'He'll steal everything worth selling, you
know.' Looking around, he added, 'Given your location and
your clientele, I doubt anyone will be quick to report your
murder to the City Watch. It's possible no priest will ever
say a prayer for either of you.'

Korbargh snarled something unintelligible, and Arakasi
stopped threatening. He stepped forward, grasped the hem
of his captive's robe, and cut away a strip of fabric. The
cloth was not silk, but the weave was fine, and ribbon
embroidery adorned the hem. Arakasi expertly twisted the
length into a gag. Before he could bind it over Korbargh's
mouth, the huge man gasped and pleaded.

'If you gag me before your fiendish tortures begin, how
can I give what you wish, even if I were of a mind
to talk?'

Arakasi never paused, but jammed the cloth between
the poison merchant's teeth. As the larger man bucked
and twisted, the Spy Master tied the ends with knots as

Interrogation

23S

secure as any sailor's. 'I am anything but a fool,' he said
in a voice of velvet consonants.

Arakasi left the bound man to dash upstairs. He returned
with several vials which he held before Korbargh's eyes, one
at a time. 'Tai-gi root, to heighten perception and pain,' he
began. 'Powder from ground jinab bark, which will keep a
man awake for a week. Sinquoi leaves, which will make time
pass slowly. You will shortly discover that I know these as
well as any healer. And I was instructed in the use of knives
by an expert. You will not be permitted to scream when the
agony starts, and if you wished to spare yourself pain and
speak first, you have forfeited that chance already.' With a
gentleness that inspired shudders, the Spy Master loosened
Korbargh's robe. He bared a hairy expanse of sa drinker's
belly to the night air, then turned away and disappeared
briefly into the next room.

Korbargh thrashed against his bonds like a hooked fish.
He stopped when he had exhausted himself, and was
hanging limp when Arakasi returned, bearing the oil lamp
used to illuminate the desk when the hired clerk came to
do the accounts, and the basket the day servant used for
sewing.

Mara's Spy Master placed these items on a small table,
which he lifted and set to his left. Then he removed the
knife from his sash, and squinted to check the edge for
flaws. It being a metal blade, the razor-sharpness of the
weapon shone balefully perfect.

The poison merchant moaned into his gag as Arakasi
said, 'I will begin without using the drugs. You may

imagine how this will feel after I administer them.' He
moved forward and, stroking carefully, opened the top
layer of skin from his victim's navel slantwise toward his
groin. Blood pattered onto the tiles, and Korbargh gave a
muffled shriek. He kicked and flopped.

'Keep still,' Arakasi cautioned. 'I despise a messy job.'

236 Mistress of the Empire

His victim was in no position to heed, but the Spy
Master seemed not to care. His quick hand compensated
for Korbargh's jerks and jumps. He made another light cut
and removed a triangle of skin, which he tossed aside. Then
he nicked through the fat layer beneath and, as if he were
performing dissections at a physician's college, bared the
muscle below.

'Will you talk now?' Arakasi said conversationally.

Korbargh jerked his head in the negative. He was
dripping sweat, along with his blood, and his hair and
beard were soggy. He moaned into his gag, but the look
in his eyes stayed belligerent.

Arakasi sighed. 'Very well. Though l warn you, the pain
has hardly begun yet.' His knife hand moved, in utmost
precision, and the muscle of his victim's abdomen parted.

Korbargh gave a muffled screech. Unheeding, the Spy
Master picked out the severed veins and tied them off with
thread. Then his blade set to work on the bared entrails
beneath, and the blood ran faster.

The floor underfoot grew slippery as in a slaughterhouse,
and the air took on the same reek. Korbargh lost control of
his bladder, and rank wetness added to the puddle.

'Now,' said Arakasi, his shadow straightening with him
as he looked up into the poison seller's face, 'have you
anything constructive to say? No? Then, I fear, we will
have to work next on the nerves.'

The knife dipped into living tissue, separated a nerve
sheath, and scraped, very gently.

Korbargh thrashed, unable to howl. His eyes rolled, and
his teeth pierced deep into the sour cloth of the gag. Then
he fainted from the pain.

Some dim time later, his head snapped back as a pungent
aroma filled his nostrils. As he blinked away confusion,
strong hands poured foul-smelling liquid between his lips
while clamping his nostrils closed, forcing him to swallow.

Interrogation

237

Pain redoubled to blinding agony, and his mind became
gripped by horrible clarity.

ùYou will speak now,' Arakasi suggested. 'Else I will
continue this until morning.' He wiped his sticky blade,
fastidiously tucked it into his sash, and reached up to
loosen the knots that prevented Korbargh from speech.
'Then when your wife arrives, I will begin on her, to see
if she knows anything.'

'Demon!' gasped the wounded man. 'Devil! May you rot
in body and mind, and come back next life as a fungus!'

Arakasi, looking bland, reached into the gore of his
handiwork and tweaked.

Korbargh released an air-shattering scream.

'The name,' the Spy Master pressed, relentless.

And words tumbled out of Korbargh's mouth, giving him
the name that he sought.

'llakuli,' Arakasi repeated. 'A rumormonger who can be
found on the Street of Sorrowful Dreams.'

The poison seller gave a miserable nod. He had begun
to sob, his face like yellow grease. 'I think he was of the
Hamoi Tong.'

'You think?' Arakasi sighed as if correcting a child. 'I
know so.'

'What of my wife?'

'The tong may seek her out. That is a risk you knew when
you agreed to sell to them. But I will be hours gone when
she returns, so in that, she's safe.' Arakasi reached up very
swiftly and cut Korbargh's throat.

He jumped back as blood sprayed, and his victim kicked
his last in this life. Arakasi immediately snuffed the wick of
the oil lamp. Merciful blackness fell and hid the carnage in
the foyer.

Arakasi worked on in the dark, his hands now trembling
in spasms. He pulled Korbargh's robe closed and tied the
sash, so that the young wife would not be greeted with the

.'

238 Mistress of the Empire

full grisly details of the night's events upon her return. The
Spy Master cut down the body and laid it in a posture
of repose on the floor. About the blood he could do
nothing. His earlier search for the lamp had revealed that
the household kept no wash water to hand. He wiped his
fingers as best he could upon a tapestry, a prayer mat being
the only other choice that would serve for a towel. Then,
in the corner of Korbargh's bedchamber, he succumbed to
his nenes at last. He knelt clutching an unemptied night

jar and vomited violently.   .

He retched long after his belly was emptied. Then,
unwilling to pass through the foyer again, he made his
exit through a window.

The streets were all but deserted, the riot long since
quelled. A few stragglers hastened homeward, and more
shadowy figures lurked in the darkened alleys. A shivering,
bedraggled priest had nothing of value to rob; Arakasi was
left alone. The night wind in his face helped to steady him.
A brief stop by an ornamental pool in the entry of what
was probably a brothel allowed him to rinse the rest of
the gore from his hands. Blood was still crusted beneath
his fingernails, but right now he lacked the stomach to use
his knife to scrape them dean. He jogged, and to drive
back the nightmares that lingered from Korbargh's foyer,
he turned his-mind to the information he had sickened
himself to win.

Ilakuli he had heard of; and there was a man in the city
who would know his whereabouts. Arakasi hurried into
the night.

Hokanu ran on foot. His two spent mounts jagged at
his side on leading reins, their chests lathered, and their ~
distended nostrils showing scarlet linings. Fear for Mara's;
life kept him on his feet, long after muscle and sinew were
exhausted. He still wore the loincloth of a penitent. Of

Interrogation
239

the clothing he had recovered from the inn, he had paused
only to lace on his sandals. The rest he had stuffed into the
roan gelding's saddlebags, never mind that he looked like
a beggar, half naked and coated with dirt and sweat.

His sole concern was the recipe for the antidote that
offered the last hope for his wife.

Mist dung in the hollows, rendering trees and landmarks
ghostly in the predawn gloom. The prayer gate
to Chochocan hulked up out of whiteness like something
from the spirit lands ruled by Turakamu, God of the Dead.
Hokanu raced under its spindle arches, barely aware of the
painted holy figures in their niches, or the votive lamp left
lit by a passing priest. He stumbled on, caring only that
this gate marked the beginning of the end of his journey.
The borders to the estate lay over the next set of hills, and
through a defile guarded by his own patrols. A runner
would be posted there, along with a trusted officer and
another man trained as a field healer. With any luck, he
would have the herb for the antidote in his stores; and
every Lord's kitchen stocked red-bee honey.

Hurting in every joint, and gasping in the extremity of
exertion, Hokanu hoped the Good God would forgive him
for neglecting the prayer of passage the gate ~s intended
to inspire. He lacked the breath for speech, and he knew
if he stopped he would fall prone and pass out. Immersed
in a misery of tiredness, Hokanu crossed through the arch
into the pearly mists beyond.

The horses sensed the ambush before he did.

The big roan gelding plowed to a stop, snorting, and the
mare shied. Jerked forward by the sudden halt, Hokanu
gasped in frustration. But the arrow fired from a thicket by
the roadway missed him by inches, clattering harmlessly on
the verge.

Instantly, he banged the gelding with his elbow, sending
it into a maddened pirouette. The snorting mare curvetted

240

Mistress of the Empire

into its quarters, and the gelding let out a squeal and a
kick. Hokanu snatched his sword from the saddle scabbard.
Under cover of the milling animals, he doubled back into
the arch of Chochocan's prayer gate.

Hokanu dared not assume there would be only one
ambusher. He offered a brief prayer to the Good God that,
whoever they were, they would not be familiar with
horses from the barbarian world, for the beasts offered his
only chance of staying alive.

Still tied together by their leading rein, his mounts
thrashed before the archway, the gelding determined t"
land a defensive bite or kick, and the panicked mare
spinning, jerking, and rearing, in an effort to bole. Hokanu
chanced that no assassin born on Kelewan would dare those
stamping, seffking hooves to rush the archway and take him
The ambusher's only option was to flank him through the
entrance on the other side, and praise be to Chochocan,
whatever dead Minwanabi Lord had raised this offering to
the god had spent with a lavish hand. This gate was massive,
built of stone and timbers, with flying buttresses to support
its great height. It had intricate carving, rare gilt spires, an`}~
a multiplicity of interior vaulting, niches, and prayer nooks.
Six archers could conceal themselves inside and seriously
impede traffic: no doubt the real reason behind the ancient
Lord's gesture-of devotion.

Hokanu could only be grateful for such impiety now,
as he left the shield of the frightened horses and climbed
the fluted scrollwork, then hauled himself hand over hand
along a beam below the rafters. He swung himself up and
ducked into a nook behind a painted face of felicity. Gasping
silently from overexertion, Hokanu pressed himself into
the shallow shadow. He lay back against the side of the
nook, eyes blindly open, while his body took in air. A
moment passed like eternity. As the dizziness left him,the
Shinzawai noble noticed that the face above him
was hollow. The backside was built like an embrasure,
with holes drilled through the eyes from which a man in
concealment could observe anyone who entered the prayer
gate, comma or going.

Had Hokanu not been breathless, and in deadly danger
from an assassin, he might have laughed aloud. Within the
Empire, not even religion was free of the Game of the
Council; obviously, past Minwanabi Lords had stationed
watchers here to give warning of arrivals to the estate, and
also to spy upon traffic and commerce that chanced by
upon the road. Whatever subterfuge had been launched
from this place in the past, Hokanu seized the advantage
of the moment. He grasped the support beam that held the
mask in its niche, pulled himself up into its hollowed back,
then looked out the eye holes.

The mare and the gelding still spun, now hopelessly
entangled in the leading rein. One or the other had kicked a
support pose, for there WAS a hoof shaped depression in one
of the caryatids that supported the entry arch. Suddenly the
animals turned as one, the gelding with a snort. Both seared
into the night, tense, ears forward listening. Warned by the
horses, Hokanu saw movement in the shadows beyond the
prayer gate. - ,
Black-clad figures stalked there, spread out in flanking
formation. The three in the lead carried bows. Two more
followed, as rear guard, and to the profound relief of the
man they hunted, all of them scanned the prayer gate's
crannies and corners at ground level.

The mare sighted the men before the gelding. She flung
up her head with such force that the rein snapped, and
with a whistling snort she bolted back down the roadway.
Fear drove her to a flee gallop, a horse's instinct guiding
her back coward home and stable. The marauders in black

leaped out of her path and re-formed. The more phlegmatic
gelding watched, ears and tail tautly lifted. Then he shook

242 Mistress of tl~e Empire

out his mane, rubbed an itch in his neck against the arm
of the dented caryatid, and trotted a short distance away,
dropping his nose to graze by the roadside.

In the night-damp cavity of the prayer gate, all fell
suddenly silent; Hokanu knew a stab of dismay. His
starved lungs still labored from his run, and an effort
to quiet his breathing left him dangerously dizzy. Left
with an ugly decision, he chose to be discovered and to
fight, rather than to pass out and allow enemies to take
him unconscious.

His five attackers heard him immediately. They stiffened
like dogs pointing game and faced their quarry's hiding
place. Then two slung their bows across their shoulders.
The three others arrayed themselves in defensive formation,
while the lead two began to climb.

Hokanu turned his sword and flung it like a javelin.
The weapon caught the bulkier man through the throat,
piercing him down behind the breastbone, through the
heart. Silenced before he could scream, he fell with a dull
thud that made the gelding start and look up. Hokanu was
peripherally aware of the horse moving nervously around
the pillar beyond the gateway; more immediately, he flung
himself down and back into cover as three arrows whizzed
toward his hiding place.

One smacked wood with a thunk, while two others
chiseled splinters out of the fortune mask's ear, and
deflected on, to imbed themselves in the timbers behind.
Hokanu grasped the knife he had kept hidden in his
loincloth. He shoved back, as far into the cranny as his
size would allow, and reached up left-handed to wrench
one of the arrows from the wood.

A black-clad figure emerged, an outline against the dark
bulk of the beams that braced the interior of the prayer
gate. Hokanu's thrown knife caught him in the neck, and
he toppled back with a gurgling sound. His companion was

Interrogation

243

not fool enough to follow, but ducked, unslinging his bow.
Hokanu saw the weapon tip gleam in the gloom. His skin
prickled with his awareness that an arrow would soon fly
to impale him. He flipped the shaft in his hand around in
position to stab, and prepared to rush the archer.

A gruff voice called from below. 'Don't hurry. Keep him
pinned. Oridzu will climb up the other statue and fire on
him from above.'

With a wretched, sinking feeling, Hokanu realised his
cover would only protect from a sally from below; on
either side, the towering likenesses of the god offered the
perfect tactical advantage upon his position. Should he
attempt to hide from whoever climbed, he would dearly
be vulnerable to bow fire from below. Uglier, and most
cruelly final: knowledge of the antidote that might save
Mara would die with him. Arakasi would have no cause to
doubt that he had made it through. Hokanu cursed the haste
that had caused him to leave Kentosani without taking the
extra minutes to assemble an escort. Even had he lacked the
time to requisition soldiers from his father's or Mara's town
house, he might at least have hired mercenaries. Any sort of
armed backup might have foiled the assassins' ambush.

But he had forgone the escort of warriors in favor of
the speed he could make alone, mounted on the exotic
Kingdom horses. The creatures could outrace the swiftest
runners, and Hokanu had placed his wife's peril ahead of
his own.

Now Mara would pay for his folly. She would die, the
last of the Acoma, never knowing how near the man who
loved her had come to getting the antidote to her.

As the furtive sounds of men moving reached Hokanu's
ears, he cursed. Not one but both of the surviving assassins

were climbing the statues. He would be fired on from either
side, and given the bent of past Minwanabi minds, he did
not put it past the dead Lords to have placed concealed

244 Mistress of the Empire

embrasures behind the other carvings in the prayer gate.
He might be picked off without ever seeing his attackers.

Desperate, cornered, and trembling with exhaustion and
rage, Hokanu grasped the arrow that was his sole weapon.
He prepared to rush the one man who held him pinned.
He would die, but perhaps he could take another of his
enemies to the halls of Turakamu with him.

But as he tensed to shove off from the wall, an arrow
hissed out. He ducked flat, too late. The shaft smacked
into his hip and imbedded with a thump and dull agony
into the bone.

Hokanu's lips peeled back in a silent snarl of agony. Animal
hurt and white-hot anger burned him to preternatural
clarity of mind. He caught the shaft and snapped it off. The
resulting agony caused him to recoil involuntarily. A second
shaft cracked wood where his torso had been. Braced on one
knee, and weeping tears of pain, he scrabbled with bloodied
fingers for some purchase point to hold himself upright.
Shock made his leg useless, and the one not wounded
seemed cramped.

By some miracle, his hand dosed over a smoothed end
of wood that had been rounded to the form of a handle.
Hokanu grimaced at the jolt. He used his last strength to
haul his crippled body upright, and cried out as the handle
fumed with a creak and gave way downward.

It was not fixed, he realised in panic. He barely heard
the thunk as another arrow bit wood beside his ear.
Overwhelmed beyond recovery, he felt himself sliding
downward, as a section of wall gave way

Of course! he thought, and in the rush of adrenaline that
followed, he laughed aloud. The nameless old Minwanabi
Lord had built his spies an escape hatch, and he had
accidentally discovered the release. The trapdoor opened
outward, dragging him from darkness, and a crossfire of
enemy shafts, into a dawn like a new pearl.

Interrogation

24S

His feet were snapped helplessly off the beam as the
doorway gaped wide, leaving him hanging by the release
lever, in the air. The drop was nothing for a healthy
man, a mere dozen feet. But with an arrowhead in his
hip, Hokanu feared the shock of the fall might kill, or
cause him to faint. He flung away the useless arrow he
was holding, kicked, wrenched, and scrabbled, but failed
to gain a second hanthold. His wound hurt mightily, and
his eyes still watered maddeningly.

A black-clothed warrior arrived behind the niche he had
just vacated. He moved gloved hands, notched another
arrow, and began a steady draw.

Gasping, Hokanu looked down, to see a ring of other
enemies converging from the roadside. All that held them
back from an open rush was the gelding, innocuously
cropping grass with its reins trailing. The horse was
harmless, but the assassins remained wary from the display
of equine irritation they had just witnessed. The animal saw
the approaching assassins and ambled away from them,
until he stood directly below Hokanu.

'Chochocan bless you,' Hokanu half sobbed. He let go.

His stomach fumed with the plunge, and the slam as his
body struck the saddle all but undid him. The torment in
his hip became eclipsed by the insult to his manhood. The
gelding grunted, ripped up its head in astonishment, and
stumbled to its knees under the impact.

'Run, you meat for dogs!' Hokanu screamed, as much
to relieve his own agony as to motivate the horse. He flung
forward, gripping the mane in both fists. Though his seat
was halfway out of the cantle, and one leg trailed down
the gelding's flank, he pounded with the heel that still

functioned and drove the horse to its feet.

That moment the archers began to fire. Struck in neck,
shoulder, and croup, the gelding bucked, but fortune still
smiled on Hokanu: the movement threw him upward and

246 Mistress of the Empire

allowed him to hook the saddle flap with his good leg,
keeping his seat. The gelding exploded into a gallop
toward home.

The pounding threatened to shake Hokanu loose. He
clung, dizzied and deafened by pain. His hands stayed
locked white-knuckled in the horse's mane, and his blood
dripped and flung away on the wind, mingled with that of
his mount. He tried, but could not balance his seat. His lame
hip prevented him from centering himself in the saddle. He
had not come this far, he thought with clenched teeth, only
to spoil things by falling off.

But inexorably, he slipped to the side, until his ankle
dragged in the dust. He dung now by only his knee, and the
gelding had begun to crow-hop. One, two, three gyrations,
he hung on. and then his hands wrenched free. His body
arced out into air

And was caught, roughly, and unceremoniously ripped
from the follow through of inertia by a pair of gauntleted
hands.

'Damn!' Hokanu yelled, and struck earth. Agony tore
from him a shattering cry. The air went black, then
blindingly white, and he heard voices shouting.
One of them was Lujan's.

'Assassins,' he gasped out. 'On my tail.'

'Already dead, my Lord,' said Mara's Force Commander
crisply. 'Hold still, you're bleeding.'

Hokanu forced his eyes open. The sky seemed to swim
above him, incongruously green and clear of mist. Sunrise
threw golden light on the faces of his own patrol.

'We saw the mare come tearing in, riderless,' someone
was saying. 'We assumed trouble on the road. Was Arakasi
with you?'

'No,' Hokanu gasped. 'Kentosani. Just listen.' And he
managed through his pain to recite the recipe for the
antidote that was the only hope to save Mara.

Interrogation

__

247

With the practiced efficiency of a field commander, Lujan
ordered his swiftest warrior to strip off his armor and run
to the healer with the instructions Hokanu had just given.
As the man hurried away, and through the exploding bustle
of activity as escort was arranged, Hokanu dung grimly to
consciousness.

More men were sent for a litter to carry the Lady's
wounded consort back to the estate house, while Hokanu's
vision swam from patchy black to painful sharpness. He
heard cloth tear, felt air against his inflamed skin as Lujan
bared his wound.

'My Lord,' said the Acoma Force Commander, 'you are
going to need this arrowhead cut out very quickly if the
flesh is not to suppurate.'

Hokanu mustered a dogged breath. 'You will have
nothing done with that arrow,' he grated. 'Not until I
am back at my Lady's side, and I have seen her restored
by the antidote with my own eyes.'

'Your will, my Lord.' The Acoma Force Commander
arose, all brusqueness and hurry. 'Strike Leader,' he shouted
to his sub-officer, 'pick four men, and make up a stretcher!
My Lord Hokanu would be at his Lady's side as swiftly as
possible!'

~:
r

Mirack

9

Miracle

The sky dimmed.

Servants entered on quiet feet to close the screens and
light the lamps in Mara's chamber. They finished their task
and silently bowed to their mistress, who lay unmoving and
wax-pale upon her cushions. Then they departed, leaving
Hokanu alone with his vigil, in a quiet that ate at his
nerves.

Seven hours had passed since the antidote had been
administered, and his Lady showed no improvement. Her
eyelids did not flicker in dreaming, and her breathing
neither quickened nor changed. As twilight deepened
beyond the screens and the gloom encroached, isolating
husband and wife in a wan circle of lamplight, Hokanu
knew doubt. What if Korbargh had lied, had misled them
by giving a false antidote? What if the ambush at the prayer
gate had delayed his arrival those critical few minutes, and
the medicine had reached Mara too late? What if the gods
had turned against them, and all that they did in life was
made futile by a foregone conclusion of fate?

The ache of his arrow wound and the unrelenting
worry over Mara's condition wore Hokanu to distraction.
Agonising over the need to act, to do something where
nothing more could be done, he reached out and gathered
up Mara's hand. Was it his imagination, or was her flesh a
shade less clammy? Or was his own stressed body growing
feverish and dry, as the untended arrowhead in his hip began
to fester? Doubts chased the tails of uncertainties, and to
break the cycle of useless worry, Hokanu tried speech.

'Mara,' he began. The emptiness of the room only

i

3

,:


249

underscored his loneliness. 'Mara.' In vain he searched
for something to say; but the words had all been said,
the endless apologies, the affirmations of love. That petty
politics should place at risk a woman who, by herself,
held so much life within her served only to emphasise the
fundamental wrongness of Tsurani society: a wrongness
Mara had dedicated herself and her Acoma line to change.
Hokanu closed his eyes against tears, unsure whether his
weakness stemmed from deep and heartfelt regret or from
weakness inspired by his wound.

How long he sat unmoving, fighting emotions unworthy
of the woman who battled against death on the mat,
Hokanu could not have said. Except when he raised
his head at the sound of the knock upon the door, the
dark beyond the screens had deepened with the fullness
of night.

'Enter,' he called, dizzied from the sudden move he had
made at the interruption. He realised he had not eaten since
the day before; surely that was the cause.

Lujan entered and bowed briskly. Although he would
normally be off duty at this hour, taking his ease at the
evening meal, tonight he still wore his armor and the
plain sword he preferred for field service. Dusty, smelling
of sweat, he straightened up, regarded the master with a
penetrating stare, and compressed his lips into a line while
he awaited permission to speak.

Hokanu gave a listless wave.

'Lord?' The tone of question was most unlike the Acoma
Force Commander.

Sure a tactful inquiry concerning his own health would
follow, Hokanu stiffened. His hand tightened over Mara's,
and he said crisply, 'You have a report to make?'

Lujan's chin jerked up at the reprimand. 'I took the
liberty of sending out a scouting detail, under Force Leader
Irrilandi.' The former Minwanabi Force Commander had

250 Mistress of the Empire ~ I

been detailing patrols over the hills beyond these estates
for more years than Lujan had been alive. -:

Hokanu nodded for the Acoma officer to continue.

Lujan said, 'The patrol turned up a small force armed for
a foray. There was a confrontation. Most of the enemy lie
dead, but two were taken alive. One had a loose tongue.
It would appear that the five archers who ambushed you
were only advance scouts. They were sent to reconnoiter
the roadway and select the site for a more decisive ambush. l
But they had not expected you to be mounted and traveling ~ I
at such speed. They were caught off guard, and had to ! l
improvise. The other men, disguised as bandits, were not in i

place, and plainly only the gods' favor spared your life.'
Half muddled by discomfort from his wound, Hokanu
nodded. 'Did you find out who sent the murdering dogs?'

Lujan hesitated before he replied. His eyes remained on
the master, naked with worry, as he hooked his thumbs
in his baldric. 'Jiro,' he snapped at last. 'The proof is
incontrovertible. The Anasati Lord was behind this.'

Hokanu blinked to dear his head. 'Then he will have
to die.'

'No. Husband, you must not even voice such a notion.
How can we go against the edict of the Assembly of
Magicians?' murmured a weak voice from the cushions.

Both Lujan and Hokanu whirled around.

Mara's eyes were open and lucid in her drawn face. Her
fingers tightened shakily inside her husband's grip. 'How
can we kill Jiro when the Great Ones have forbidden our
blood feud?'

'Thank the Good God!' Hokanu exclaimed. He bent over
his wife and kissed her cheek, though the motion left him
dizzy. 'Beloved, how do you feel?'

'annoyed,' Mare confessed. 'I should have known better
than to taste that chocolate. My greed to gain a trade
monopoly nearly became my undoing.'
Hokanu stroked her hand. 'Rest now. We are lucky to
have you with us.'

Mara's brow puckered into a frown. 'The baby? What
has become of our son?' But the anguish on Hokanu's
face told her all she needed to know. She braced herself
and closed her eyes. 'Two sons,' she whispered. 'Two sons
dead, and we can spill no blood in retribution.' The phrase
seemed to exhaust the last of her resources, for she drifted
away into sleep, a flush of anger still staining the pallor of
her cheeks.

Servants descended in force upon the sick chamber the
instant the Lady stilled into slumber. A healer with a satchel
of remedies directed them to air Mara's bedding, and to turn
down the wicks in the lamps. Lujan did not wait for orders,
but stepped forward, caught Hokanu in his strong arms,
and lifted the master bodily from Mara's side.

'Force Commander!' snapped the Shinzawai irritably. 'I
can walk on my own, and as of this moment you are
dismissed.'

For answer, he received Lujan's most disarming grin. 'I
am my Lady's man, Master Hokanu. Tonight I will take no
orders from a Shinzawai. If you were one of my warriors, I
would forbid you outright to move with such a wound. And
truth to tell, I fear my Lady's wrath the more. I will have you
off to visit the surgeon to have that arrowhead removed. If
you were to die of Jiro's plots while Mara slept, that would
be doing her no service.' His tone was almost insolent, but

his eyes spoke heartfelt thanks to the man who had saved
the woman who was paramount in both their lives.

The surgeon set aside bloodstained instruments, looked
up from his work, and met Lujan's eyes. Lamplight
burnished the sweat-streaked planes of his face, to reveal
a strained expression. 'No, the light is quite sufficient,' he
said hoarsely. 'I can see well enough to work.'

252

Mistress of the Empire

'Then the prognosis is not good,' Lujan whispered back.
His hands stayed steady and firm on Hokanu's leg, an
assurance to the injured man as much as a restraint t o
keep an inopportune flinch from disrupting the healer's
touch. Dosed with sa wine laced with a narcotic herb to
dull pain, Hokanu might not realise where he was or what
was happening well enough to hold his honor and keep
motionless. Still, no matter how muddled the consciousness
of a man became, his spirit would remain aware. If the
news was going to be bad, Hokanu's wal, his inner self,
did not need to hear before he was sufficiently recovered
to maintain self-control.

Yet either Lujan's words were not quiet enough, or the
wounded man was unwilling to relinquish consciousness
enough to be spared. Hokanu weakly raised his head. 'If
there is something wrong, I'll hear of it now.'

The healer wiped his hands on a cloth. He mopped his
brow also, though his infirmary was not hot. He turned
worried eyes to Lujan, who nodded, then looked back at
Mara's consort. 'The arrowhead is removed, master. But it
was deep into the bone, and your attempts to move and run
caused much damage. Tendons and ligaments are severed,
some frayed beyond my skills to sew back.' He did not
add that the wound was deep, and the lacerations invited
infection. He would pack the tears with poultice, but that
was all he could do.

'Are you telling me I won't walk again?' Hokanu's voice
did not quaver, but held only the sharpness of command.

The healer sighed. 'You will walk, master. But you will
never lead a charge onto a battlefield again. You will limp,
and your balance will be compromised. In combat, any
competent enemy would see your lameness and kill you
easily. My Lord, you must never don armor again.' He
shook his grey head in sympathy. 'I am sorry. That is the
best I can promise.'

Miracle

2S3

Hokanu turned his face toward the wall, utterly still.
Not even his hands tensed into fists; his rage, or his pain,
stayed hidden. But Lujan, who was a warrior also, knew
his mind: that he was yet his father's heir, and had stood
as Shinzawai Force Commander. It was an ill thing for a
man in line for the mantle of a great house to become a
cripple. Lujan noticed the barest tremor in the sinews under
his hands. He felt his heart wrench, but dared not offer
sympathy, for fear that Hokanu's desperately held dignity
would break down.

And yet the man that Mara had married showed once
again the sternness of his fiber. 'Get on with your work,
healer,' he said. 'Sew up what you can, and for the love
of the gods, give me no more medicinal wine. I would be
aware when my Lady wakes, and not half out of my head
with self-pity brought on by drink.'

'Shift the lamp, then,' muttered the surgeon. 'I'll have
this over with as quickly as may be.'

'Good servant, in that I may be of assistance,' said a quiet
voice from the doorway.

The surgeon started in surprise, his hand half extended
toward his tray of instruments; Lujan all but released hold
of Hokanu's leg in his initial annoyance. 'I told the guard
on this corridor that the master was not to be disturbed.
For any reason.' He half turned, drawing breath to dress
down the lax soldier, and checked, appalled.

The wizened man in coarse brown robes who stood at
the edge of the lamplight was no servant but a priest
of Hantukama, the God of Healing. Lujan had seen his
like once before, on the day Keyoke's life had been saved
from multiple battle wounds and a leg amputation gone

septic. He recognised the stranger's order by the shaved
semicircle at the back of his head, and by the intricate
braid that trailed from his nape. Mindful of how difficult
it was to gain the services of such a priest, Lujan bowed as

254 Mistress of the Empire

deeply as the lowliest scullion to atone for his thoughtless
address.

'Forgive me, good priest, for my ill manners. In my
mistress's name, you are welcome here, my brutish behavior
a pitiful reflection on the honor of this house.'

The priest stepped forward, silent on bare feet. His
sun-browned face showed no affront but only deepest
sympathy as he touched the warrior's shoulder. 'With
master and Lady both hurt, you would be a poor guardian
if you did not seek to spare them from intrusions.'

Lujan spoke with his face still pressed to the floor. 'Good
priest, if you have come to help, my feelings are of no
consequence before the needs of my master and Lady.'

Now the priest frowned, a fearful expression on a
face that habitually was serene. His hand tightened, in
surprising strength, and he raised Lujan from his posture
of submission. 'On the contrary,' he snapped. 'The spirit
and the feelings of any man are equal in the sight of my god.
You are forgiven your lapse of manners, worthy warrior.
Go now. Leave me to my business with your master, and
mind your post by the door with all vigilance.'

Lujan snapped the priest a salute, hand over heart, and
stepped out as ordered. The surgeon gave a hasty half bow,
and made as if to follow. But the priest waved for him to
stay as he stepped to Hokanu's bedside. 'My novice is but
a boy, and too tired from travel to assist. He sleeps, and if
I am to be of service to my god, I will need help.'

The priest set down his satchel. He took the sick man's
sweating fingers into his own and looked into Hokanu's
eyes. 'Son of my god, how are you?'

Hokanu inclined his head, the best he could manage
for courtesy. 'I do well enough. Blessings of your
god, and Chochocan's favor for guiding you to this
house.' He drew a difficult breath and forced his voice
steady over his pain. 'If I may presume, I would ask

Miracle

255

that you look after my Lady. Her need is greater than
mine.'

The priest pursed his lips. 'No. I say not' -he held
up a hand, forestalling Hokanu's protest- 'and it is my
judgment to make. I have seen the Good Servant already. I
traveled here in answer to her need, for her sacrifice and her
love for her people are recognised by the followers of my
god. But she is mending well enough without Hantukama's
blessing. You brought the antidote in good time.'

Hokanu closed his eyes, his relief palpable. 'I am grateful
to hear she will be well again.'
'She will be well.' The priest paused, his face suddenly
careworn. As if he chose his words carefully, he added,
'But you should know, as her consort, that she will bear
only one more child. The poison caused damage, and that
was the best the healing powers of my god would allow.'

Hokanu's eyes flicked open, black in the flicker of
lamplight. His warrior's composure held, and nothing of
his anguish leaked through, that his Lady could not have
the many children she craved, to secure both her line and
his also. 'That is enough, then, good priest.'

A silence fell over the chamber, with the surgeon standing
motionless in respect for his master's feelings. The
hiss of the oil lamp blended with the whisper of the
breeze beyond the screen and, farther off, the tramp
of a warrior answering the change of the watch. With
summer past, the amphibious creatures were silent on
the lakeshore; only insects sang in the soft warmth of
the night.

Out of that stillness, and the peace that ruled the late
hour, the priest of Hantukama spoke. 'Master Hokanu,
that is not enough.'

The eyes of Mara's consort focused with an effort,
through the dulling effects of drugged wine. He looked
at the slender, wizened little priest, and pulled himself

256 Mistress of the Empire

half upright. 'What more would you ask of me that I have
not already given?'

The priest of Hantukama sighed and returned a thin
smile. 'It is that you give too much, son of my god. Your
love and devotion to your Lady consume all that you have
and all that you are. For her, the heir to the Shinzawai has
risked the wholeness of his leg, and for her, he would lay
down his life to spare her own. I say, as the voice of my
god, that this is too much.'

Now Hokanu's cheeks flushed red in anger. 'What honor
would I have if I saved myself before Mara?'

The priest pressed him back against his cushions with a
touch that was gentle but firm. 'She does not need your
rescue,' he said, inarguably blunt. 'She is Servant of the
Empire and Lady of the Acoma. She has her own strength.
She needs you as confidant and companion beside her, not
as a shield before her.'

Hokanu drew breath to argue. The priest gave him a
sharp shake that made him gasp in discomfort. 'You are
no less than she in the eyes of this Empire and my god.
The continuance of this nation, and the better life for all
promised by the Light of Heaven, rely upon you, as heir to
the House of Shinzawai, as much as on her. You are a major
player in this changed Game of the Council. This you must
understand.'

Too weakened to argue, Hokanu sank back. 'You sound
as if you know the future,' he said tiredly. 'What is it you
see that we do not?'

But the priest would not say. Instead he stepped from
Hokanu's shoulder, and laid his hands on the flesh at
either side of the wound on Hokanu's hip. Softly, firmly,
he addressed the surgeon. 'Open my satchel, good healer. If
this man is to rise without a limp, there is a long night's work
ahead, and a need to invoke the blessing of my god.'

Word of the ambush against Hokanu and the certainty
of Mara's recovery caught up with Arakasi on a river
barge bound downriver from Kentosani. The messenger
who brought the news arrived just past dawn, during
a stop to load fresh fruit. He boarded with the slaves
carrying the baskets of jomach, and slipped unobtrusively
forward to the huddled mass of deck passengers who
bought their comfortless passage for a centi each. The
barge was crowded with three families of migrant fruit
pickers, two scabby beggars who had been run out of
Kentosani for plying their craft without license from the
Emperor, and a guild runner with a swollen ankle bound
south to ask charity of an uncle while his injury healed.

Arakasi was seated between two lashed casks, his dark
hood drawn over his face. Since he was as dirty as the
beggars, and looked as shifty as a street thief, the peasant
mothers with their fretful infants and gaggle of skinny
children had given him wide berth. The newcomer found
enough space to squeeze down beside him, and whisper
news from the Acoma estate.

Eyes closed, head lolling against a barrel, the Spy Master
appeared asleep; he had charcoal under his fingernails and
an untended scab on his chin. He smelled as though he had
not bathed in a sevenday. But his ears heard well. After a
moment through which he thought furiously, he grumbled
sleepily, rolled on his side, and returned the barest breath
of a whisper.

'I will not be getting off at the river fork. Tell the
connection there to convey my regards to our master
and mistress. If I am needed, have the net ask after me
from the jewel setter adjacent to the trophy stuffer's shop
in Sulan-Qu. You'll know the place by the harulth skull on

the signpost.'

The messenger touched the Spy Master's wrist in confirmation.
Then he made a noise of disgust, leaned over
2S8 Mistress of the Empire

toward the nearest of the passengers, and began to proselytise
for an obscure priesthood of Lulondi, God of Farmers.

'Be off, pest,' snapped the bothered victim. 'I don't love
vegetables, and the flies are bad enough on this journey
without your carping on top of them!'

The messenger bowed, carelessly banging an elbow into
the knee of a peasant wife. She cursed him, lashed out a
foot, and caught him a blow in the shins.

The disturbance brought the attention of the barge
master. 'Hey there! Mind you stay quiet, or I'll heave
the lot of you overboard.'

The farm wife returned loud protest. 'This scum is
here soliciting, and did you get a coin for his passage,
anyway?'

The bargemaster scowled, tramped forward, and peered
at the prostrate man the farm wife pointed her calloused
finger at.

'You! Vermin-carrying, sores-ridden wretch! Have you a
centi to pay for your space?' The barge master held out his
hand, sweating in his annoyance.

The man he singled out muttered pitiably. 'For the
goodness of Lulondi's blessing, I ask that you let me stay.'

The barge master scowled and snapped his fingers. 'I'll
show you Lulondi's blessing.' At his signal, two polemen
arose from their resting place by the rail. Muscled like
wrestlers, they came forward on bandy legs and bowed
before their master. 'Heave him off,' the barge master
ordered in disgust. 'And none too gently, either, since he
thought to stow away.'

Identical grins spread across the faces of the polemen.
They grabbed their victim by the wrists, raised him, and
tossed him over the side.

He landed with a smack and a splash of dirty water that
all but swamped the fruit seller's dugout, tied alongside for
the transfer of goods. The slaves whacked him away with

.

~.

Miracle

259
their paddles, and the barge crew, the deck passengers, and
bystanders gathered on the shore all laughed as the wretch
kicked free of the strangling folds of his cloak and swam
like a river rodent for dry land.

'Lulondi's blessing, indeed,' harrumphed the barge master.
He whirled, his mind back on business, and stepped
over a snoring Arakasi without so much as a glance.

Two days later, Mara's Spy Master disembarked in SulanQu.
He made his way across the riverfront, unobtrusive in
the noon shadows. The streets were nearly deserted, the
shops closed in siesta. What few loiterers were about either
slept in the shade of the window awnings and balconies
or poked through the refuse in the gutters, in search of a
crust to eat. Arakasi made his way to the House of Seven
Stars, a brothel that catered to wealthy nobles with odd
tastes. There, under a back-door arch adorned with kissing
cherubs, he knocked in a prescribed sequence. The panel
opened, and an immensely fat woman hung with beads and
corcara necklaces pulled him inside.

'Gods,' she murmured in a voice as deep as a man's, 'do
you always have to come here smelling like a sewer? We
have clients upstairs who might be offended.' .~

Arakasi flashed a grin. 'Now, Bubara, don't tell me you've
used up all the bath water with the kekali leaves and citrus

so early in the day?'

The madam grunted through her nose. 'Hardly. The girls
and boys have to smell sweet.' She twitched a flabby arm
through a curtain, and a naked deaf-mute child with skin the
color of chocha-la beans scurried out and bowed before her.

She motioned toward Arakasi and nodded.

The little boy looked at the dirty visitor, cocked his
head to one side, and grinned in delighted recognition.
Unmindful of the smell, he took the charcoal-marked hand
and led the Spy Master off.

260 Mistress of the Empire

Arakasi tousled the boy's hair and from some hidden
pocket produced a cho-ja-made candy. The boy smiled,
showing a pathetic expanse of gums where teeth should
have been at his age. He made soft moans of pleasure and
bowed his forehead to his fists repeatedly as a gesture of
thanks.

As an afterthought, Arakasi added two shell coins.
'Somebody should buy you some clothing,' he muttered
and caught the boy by the elbow, tugging him upright as
he made to prostrate himself on the floor. He patted the
boy again on the head and waved him off, as he had been
this way many times and knew which room he sought.

He moved off down the corridor, touched a section of
carving that unlatched a hidden door, and climbed the
narrow, shadowy stair beyond to a cubbyhole under
the eaves, while, behind him, the little boy clutched his
treasured gifts and groveled upon the pretty carpets for
long, unnoticed minutes.

In the cramped chamber, under the heat of shingles ablaze
under the noon sun, Arakasi picked from an assortment of
carry boxes and chests which held garments of all types,
from beaded, glittering robes to field workers' smocks. He
selected an orange-and-purple livery and a dusty pair o f
sandals with a hole in the toe of the left one's sole. Then
he bundled his unwashed robes in another chest that held
what looked to be beggar's rags, and, dad in nothing but his
dirt and a soiled loincloth, made his way back downstairs
to avail himself of the madam's bath.

An hour later, he was on his knees in the offices of the
-moneylenders' guild, a scrub brush and bucket in hand.
Afternoon trade had resumed, and if he spent overlong
cleansing the tiles around the desk of the clerk by the
aisle, no one commented. Merchants tended to kick him
out of their path as they came and went, particularly if
repayment of their loans was behind schedule, or if their
need for credit had resulted from misfortune: a caravan
load lost to bandits or a silk shipment spoiled by damp
weather.

Arguments tended to flare in the heat of afternoon, and
no one noticed that the servant muttered under his breath
as he scrubbed the tiles.

Except the clerk who, as he copied rows of figures, held
his head tilted to one side.

'. . . hafta track in dog dung,' Arakasi grumbled. 'Should
be a law against letting the pets of the ladies defecate in the
streets.' He sniffed, cursed his aching back, and in exactly
the same singsong tone added, 'Offends my nose, it does,
and did you notice whether the red boy took out any notes
that might have been for blood money? Crap in the wash
water again, and I'm tired of refilling my bucket.'

The clerk scrubbed sweat from his brow, picked a slate off
a corner of his desk, and made a notation. Then he shuffled
it into another stack, smeared with erasures and chalk dust,
and lashed out with a foot, catching the floor scrubber a
hard blow in the ribs. 'Here, you. Clean these.'

Arakasi tugged his forelock and pressed his nose to the
wet tiles. 'Your will, sir, master, your will.' He accepted
the pile of slates, shuffled off to fetch a rag, and began the
appointed task. His muttering continued, the inflection even
as ever as he came to the slate with the blurred notation. At
the sight of the figures there, with dates noted in code to
one side, he could barely keep his wipe rag steady. Three
flicks of his wrist, and the slate was empty, the figures
and dates committed to memory. His appearance remained
innocuously bland, but his heartbeat doubled.

For 'red boy' was his code name for Anasati, and the
clerk, a carefully placed agent. The numbers exchanged had

revealed large sums in metal, taken out by the Anasati First
Adviser. They had not been for trade purposes; those the

262

Mistress of the Empire

hadonra would have signed for, and most would have been
in notes to merchants that handled regular transactions.
One of the sums had been borrowed just before the time of
Arakasi's near-disastrous exposure in the silk warehouse.
Could the events have been connected? And the other two,
recently dated, might have been payments to the Hamoi
Tong, blood money for specified assassinations.

Arakasi polished the last slate and shuffled back to the
clerk's desk. He resumed mopping the floor, and roundly
cursed when the clerk tossed a bit of thyza paper at the
waste bin and missed. The crumpled bit of scrap landed on
Arakasi's cleaned tiles. He retrieved it, bowed obsequiously,
and deposited it within the waste barrel.- But a second scrap
of paper twisted inside remained in his palm, and vanished
into a fold o' his loincloth.

He endured the cuffs and blows of the merchants as he
scrubbed his way across the aisle, until he reached haven
in a far corner.

Just before dosing time, when voices were loudest and
tempers most frayed, an ostentatiously dressed merchant
stopped by the desk of the clerk who was Arakasi's agent.
He flicked a swift glance about the shop, saw that all on
the floor were occupied, and made an inquiry.

The apparently flustered clerk dropped his chalk. Arakasi
dipped his scrub brush into his bucket and started on a new
section of floor, but his bent head was angled so that he
caught a clear view of the exchange at the clerk's desk
under his arm.

The two men spoke for a few minutes. Shell counters
changed hands, invisibly to anyone who happened to be
standing, but not to a servant bent down on the floor. The
merchant glanced to left and right, his eyes bright with
exhilaration.

Arakasi, muttering, repressed a frown. Where have I
seen that man before? he thought. Where? And in time

Miracle

263

the answer came to him, who was adept at separating details
from circumstance, no matter how incongruous they might
have seemed.

He knew, with a thrill of excitement, that the man dressed
as the gaudy merchant was none other than Chumaka, the
Anasati First Adviser.

'Chochocan's favor,' he grumbled. 'Damned floor goes
on forever.' He dragged his bucket to one side, half blocking
the doorway that led to the privy. A moment later, he was
rewarded by another blow in the ribs, as the clerk who
hastened to nature's call tripped over him.

'Damn you for a wretch!' He bent to deliver another
punitive blow, and, between curses, said breathlessly, 'The
merchant wanted to know if anyone had made inquiry
into the Anasati accounts. I told him several shifty and
questionable men had offered me bribes to that effect, just
to make him worry.'

Arakasi choked back a grin, and pressed his face to the
floor in a slave's bow of apology. 'Sorry, sir, master, I'm
sorry. That's damned interesting news, and forgive me for
my clumsiness, I beg you.'

'You aren't forgiven!' shouted the clerk. 'Get out on the
street and scrub the stoop! And make sure no street brats
have made water on the pillars on the alley side, while
you're at it.'

Arakasi bowed and scraped, and backed hastily out
the door. But though he detailed his sharpest squad of
street children to seek out the merchant's trail, no trace

of Chumaka could be found.

By sundown, Mara's Spy Master was forced to concede
the man's cleverness. It also left him worried. He felt cold
to discover a man who could match his skills at subterfuge
in the camp of an enemy. For not only was Jiro sworn
to destroy Mara, he was the most dangerous member of
the traditionalist faction that sought to bring down the

264

Mistress of the Empire
Emperor. Others might be more public in their opposition,
but Arakasi had no doubt that Jiro sought advantage
by letting others voice his desires. What progress had
been made to change a governance fallen to stagnation
and decay remained threatened. As evening fell, Arakasi
hastened through darkening streets toward the House of
Seven Stars. He must go there and shift identity, then
return to his mistress straight away. For although he had
run into a dead end in his lead to root out the Hamoi
Tong, he had other disquieting news to report, concerning
political affairs within the Empire. Still more upsetting was
his chance discovery that Chumaka, First Adviser to Jiro
of the Anasati, had somehow discovered a need to guard
his tracks.

Which of his agents, Arakasi wondered in anxiety, had
been found out?

10

Interval

Mara fretted.

The debilitating effects of her poisoning passed too slowly
for her liking. Two months since the event, and still she was
too weak to travel. She regarded the afternoon sunlight that
striped the carpet in her study, and frowned. She ought to
be in the Holy City, attending the semiannual convocation
of the Emperor's advisers. Frasai of the Tonmargu, the
Imperial Overlord, had lost his health; some whispered
in corners that he was becoming senile. The rumors
were baseless, but even in his vigorous years as Clan
Warchief, the Lord of the Tonmargu had ruled with
an uncertain hand, trying to please divergent factions.
Mara worried. With Frasai's authority crumbling, and the
Imperial Chancellor, Hokanu's father, Kamatsu, hampered
on all sides by traditionalist attacks that threatened not only
his own prosperity, but that of his allies and supporters, this
autumn's meeting could easily become a battleground.

The bloodier days when the Game of the Council had
been played under rule of a Warlord were still too recent
to be forgotten.

Mara hit her thin fist on her writing desk in an unwonted
display of frustration, and arose to pace. That she was too
weak to walk without the aid of a cane made her flush with
annoyance. The servants who attended her needs, and even
the runner boy by the doorway, turned their faces away
from the emotions that played with embarrassing plainness
across their Lady's face.

But today, she was too exasperated to waste effort
keeping up a proper Tsurani facade. Kevin the barbarian,
.



r

266 Mistress of the Empire

had he been there, would have teased her for that. Mara
felt a pang in a place she had thought hardened over with
callus. 'Damn the man,' she muttered, and banged down
her cane for emphasis.

A gentle voice chided from the doorway. 'The Empire
won't fall apart, just because its favorite Servant is too
unwell to go to council.' Clad in little more than an
overrobe dampened from sweat from his arms practice,
Hokanu stepped in, the limp in his stride nearly gone.
As Mara rounded on him in a fury, he caught her wrists.
She had no strength; his fingers could circle her bones like
shackles, she was so thin, and he had to take care not to
bruise her. He spoke again with a firmness that of necessity
he withheld from his grip. 'My Lady, Lord Hoppara will
have things well in hand. The council will not go to pieces
because you're not there.'

She looked up, her eyes snapping. After a moment, she
said, 'Stop treating me as though I were made of glass.
You and I know the traditionalists will be vicious in their
plotting, and not half of what happens will take place in
the council chamber. Bargains will- be made, terms set, ant
conditions agreed upon, and many who would otherwise
act with caution will not, because I am not there!'

Hokanu smiled, freed one of her wrists, and straightened
a fallen wisp of her hair. As he wound it back under what
he guessed was the correct jade pin, he hid his pain that her
dark locks had lost their shine, and her skin no longer had
the luster of corcara shell. Her dancer's litheness had gone,
through her weeks in a sickbed. She still looked peaked, and
not even Lujan could get her to rest through the heat of the
afternoons. 'Imperial politics aside, pretty bird, I've taken
the liberty of assembling your maids. You have a visitor.'

'Dear gods, state clothing?' Mara's fury changed course
toward annoyance. 'I'll suffocate. Whose father has come
this time, hoping to touch my robe hem to gain the

~.

:

~,

,
3
.4

Interval
- 267

luck to find auspicious husbands for his five ill-favored
daughters?'

Hokanu laughed, clasped her waist, and lifted her
wholesale into his arms. 'How bitchy we are today. Did
you know that Jican was approached by a merchant who
offered him metal for your cast-off clothing? He wanted to
sew the rags into ribbons to sell for souvenirs.'

Mara stiffened in affront. 'Jican didn't tell me that!'

'He knew,' Hokanu began, and grunted as the wraith-like
woman in his arms caught him in the diaphragm with an
elbow. He shifted her out of reach of a stiffening bruise
gained at sword drill, and manfully continued speaking.
'Your hadonra didn't tell you. He knew you'd ask to have
the poor man whipped off the estates, and he deemed that
inappropriate hospitality, even for a rude schemer.'

As her husband stepped into the hallway, Mara said a
word that certainly would have tarnished the reverent image
of her held by the commoners. Then she poked her husband
in the arm. 'So who is this visitor that Jican and you have
decided it's safe for me to see?'

A grin spread across Hokanu's handsome face. 'You'll

want your makeup. It's Lady Isashani of the Zacatecas.'

'Here?' Mara's voice was shrill with dismay. She reached
up and worriedly began to pat at her hair.

Since that was the first moment anyone had seen her have
a care for her personal appearance since her miscarriage,
Hokanu silently thanked the provocative beauty who
waited in Mara's best sitting room. Maybe after today the
Lady of the Acoma would hear sense, and stop spending the
reserves she needed for healing on frazzled nervous energy.
The healing priest had judged that the antidote had rescued
Mara from the very gates of the Red God's hall, and that
with rest and a calm mind, it would take three months
for her bodily recovery, then another to regain her full
strength. But Mara's emotional state after the death of

268

Mistress of the Empire

another baby and a near-miss on her own life had been
anything but restful. Hokanu feared it would be longer
than three months before his wife became her former self.

An emphatic squirm from his wife reminded Hokanu
painfully that her fitness had not been the only one to
suffer. If he did not sweat through a hot bath, and soon,
he was going to be wretchedly stiff. She interpreted his
grimace, as she was wont to do.

'You must not be long at your bath, dear man. If
Isashani's come, there will be subtleties and intrigues
about her as thick as perfume. It will take a handsome
face to flatter the information out of her, and since I'm
not male and a favorite of hers, you are placed on your
honor as Acoma consort to attend.'

Hokanu was neither so tired from his exercise, nor so
deaf to nuance, that he did not hear the underlying fear
in his Lady's voice. 'What troubles you, Lady? Normally
you would be delighted by a visit by Lady Isashani.'

Mara looked up at him, her eyes black in the thicker
gloom of the hallway. 'The Great Game,' she murmured.
'It turns too often toward bloodshed, and once more there
are rumors of a plot against the Emperor.'

Hokanu's face went hard. 'I'll be there. But after my
bath, and after you women have a chance to renew your
acquaintance.' Dangerous politics might be the reason
behind the Xacatecas dowager's visit; but Hokanu was
damned if he would forfeit the chance to have Mara
benefit from the former Ruling Lady of the Xacatecas'
shrewd insight and wit.

Mara looked like a lost waif in the enveloping weight of
her finery. She entered the sitting room with small, demure
steps, not for the sake of dainty appearance, but because of
weakness. The luster of her emeralds and jade outshone her
eyes, and the bow she gave the tall woman who awaited her
presence in purple-and-gold robes was of necessity shallow
and brief. Prolonged obeisance of any form would have seen
her on her knees on the floor, and stubborn pride prevented
her from having a serving man along to steady her.

Lady Isashani of the Xacatecas arose from her cushions
in a sweep of fine silk and perfumes. Her eyes were rich
brown, and exotically slanted. Her hair had silver mixed
in with its auburn, and the thyza powder she had used to
burnish her distinctive cheekbones must have been mixed
with sparkling bits of ground shell. The effect glittered with
tiny points of light, and enhanced the milk-and-rose skin
that had retained its glow- of youth as if by a magician's
spell. Renowned for her beauty, feared for her shrewdness,
and acknowledged as a matchless manipulator, the dowager
Lady of the Xacatecas hurried forward and supported
Mara's elbow.
'You're obviously not hale, my dear.' Her voice was
fine-grained, mellow as the tone of a treasured old instrument
handed down through generations of players. 'And
formalities are wasted between friends.'

Mara sank gratefully into deep cushions. Her own voice
sounded dry as the scratch of sand as she opened with the
time-honored words of greeting toward one of higher social
position. 'Welcome to my house, Lady. Are you well?'

Isashani inclined her head, a saucy smile dimpling
her cheeks. 'I thank the Good Servant for the undeserved
courtesy,' she answered, her tone one of genuine
pleasure at Mara's reversal of their ranks. While she

was Mara's senior in age and experience, she was but
a former Ruling Lady and Mara was Servant of the
Empire. 'I do well enough, but you look like hwaet
gruel left in the sun for the livestock. My dear, have
you given up eating altogether?' That her words were
direct as a spearcast did not surprise Mara, but that
bluntness had unbalanced many an opponent of House

270

Mistress of the Empire

Xacatecas whose wits were left muddled by the Lady's
alluring loveliness.

Mara dropped her eyes from the dazzle of gleaming viola
silk trimmed expensively with gold thread, and as quickly
glanced away from the tray of sweetmeats and sliced fruits
left by the servants for her guest's refreshment. She evaded.
'You surely didn't come here to hear me complain of my
health.' In fact, nourishment held no savor. The poison hat
left her stomach nervous and delicate.

The reply from the Lady came barbed as a riposte. 'I
certainly didn't come here to indulge you by watching
you sulk.'

Mara repressed a flinch. From anyone else she must
interpret such rebuke as an insult; but Isashani's deep
eyes held sympathy that stung her like a slap because it
was genuine. She sighed, and emotion that had hardened
since her miscarriage eased a little. 'I'm sorry. I didn't realise
my mood was so transparent.'

~Sorry won't suffice.' Isashani reached out a perfectly
groomed hand, selected a plate, and served up a portion
of the fruit. 'Eat, or else I'll call your maids and have them
bundle you straight off to bed.'

She would, too, Mara thought, and her perfidious maids
would probably obey without pause to question that the
wish of their mistress might not be in accord. Isashani
handled authority like an irascible field general, and folk
in her presence tended to march to her tune, and think
the better of their actions afterward. Since Mara did not
feel strong enough to argue, she began to nibble a slice of
jomach. She, too, could be direct. 'Why did you come?'

Isashani gave her back a look that measured; then, as
if reassured that Mara's inner fiber was not as depleted
as her physical resilience, she poured herself chocha from
the pot upon the snack tray. 'Lord Jiro of the Anasati has
made overtures toward my late husband's oldest bastard
son.' Her voice was hard as rare barbarian steel, at odds
with her fragile beauty.

Mara set aside her half-eaten fruit slice, unthinking.
A frown marked her brow. 'Wenaseti,' she said, quietly
questioning.

An elegant nod from her guest confirmed that this was
the name of the bastard in question; Isashani returned a
small smile in salute. That Mara knew the name at all
was impressive, since the late Lord Chipino had sampled
concubines and courtesans like fine wines. His bastards
were numerous as vermin, and though all had been raised
in evenhanded fairness by House Xacatecas, their temperaments
and characters varied like weather. The old Lord had
shared his sheets as readily for beauty as for brains, and
though none of the mothers he got with child had been able
to successfully challenge Isashani's preeminent position as
Lady and wife, some had been bitter in their defeat, and
had taught their resentment to their offspring. The current
heir, Hoppara, relied on his dowager mother's shrewd grasp
of family politics to keep his sprawling collection of siblings
and bastard relations in line.

'It is our great good fortune,' Isashani added with a
spark to her eye that suggested a sharpness of circumstance
smoothed over, 'that Wenaseti is a son loyal to his bloodline.
Jiro was rebuffed.'

Mara's frown did not ease, and the glint in Isashani's
glance did not soften. As second-in-command to Lord Frasai
as Imperial Overlord, Lord Hoppara of the Xacatecas held a
pivotal position in the Emperor's court. That he was young
for such a powerful post made him vulnerable; his staunch

advice and quick perception often stiffened Lord Frasai's
suggestible nature to take action in time to avert setbacks
from the traditionalist factions that sought to undermine
reform and reinstate the abolished office of Warlord.

Lord Hoppara removed meant a key defense lost: a

272 M,stress of tl~e Emptre
dangerous step closer to bloodshed and the barely stayed
threat of civil war. Something in Isashani's mien gave
warning.

Mara said, 'You've had an assassination attempt.'

Isashani's face went motionless as porcelain. 'Several.'

Mara dosed her eyes. She felt weak to her core, pressed
of a sudden by a weariness that made her long to give up ~
the greater fight, and to narrow her hopes and her efforts r3,
toward Acoma survival in the face of perils that closed like
a ring of naked swords. Yet she was Servant of the Empire,
and no longer the inexperienced girl torn from service to
Lashima's order to take over a beleaguered house. ~e
enemies of the Emperor were Acoma foes also; for she
was as the king post that holds the weight of a great roof.
To bring down imperial rule, Jiro and his allies must first
cut off her support.

The thought that followed hard after was that the Hamoi
Tong had been far too successful in its assassination
attempts against friends and allies and family. For as
long as Jiro ruled, the Anasati would continue to stoop
to the hiring of assassins; the tong had become a liability no
longer safe to ignore. Mara would never forget the horror of
near strangulation, or the pain of the miscarriage brought
on by poison. For the rest of her days she would suffer
grief for Ayaki's death. Wrapped in bleak thoughts, Mara was
made aware of Hokanu's entrance only by Isashani's
words of formal greeting.

She opened her eyes to see her husband bowing over the
Lady of the Xacatecas' hand. He was self-conscious as a
boy, an odd mien for a man who had commanded armies
in the name of his Emperor, and whose own social grace
had made Mara the envy of unmarried daughters of great
houses. Yet Isashani's skills at confounding men were so
facile that it was rumored that she was secretly a witch who
maniDulated her admirers through enchantment. Hokanu:

Interval

273

was one of her favorites, and her soft, bantering flattery set
him at his ease at once. Men she did not care for had been
known to stay tongue-tied in her presence for remarkable
intervals of time.

Still half dazzled by Isashani's charm, Hokanu took a
seat beside his wife. He folded Mara's hand inside his own
and said, 'We also are weary of playing mo-jo-go against
the tong.' He referred to a card game often played for heavy
stakes. 'Really, it would be a relief to us all if Ichindar
would sire a son. A male heir to the imperial throne would
do much to damp the fires of the traditionalist faction.'

Isashani's dark eyes flashed amusement. 'It has been a
dull few years for matchmaking, I'll agree, with every
highborn son taking concubines instead of wives, in the
hope of winning an imperial daughter for marriage. The
parties are getting quite vicious, with so many unwed girls
spitting at each other like sarcat cubs.'

From there the subject turned to the trade war between
a consortium from the Omechan Clan and a Kanazawai
Clan group, which was causing Hokanu's father setbacks
in the resin market. Frustrated by the resultant shortage in
the production of laminated hide, the armourers' guild was
on the verge of joining the fray, with the shipdmasters and
stevedores in Jamar upset by embargoes that disrupted sailing
schedules. Since the Acoma had needra hides mildewing
in warehouses in Sulan-Qu, and the Anasati did not, the
consensus was that Jiro's allies were behind the disturbance.
It did the Omechan no good to recall that their own disunity
had provided the opening that had given the Emperor
absolute power to begin with.

Afternoon blended into evening. As Mara's weariness
became evident, and she excused herself to retire, Isashani
at last took her leave. Seated in her litter in the dooryard,

with her bearers in place to depart, she raised her dark eyes
to Hokanu and planted one last barbed comment. 'Really,

274

Mistress of the Empire

young master, you had better take pains to see that your ~
wife eats, or the gossip will go round that you are starving -]
her to an early grave, in the hope of joining the circle of

suitors who pant after Ichindar's eldest daughter.'

Hokanu's eyebrows rose as though he had been swordpricked. '
Lady, is that a threat?'

Isashani smiled with poisonous sweetness. 'Depend on it.
My late husband was fond of Mara, and I don't want his
shade out to haunt me. Also, my Hoppara would probably
challenge you to a duel of honor over the issue, were he
to see your Lady so sad. After her heroics during the Night
of the Bloody Swords, he compares all the young women
he meets to her.'

'Indeed.' Hokanu's voice turned serious. 'No man in the
Empire cares more for our Good Servant than I. And your
visit has done more for her than you can possibly know.'
Lady Isashani's visit at least inspired Mara to resume
normal care for her appearance. She called upon the skills
of her maids, and if at first her improved complexion was
solely attributable to makeup, Hokanu was careful not to
badger her. If she still kept long hours over her reports, she
at least made an effort to eat more; and once she took up
the practice of meditating in a small boat upon the lake,
her pallor disappeared soon after.

'It's very hard to worry with the water all around,
peaceful under the sky,' she said, stepping ashore one
evening when the afterglow of sunset turned waveless and
landscape all to gold. Holding her in his embrace, Hokanu
hated to disrupt the moment. But soon enough she would
find out, and unless he wished to provoke an explosion, he
dared not hold back fresh news.

'Arakasi is back.'

'So soon?' Mara lifted her face, kissing her husband's lips
with the absentee air of one already preoccupied. 'He must

Interval

.

~_

275

have heard of the attempt on Lord Hoppara before I sent
out my summons.'

The moment of warmth was cut short as the Lady
hastened to meet her Spy Master. Hokanu accompanied
her into the estate house, through hallways dimmed with
evening shadows, and past the servants who dispersed to
light oil lamps. Faintly, from one of the courtyards, came
the echoes of Justin's happy shouts.

'What's got the little one all stirred up?' Mara asked.

Hokanu put his arm around her shoulder. 'A new game.
Your Adviser for War laid a bet with the boy that he could
not be ambushed unawares. Justin has taken to lurking
behind the furniture, and the servants won't use the back
hallways anymore, for fear of being set upon.'

'And Keyoke?' Mara turned the last corner and passed
the length of another corridor tiled in old, worn mosaic.
'Has he been caught?'

Hokanu laughed. 'Several times. His hearing is not what
it once was, and his crutch makes him easy prey.'

Mara shook her head. 'Just so Justin doesn't terrorise
him. The old campaigner has received scars enough in
Acoma service without getting battered in his twilight
years.' ~ j

But Keyoke, Hokanu knew, did not mind his bruises in
the least, for Justin held the affection of the grandson the
old man had never had.

The couple reached the doorway to Mara's study. There
Hokanu lifted his arm and gave his wife a questioning
glance. The servants had not reached this hallway yet, and
the lamps were still unlit. Mara's face was a pale oval in
the shadows, and her expression was unreadable. After a
moment she said, 'Stay with me this time. Lady Isashani's
news has left me unsettled, and I would like your counsel.'

Hokanu heard the worry in her voice. He asked, 'Should
I send for Saric and Incomo?'

276

Mistress of the Empire

Mara "turned a shake of her head. 'No. They would
not condone what I plan, and I see no need to endure their
criticism.'

Suddenly cold, there in the warm darkness, with the
calls of the servants near to hand, and the smells of supper
wafting from the kitchen, Hokanu reached out and tipped
Mara's chin up with one finger. 'Just what are you thinking,
pretty Lady?' His tone was at odds with the apprehension
that bound his breath.

Mara answered after a pause. 'I am thinking that the
Hamoi Tong has made trouble for far too long. I have lost
a son and an unborn child to it. I would not see Lady
Isashani suffer the same loss, and I owe her late husband,
Lord Chipino, at least that much.'

Hokanu released a sigh, distressed by the strain that came
between them over the subject of children. 'It is not the tong
but the enemy who employs it that is to be feared.'

Mara gave back a fractional nod. 'I know. That is why I
am going to ask Arakasi to penetrate its headquarters and
steal its records. I will know its employer, and have his plots
out into the open.'

'His name is probably Anasati,' Hokanu said.

'One of his names.' Mare's tone was ominous. 'I would
know the others as well, that no more parents lose young
heirs to the cause of murderous politics. Come, let us go
and charge Arakasi to undertake this difficult task.'
Hokanu could only nod as he escorted his wife into the
hall leading to her study. He held respect close to awe for
the Spy Master, since watching him act on the night they
had sought the antidote. Yet even for a man of his gifts of
guile and disguise, to infiltrate the Hamoi Tong was asking
the impossible. Hokanu had no argument for the notion
that his Lady was sending her Spy Master off to die at a
time when she most needed his services.

Interual

277

Arakasi departed his Lady's study preoccupied. Talk had
left his voice hoarse. This night's report had been extensive,
the end result of many months of labor in the field. The Spy
Master had pushed his agents hard, had exhorted them to
seek out answers even in the face of the dangers posed
by Jiro's First Adviser, Chumaka. Two men had forfeited
their cover to gain information, and had chosen suicide by
the blade rather than face inquisition and torture, and risk
betraying their mistress. And although they had winnowed
out several traditionalist plots and shifts in old alliances
against the Emperor, they had come no nearer to setting
a name to the employer who had sent the Hamoi Tong
against Mara.

More disquieting news than the late failed attempt
against Lord Hoppara was that several other attempts had
been foiled by Arakasi's agent in the Xacatecas household.
Twice she had been 'clumsy' around the cooks, and spilled
dishes of food she suspected had been poisoned.

That report had caused Mara to flinch openly. Her face
had paled, and then flushed with a depth of anger Arakasi
had never seen. Her words still rang in his memory, edged
with a grief that never left her since Ayaki's loss. 'Arakasi,'
she had said, 'I ask that you find a way to steal the records
of the Hamoi Tong. These attacks against us,and now
the allies of our Emperor, must be brought to a stop. If
more than the Anasati are behind them, I would have you
find out.'

Arakasi had accepted the command, fist over heart in a
soldier's salute. After months of attempts to penetrate the
Anasati accounts, and three unsuccessful tries to place new
agents on Jiro's estate, he regarded the order to go directly

after the tong almost as a relief. Arakasi had conceded
from frustration that Chumaka was by far the most clever
opponent he had ever faced. But even as brilliant a player of
politics as the Anasati First Adviser would not anticipate a

278 Mistress of t/'e Empire

move as foolhardy as attempting to challenge the assassins.
And while Chumaka might not know Mara's Spy Master
by name, he was developing an understanding that let him
anticipate Arakasi's methods. A dose of the unexpected,
especially if no dear motives could be discerned, might
throw Chumaka off balance for a while.

Quiet as shadow, and deep in his own thoughts, Arakasi
turned, keeping to the dimmer passageways out of habit.
This narrow hall crossed the oldest part of the estate
house. The floors were built on two heights, legacy o f
some forgotten Lord who had believed he should always
stand above his servants. He, or perhaps one of his
wives, had also been a devotee of bric-a-brac. The walls
held cavernous niches for statuary and artworks. Arakasi
personally thought the things a liability, since some were
large enough to harbor an assassin, or a large child.

Consequently, he was not taken entirely off guard when
an earsplitting yell sounded at his back, and someone gave
an athletic leap with intent to hammer him down from
behind.

He spun, light and fast, and found himself with an
armload of six-year-old, kicking and cross that his surprise
attack had been anticipated.

Mara's Spy Master blew a lock of reddish gold hair out
of his lips and said equably, 'Do I look so much like Keyoke
today that you saw fit to test my reflexes?'

Young Justin giggled and squirmed, and managed to raise
the toy sword carved from wood and inlaid with lacquer
disks. 'Already killed Keyoke twice today,' he crowed.

Arakasi's brows rose. He shifted his grip, surprised at
the strength required to restrain the energetic little boy.
Certainly he was his father's son, with his impertinent attitude
and legs as long as those of a corani, an antelope-like
creature renowned for its fierce speed. 'How many times
did Keyoke kill you today, imp?'

Interval

279

Justin looked sheepish. 'Four.' He added a rude phrase
in the barbarian tongue, most likely overheard from a
soldier in the barracks who had been close to Kevin on
the campaign in Dustari. Arakasi took mental note that
the boy had ears as quick as his wits; the child was not
too young to eavesdrop on his elders. 'I have the feeling
it's after your bedtime,' the Spy Master accused. 'Do your
nurses know you're awake?' And carefully he began to walk
in the direction of the child's quarters.

Justin shook back a curly mop of hair. 'Nurses don't
know where I am.' He smiled proudly, then looked dismayed
as doubt crept in. 'You won't tell them? I'll get
punished for certain.'

A gleam lit Arakasi's dark eyes. 'There are terms,' he
said in all seriousness. 'You will have to make a promise
in exchange for my silence.'

Justin looked solemn. Then, as he had seen the soldiers
do at dice to seal a debt, he raised his closed fist and touched
thumb to forehead. 'I keep my word.'

Arakasi choked back a grin. 'Very well, honorable young
master. You will not make a sound when I slip you into your
sleeping quarters, and you will lie on your mat without
moving, with your eyes closed, until you wake up, and it
is morning.'

Justin gave a howl of betrayal. So like his father, Arakasi
thought, as he lugged the protesting boy off to the nursery.
Neither would Kevin accept protocols, or propriety. He
was honest when it was a frank embarrassment, and
lied whenever it suited him. He was anathema to any
well-run Tsurani household, but life had certainly been
less entertaining since his departure through the rift gate

back to Midkemia. Even Jican, who had been the butt of
more than his share of Kevin's jokes, had been known to
remark wistfully on his absence.

In true form, Justin ceased his outcry on the threshold of

280

Mistress of the Empire

his own room. His tantrum was not worth continuing at
the risk of wrath from his nurses. He held to his warrior's
word as Arakasi slid him into his blankets; but he did not
close his eyes. Instead he glared in outraged indignation
as Arakasi stood by, until at last he lost his battle with
fatigue and slipped into the deep and healthy sleep of a
young boy.

That he would have sneaked out of his chambers had
Arakasi not stood by to enforce his warrior's given word,
the Spy Master had no doubt. In many ways, the boy was
more Midkemian in manner than Tsurani, a trait his mother
and foster father encouraged.

Whether his un-Tsurani bent would prove an asset in
adulthood, or whether it would leave the Acoma name
and natami vulnerable to Jiro and his allies, could not be
foretold. Arakasi sighed as he slipped through the screen
and made his way across moonlit gardens. Reaching the
quarters he used on his rare stays at the estate, Arakasi
changed out of his most recent disguise, that of an itinerant
-peddler of cheap jewelry. He bathed in water gone tepid,
unwilling to waste time to have servants make the tub hot,
and thought as he sponged away road grime.

The only written records of contracts held by the Hamoi,
or any other tong, would be in the possession of the
Obajan himself. Only one trusted successor, usually a son,
would know where those scrolls were secreted, against the
possibility of the Obajan's accidental demise. For Arakasi
even to locate the records would require him to come
within touching distance of the leader of the Red Flower
Brotherhood, the most powerful tong in the Empire.

Arakasi rubbed dye from his hair, his vigorous scrubbing
as much a release from frustration. To gain the heart of the
tong would be far more difficult than his past forays into
the Imperial Palace.

Of the risks, Arakasi had said nothing. He had but
to look at Mara's wan face to know that more worries
would further delay her return to health. If she knew the
risks behind the order she had just delivered, she would
be strained enough without anyone seeming to call ha
judgment into question.

Arakasi settled back, unmindful that the last warmth had
fled from the water. He reflected on his encounter with
Justin. Mara's worry would revolve around the well-being
of her surviving child, Arakasi knew. this shared duty was
to see that the boy survived to reach adulthood; this
moment, that meant finding means to bring down the
most dangerously guarded man in the Empire: the Obajan
of the Hamoi Tong.

That any sane man would have regarded the task as an
impossibility bothered Arakasi not at all. What troubled
his devious mind was that for the first time in his long and
varied career he had no clue about where he should start.
The location of the Brotherhood of Assassins' headquarters
was a closely held secret. The agents who took payment
for commissions were not easy marks, as the apothecary
he had once tortured in a back alley in Kentosani had
been. They would commit suicide - as they had, many
times in history - before revealing the next in their chain

of contacts. They were as loyal to their own murderous
cult as any of Arakasi's agents were to Mara.troubled,
Arakasi slipped out of the tub and dried off. He dressed
in a simple robe. For almost half the night, he rested in
a near-meditative state, sifting his memory for facts and
faces that might lend him a starting connection.

A few hours before dawn, he stood up, did some
stretching exercises, and gathered together those things
he felt he would need. He exited the estate house without
drawing notice from the sentries. Hokanu had once joked
that, one day, a warrior might accidently kill Mara's Spy
Master, should Arakasi continue to skulk about the estate at

282

Mistress of the Empire

night. Arakasi had replied that a guard who slew him should
be promoted, as he would have rid Mara of an ineffective
servant.

Dawn found Arakasi on the far side of the lake, walking
steadily as he took his own counsel. Plans were formulated,
reviewed, and discarded, but he felt no despair, only a
quickening sense of challenge. By sundown, he was at
the river, melding with other travelers waiting for a
commercial barge, another nameless passenger on his way
to the Holy City.

11

Bereavement

Months passed.

The bloom at last returned to Mara's cheeks. Spring
came, and the needra gave birth to their calves, and
the barbarian mares delivered seven healthy foals to add
to the stables. With Lujan's permission, Hokanu had
appropriated two patrols of swordsmen and, into the
summer, proceeded to teach them to ride, and then to
drill on horseback in formation.

The dust from such maneuvers overhung the fields in the
dry heat, and the lakeshore in the late afternoons became
boisterous with the laughter and chaffing as off-duty
comrades watched the chosen few swim their barbarian
beasts, or sluice the sweat of a workout off glossy hides.
More than riders and horses emerged wet, some days when
the play got rough. From the terraced balcony that Tasaio of
the Minwanabi had once used to oversee field tactics, Mara
often watched. She was attended by maids, and her young
son, and increasingly often by her husband, still wearing
his riding leathers, saber, and quirt.

One afternoon, as the sun sank low, as a scarred and
grizzled old veteran bent to kiss his chosen mare on the
muzzle, Mara gave the first carefree smile she had shown in
weeks. 'The men are certainly becoming used to the horses.
Not a few of their sweethearts have been complaining that
they spend more time in the stables than they do in their
rightful beds.'

Hokanu grinned and slipped his hand around her slender
middle. 'Are you making such complaint, wife?'
Mara turned in his arms, and caught Justin staring

.~
:~

,.

:;

.... ~
lL

284 Mistress of the Empire

with guilelessly wide blue eyes. The look reminded her
poignantly of his father, before he made a rude symbol with
his hands that he certainly had not learned from his nurses.
'You're going to make a baby tonight,' he said, proud of
his deduction, and not at all nonplussed when the nearest
of his nurses gave his cheek an open-handed slap.

'Impertinent boy! How dare you speak to your mother
so? And wherever you learned that finger sign, you'll be whipped
if you try it again.' With a red-faced bow to:
master and mistress, the maid hustled a protesting Justin
off to bed.

'But the sun's still up,' his voice pealed back in protest
'How can I go to sleep when I can still see outside?' '.e

The pair disappeared around the stair that led down the
hill, Justin'.' hair catching the lowering light like flame.

'By the gods, he's growing up,' Hokanu said fondly
'We're going to have to find him an arms tutor soon:
His ciphers and writing are plainly not enough to keep!
him from spying on the servants.'

'He wasn't.' Mara's hands tightened around her husband's
trim middle, appreciative of the muscles that his
hours in the saddle kept firm. 'He sneaks out to th'
barracks, or the slave quarters, every chance he gets
And listens intently when the men boast of their feats.
with ladies of the Reed Life or serving girls. He is hi'
father's son when it comes to staring at the women, and
something he said to my maid Kesha this morning made
her blush like a maiden which she's not.'

Her head tilted sideways, and she regarded her husband
through her lashes. 'He's a randy, rude little boy who h;
better be married off young, lest he sow Acoma baster
like hwaet, and have half the fathers of girls in the Nation
after him with swords.'

Hokanu chuckled. 'Of all the problems you might ha
with him, that one worries me least.'

_

Bereavement

285

Mara's eyes widened. 'He's barely seven!'

'High time he had a little brother, then,' Hokanu said.
'Another little demon to look after, to keep his mind off
bigger trouble.'

'You're a randy, rude little boy,' Mara retaliated, and with
a quick, breathless laugh slipped out of his arms. She raced
off down the hill with her robe half-undone in abandon.

Hokanu gathered himself in surprise and followed.
Delight, more than exertion, caused his face to flush.
His Lady had not been playful for entirely too long, since
the poisoning. As he knew she desired, he ran easily, and
did not extend his long, athletic stride to overtake her until
she had reached the glen by the lakeshore.

The summer was fully upon them. Though dry, the
grasses still retained a trace of green. The stinging insects
of the early season had dispersed, and the shrill of night
callers had not yet died for the season. The air was syrupy
warm. Hokanu caught his wife in a flying tackle, and both
of them tumbled to the earth, breathless, disheveled, and
utterly departed from solemnity.

Mara said, 'My Lord and consort, we seem to have a
problem between us, that being a shortage of heirs.'

His fingers were already loosening the rest of the ties
on her underrobe. 'Lujan's sentries patrol the lakeshore
after dark.'

Her smile come back to him, a flash of white in the dusk.

'Then we have no time to lose, on several counts.'

'That,' Hokanu said gaily, 'is hardly a problem.' After
that, neither of them had the attention to spare for talk.

**~

The much-longed-for, and overly disputed, heir to the
Shinzawai must have been conceived on that night, either
there under the open sky, or later, amid scented cushions,
after a late-night cup of sa wine shared in their private
chambers. Six weeks later, Mara was sure. She knew the

286 Mistress of the Empire
signs, and though she woke feeling miserable, Hokanu
could hear her singing in the mornings. His smile was
bittersweet. But what he knew, and she did not, was that
this child to come would be her last, the miracle that was
all the healers of Hantukama's priesthood had been able
to bestow upon her.

Until he overheard a speculative argument between the kitchen
scullions and the bastard child of one of the house"
hold factors, it never occurred to him, that the babe, when
it came, might be female. He let the matter lie, and took
no notice of the bets that were being laid in the barracks
over the forthcoming child's unknown sex.

That this, Mara's last child, who was to be heir to hi.
family name and fortune, might not be a son quite simply
did not bear thinking about.

The pregnancy that had begun in such carefree abandon
did not continue in the same vein - not since the poisoning,
and not since the attempts on the lives of Acoma allies.
Lujan tripled his patrols and personally inspected the
checkpoints in the passes. The prayer gate over the river)
entrance to the lake was never without watchers in it'
towers, and a company of warriors was always armed
and at the ready. But autumn came, and the needra cows
were driven to market, and commerce went on without
interruption. Even the silk caravans suffered no raid, which
was not usual, and did nothing to set anyone at ease. Jican.
spent hours mumbling over armloads of tally slates. Not
even the surplus of hwaet profits seemed to please him. '

'Nature is often most bountiful before the severest d
storms,' he grumbled pessimistically when Mara complained
that his restlessness was making her neck ache
Weighed down by her swollen middle, she could ha~i
walk the floor with him, to follow his render It's too quiet by far,' said the little hadonra, droppi'
-a

Bereavement

287

like an arrow-shot bird to the cushions before the mistress's
writing desk. 'I don't like it, and I don't believe that Jiro is
sitting by innocently, up to his nose in old scrolls.'

In fact, Arakasi's agents had sent word. Jiro was not
idle, but had been hiring engineers and joiners to build
strange-looking machinery in what had been his father's
marshaling yard. That the equipment was intended for
siege and sapping was probable, and by dint of suggestively
placed gossip, old Frasai of the Tonmargu had been
convinced by Lord Hoppara of the Xacatecas to spend
imperial funds. Workers had been taken on to repair the
cracks in the walls of Kentosani, and in the Emperor's
inner citadel, caused by the earthquake set loose by the
renegade magician Milamber when he had wreaked havoc
at the Imperial Games years past.

As autumn dragged on, and the wet season threatened,
Mara found herself as restless as her hadonra, and unable
to do so much as pace. Her only respite came upon Justin's
eighth birthday, when Hokanu presented him with his first
real sword, not a mock weapon used by children. He
had received the well-made small blade with solemnity
and resisted the impulse to rush around swinging it at
everything in sight. If Keyoke had instructed'+him on the
proper behavior, such- forbearance was lacking the next
morning, when Justin charged with bared blade down the
hillside to his lesson from his arms tutor.

Mara saw her son from the terrace, wishing she could go
watch Justin take his instruction. But her healers would not
let her stir from her cushions, and her husband, who usually
was indulgent when she became stubborn, would not relent.
The heir that she carried must not be risked. To ease her
confinement, anything she requested was sent for.

Gifts from other nobles arrived, as her time approached,
some lavish, others minor tokens, the minimum tradition
demanded. An expensive but undeniably ugly vase was

288 Mistress of the Empire

Jiro's gift to the expectant Servant of the Empire. Amused
to sardonic humor, she ordered it given to her servants so
they might use it to carry out night soils from the house.

But her most welcome gifts of all were the rare books
delivered in chests that smelled of mildew and dust. Isashani
had sent them, instead of the more usual lacquered boxes
or exotic songbirds. Upon reading the inscription on the
gift card, Mara had laughed. Beneath the makeup, and the
feminine airs, there was no limit to Isashani's shrewdness.
It was her son, Hoppara, who sent a traditional if astonishingly
extravagant arrangement of sweet flowers. ::

Surrounded by painted vases, Mara breathed in the
perfume of cut kekali blossoms and tried not to think
of Kevin the barbarian, who had first taught her what it
was to be a woman in the dusk of a garden, years past. A
frown on her face that had nothing to do with the lighting,
she studied a treatise on weapons and campaigns of war.
Her frown deepened as she considered the likelihood that
Jiro had also studied this very text. From there her thoughts
wandered. Arakasi's messages arrived irregularly since she
had charged him with his mission to acquire the Hamoi
Tong's records. She had not seen him in months, and missed
his quick wit and his unfailing appreciation of odd gossip.
Closing the book, she tried to imagine his location. Perhaps
he sat in some distant inn, disguised as a needra driver, or a
sailor. Or he might be lunching late with a merchant in some
distant city. She refused to consider that he could very well
be dead.

Arakasi at that moment lay on his side amid a tangle
of silk sheets, and ran light, expert fingers down the
thigh of a nubile girl. That she was by binding contract
another man's property, and that he risked his very life
to seduce her, was not at the forefront of his thoughts;
He had come in through the window. The absent masters
bedchambers in the midafternoon were the last place any

Bereavement

289

servant or guardsman bent on protecting the virtue of a
slave concubine would expect to find her with a lover.

The girl was bored enough to be excited by the adventure,
and young enough to believe herself immune to misfortune.
Her latest master was old, and fat, and his prowess had
flagged with age. Arakasi posed a different sort of challenge.
It was she who was jaded, having been trained for pleasure
and bed sport since the age of six. Whether or not he could
successfully excite her was the sum of the issue at hand.

For Mara's Spy Master, the stakes that he dallied to win
were a great deal higher.

In the half-light shed by closed screens, the air smelled
heavy with incense and the girl's perfume. The sheets had
been treated with herbs that in some circles were considered
aphrodisiacs. Arakasi, who had read texts on medicine,
knew the belief was a myth. The elderly master had wealth
enough not to care if his money had been wasted. The
miasma of scents was powerfully cloying, causing Arakasi
to regret that the screens must stay closed. Almost, he would
rather have endured the stinking loincloth and apron he
had bought from the dyers in Sulan-Qu, which he used
for disguise when he did not want well-bred passersby
examining his face too closely. The reek at least would
have kept him alert. As it was, he had to fight not to fall
fatally asleep.

The girl shifted. Sheets slid away from her body with
a hiss of silk on skin. She was magnificent, outlined in
afternoon light, her hair in heavy honey-colored curls on
the pillows. Slant eyes the color of jade fixed on Arakasi.
'I never said I had a sister.'

She referred to a comment some minutes old. The
Spy Master's fingers slipped past her hip, dipped down,
and continued stroking. Her magnificent eyes drooped
half closed, and her hands spasmed on the silk like a cat's
paws, kneading.

290 Mistress of the Empire

The velvet-soft voice of Arakasi said, 'I know from the
merchant who sold your contract.'

She stiffened under his couch, spoiling ten minutes of his
careful ministrations. She had had men enough that she did
not care. 'That was not a prudent remark.'

Insult did not enter into the question; that she was in
truth little better than a very expensive prostitute was
not.the issue. Who had been the sister's buyer: that was
dangerous knowledge, and the dealer who had made the
transaction would hardly be so free, or so foolhardy, that
he would tell. Arakasi stroked aside honey-gold locks, and
cradled the back of the girl's neck. 'I am not a prudent man,
Kamlio.'

Her eyes widened and her lips shaped a wicked smile.
'You are not.' Then her expression turned thoughtful. 'You
are a strange man.' Breathing deeply, she feigned a pout.
'Sometimes I think you are a noble, playing the part of a
poor merchant.' She fixed him with a steady gaze. 'Your
eyes are older than your appearance.' When a lingering
moment passed, and he gave no answer, she said, 'You are
not very forthcoming.' Then she licked her lips suggestively.
'Neither are you amusing. So. Amuse me. I am someone
else's toy. Why should I risk disgrace to become yours?'

As Arakasi drew breath to reply, Kamlio raised a finger
and stopped his lips. Her nails were dusted with gilt,
costliest of cosmetics. 'Don't say you'll buy me my freedom
for love. That would be trite.'

Arakasi blessed the rosy flesh of her fingertips with a kiss.
Then, very gently, he removed her hand, so he could speak
His expression was faintly offended. 'It would not be trite.
It would be true.' Mara had set no limits on his expenses,
ever, and for stakes so high as access to the tong's most
guarded chieftain, she would hardly stint his needs.

The girl in his arms went icy with distrust. To free he r
from the seven-year contract signed and sold to her aged
master would be worth the cost of a town house; but to
buy out her worth, and the expense of her training and
upbringing, from the merchant of the pleasure house who
had invested in her - that would be as much as a small
estate. Her contracts would be sold, and sold again, until
she was faded to the point where even her skills between the
sheets would be spurned. 'You were never so rich.' Even her
voice was contemptuous. 'And if the master who employs
you is so wealthy, then I risk my very life to be speaking
to you.'
Arakasi bent his head and kissed her neck. His hands did
not tighten against her tenseness; she could at any moment
draw away, a nuance she understood, and in appreciation
of the subtlety, she kept still. Few men treated her as though
she had a will of her own, or feelings. This one was rare. And
his hands were very schooled. She heard the note of sincerity
in his voice as he added, 'But I work for no master.'

His tone conveyed the nuance. His mistress, then, would
have little use for an expensive courtesan. The offer of
freedom might be genuine, if he had access to the money.

Arakasi's hands recovered lost ground, and Kamlio
quivered. He was more than rare: he was gifted. She settled
a little, her flank melting into the curve of his body.

As though the footsteps of servants did not come and go
in the corridor, separated by only a screen, Arakasi's touch
drifted down the girl's golden flesh. She leaned into him.
Pleasure came rarely enough to her, who was a thing bought
and sold to meet the needs of others. Discovery might earn
her a beating; her partner would wind up dishonorably dead
on a rope end. He was either exceptionally brave, or else
careless unto insanity. Through skin that had been caressed
and cajoled into unwonted sensitivity, the girl could feel the

unhurried beat of his heart.

'This mistress,' Kamlio murmured languidly. 'She means
so very much to you?'

292

Mistress of tl~e Empire

'Just at this moment I was not thinking of her,' Arakasi
said, but it was not his words that convinced as his lips
met hers with a tenderness akin to worship. The kiss
blurred all doubts and soon after, all thoughts. The filtered
sunlight through the windows blended with a red-golden
haze behind her eyes, as passion was drawn out of her and
savored like fine wine.

At last, gasping and drenched with the fine sweat of
lovemaking, Kamlio forgot herself and dung to the lean
form of the man as she exploded into relief. She laughed
and she wept, and somewhere between amazement and
exhaustion, she whispered the location of the sister sold
away in far Ontoset.

Despite his mysterious background, it did not occur
to Kamlio that her partner might be no more than a
consummate actor until she rolled over. The light touch that
cradled her body was no more than the fold of warm sheets.
She flung back damp hair, her beautiful eyes narrowed and
furious to find the window opened, and himself gone, even
to the clothes he had worn.

She opened her lips to call out, in a pique that would see
him caught and executed, never mind his clever hands and
Lying promises. But on the moment the air filled her lungs,
the latch on the screen tripped up.

Arakasi must have heard the heavy tread of her elderly
master, returned early from his meeting with his hadonra.
Stoop-shouldered, palsied, grey-haired, he shuffled into her
chamber. His milky eyes blinked at the twisted sheets, and
his dry, chill hands reached out and stroked her skin, heated
still, and damp from a surfeit of passion.

'My dear, are you ill?' he said in his old man's voice.

'Bad dreams,' she said, sulky, but trained by instinct to
use the mood to increase her allure. 'I dozed in the afternoon
heat, and had nightmares, nothing more.' Grateful that her
deft, dark-haired lover had made clean his escape, Kamlio

Bereauement

.

:~

.:

293

sighed and bent her skills upon her decrepit master, who
was harder, it sometimes seemed, to please than she was.

Outside the window, screened from sight by a veiling of
vines and unkempt akasi, Arakasi listened intently to the
sounds that issued from the bedchamber. In relief, and an
uncharacteristic anger, he silently donned his clothing. He
had lied only once: never had he ceased thinking of his
mistress. Over the years since he had sworn to Acoma
service, Mara had become the linchpin of his life.

But the girl, half spoiled, fully hardened to the resentment
of a whore brought up to the Reed Life, had touched
him. His care for her had been real, and that by itself was
disturbing. Arakasi shook off the memory of Kamlio's
long, fine hair and her jewel-clear eyes. He had work to
do, before her freedom from usage could be arranged. For
the information she had delivered in the naive belief that
she had disclosed only a family secret was the possible
location of the harem of the Hamoi Tong's Obajan. The
tenuous link she had managed to retain with her sister, used
to exchange spurious and widely erratic communication,
held far more peril than she knew.
It had taken months for Arakasi to trace a rumor that
a girl of unusual beauty, a sister to another, had been
purchased by a certain trader, one whom Arakasi had
suspected as a Hamoi Tong agent. He was now dead, a

necessary by-product of Arakasi's identifying him, but his
purchase of so expensive a courtesan led Arakasi to the near
certainty that she must belong to the Obajan, or one of his
closest lieutenants.

And the fact she had been sent to Ontoset made peculiar
sense; it was safer for the tong to have its seat so distant from
where it was contacted, a minor shrine outside the Temple of
Turakamu. Arakasi himself had many agents who suspected
he was based in Jamar or Yankora, because that was where
all their messages originated.

294

Mistress of the Empire

Arakasi had resisted the temptation to leave at once for
Ontoset and had spent valuable weeks in Kentosani seeking
out the girl's sister.

The Spy Master had studied his prey for weeks before
making himself known to her. Turning away Kamlio's:
questions with vague references he led her to believe him
the son of some powerful noble, fallen to low estate because
of a romantic adventure.

As he repeatedly risked shameful death to see her, then
at last Kamlio had welcomed him to her bed.

Without her, Arakasi might have searched a lifetime
and never obtained a due to what he sought by Mara's
command. As he sat, still as stone, awaiting the dusk and
the chance to steal away, he pondered how much he owed
to a girl who had been raised up to be no more than a bed
toy. He knew he should leave this woman and never see
her again, but something in him had been touched. Now
he confronted a new fear: that he might entreat Mara to
intercede and buy the girl's contract, and that, once free,
Kamlio might laugh at his genuine care for her.

For a man brought up by women of the Reed Life,
understanding of her contempt came all too easily. Veiled
by the bushes, suffering insect bites and muscle cramps from
his pose of forced stillness, Arakasi sighed. He closed his
eyes, but could not escape the sounds of Kamlio's marathon
efforts in the bedchamber to gratify the lechery of a man too
old to perform. Arakasi endured a wait that passed painfully
slowly. Once he was sure the old master was asleep, he
silently made his departure. But with him came vivid
memories and the uncomfortable, unwanted awareness
that he had come to care for Kamlio. His feelings for
her were folly; any emotional ties to those not of the
Acoma made him vulnerable. And he knew that if he was
vulnerable, so then was Lady Mara.

The messenger hesitated after he made his bow. Breathless
still from his run through the hills bordering the estate, he
might have been taking an ordinary pause to recover his
wind; except that his hands were tense, and the eyes he
raised to Hokanu were dark with pity.

The Shinzawai heir was not a man to shy from misfortune.
Campaigns in the field had taught him that setbacks
must be faced at once, and overcome, lest enemies gain
opening and triumph. 'The news is bad,' he said quickly.
'Tell me.'

Still mute, and with a second bow made out of sympathy,
the messenger drew a scroll out of a carry tube fashioned of
bone strips laced together with cord. The instant Hokanu
saw the red dye that edged the parchment, he knew: the
word was a death, and even as he accepted the document
and cracked the seal, he guessed the name inside would be
his father's.

The timing could not be worse, he thought in that
stunned, disbelieving interval before grief struck his mind
like a fist. His father, gone. The man who had understood
him as no other; who had adopted him when his blood
sire had been called into the Assembly of Magicians, and
who had raised him with all the love any son could
require.

There would be no more midnight talks over hwaet beer,
or jokes about hangovers in the mornings. There would be
no more scholarly arguments, or reprimands, or shared
elation over victories. The grandchild soon to be born to
Mara would never meet his grandfather.

Fighting sudden tears, Hokanu found himself mechanically
dismissing the messenger. Jican appeared, as if spellcalled,
and quietly dealt with the matter of refreshments
and disposition of the bone token that couriers received
in acknowledgment of completion of their missions. The
hadonra finished with necessities, and turned back to his

296

Mistress of tbe Empire

mistress's husband, expectant. Hokanu had not moved,
except to crush the red-bordered scroll between his fist.

'The news was bad,' Jican surmised in commiseration.

'My father,' Hokanu said tightly. 'He died in his sleep,
in no pain, of natural causes.' He shut his eyes a moment,
opened them, and added, 'Our enemies will be gloating,
nonetheless.'

Jican fingered the tassels on his sash, diffident, careworn, i
and silent. He had met Kamatsu of the Shinzawai; he knew
the Lord's hadonra well. The most enduring tribute he could
think to mention was not the usual one, or the most elegant.
He spoke anyway. 'He is a man who will be missed by his

servants, young master. He was well loved.' ;,

Hokanu raised eyes dark with hurt. 'My father was like
that.' He sighed. 'He abused no man and no beast. His heart
was great. Like Mara, he was able to see past tradition with
fairness. Because of him, I am all that I am.'

Jican allowed the silence to stretch unbroken, while
outside the window, the footsteps of a sentry passed by.
Then he suggested, very gently, 'Mare is in the work shed
with the toy maker.'

The new-made Lord of Shinzawai nodded. He went to
seek his wife with a weight on his elegant shoulders that
the news he carried made fearful. More than ever, the
heir his Lady carried was important. For while Hokanu
had cousins aplenty, and even a bastard nephew or three,;
none of them had grown up schooled to his foster father's ~
breadth of vision. Not a one of them had the perception i
and the clarity of thought to fill the shoes of the man who
had been the Emperor Ichindar's right hand.

:,

The ambience of the work shed was an amalgam of dusty
warmth shed into dimness by the sunlit tiles of the roof,<.
and the aromatic scents of wood shavings, resins, and the
pungency of needra glue. The corners were murky with

Bereauement

297

shelves of scrap cloth, baskets of feathers, and an orderly
arrangement of woodworker's tools, among which was a
priceless metal knife, imported from the barbarian world,
and with which Mara had bought the undying admiration
and services of Orcato, toy maker, genius, and dissembler,
with a penchant for lewd jokes and drink. Mara overlooked
his coarseness, his tendency to forget her femininity and
speak with her as if she were an equal, and his stink, which
was always of unwashed sweat and the tecca seeds with
which he spiced his food. When Hokanu entered, Lady and
artisan were engaged with bent heads over a waist-high
contraption of wood, around which were arrayed an army
of painted toy soldiers.
'There,' said Orcato in his tremulous old-man's voice
that also held childish enthusiasm. 'If you'd pull that string
and release that lever, there, mistress, we'll know if we've
wasted our time.'

His sarcasm was belied by the unholy gleam of joy in his
eyes; disheveled, hot, and heavily pregnant, Mara bent a
face marred by a smear of dust across one cheek. She gave
an unladylike whoop and yanked a tasseled cord.

The contrivance on the floor responded with a click, a
whap, and a violent whipping of cord, timber and wicker.
What Hokanu recognised as a replica of an engine designed
to hurl rocks over the walls of a besieged city did not
perform its intended office. Instead, its throwing arm spun
in an arc, discharging its missiles amid the neat ranks of its
allies. Toy soldiers scattered and bounced through the dusty

air, and rocks cracked in rebound off the walls. Hokanu
ducked the ricochets and winced at the Lady's unfettered
yell of delight.

Orcato the toy maker cackled with pleasure and from a
pocket beneath his needra-hide apron produced a flask. 'A
toast to the Gods of Prank and Mischief ?' He offered the
Lady a swig, and froze, seeing Hokanu in the doorway.

298

Mistress of the Empire

'We've done it, my Lord,' he announced, blithe as a boy
in his excitement. 'Found a way to turn Jiro's penchant
for engines back upon his own troops.' He paused, drank
deeply, and cackled again, then offered his dripping flask
to the master.

It was Mara who noticed the stiffness of Hokanu's face.
'What has happened?' she asked, her sudden concern as
jarring as a shout. She maneuvered her swollen belly
around the toy engine, stepping upon the scattered ranks
of soldiers.

Stung on top of grief by the sudden draining of joy from
her face, Hokanu struggled for words.

'Dear gods,' Mara murmured, reaching him, and awkwardly
seeking his embrace. 'It's your father, isn't it?' She
tugged him to her, the unborn bulk of their child pressed
between. He could feel her tremble and knew her sorrow
was real. Everywhere, his father had been loved. He heard
his voice recite woodenly, 'He died naturally. In no pain.
In his bed.'

The toy maker handed over his flask. Hokanu accepted,
and swallowed without much noticing what brew it contained.
The sting of it freed his voice, and his thoughts began
sluggishly to function. 'There will be a state funeral. I must
be present.' Too much was he aware of his pregnant wife's
vulnerability and the heir that now must not be risked. As he
felt her drawing breath, he shook his head and said quickly,
'No. You will not go. I will not expose you or our unborn
child to our enemies.'

She moved, on the point of protest.

Hokanu shook her gently, uncaring that the noxious
spirits slopped from the flask with the gesture, staining
the shoulder of her robe. 'No. Kamatsu would understand,
my love. He would do as I must, and implore you to go and
visit your adoptive family, whom you have sorely neglected
of late. You will travel to Kentosani and pay your respects

Bereavement

299

to your Emperor Ichindar. He has lost a staunch defender
in my father. It is seemly that you be there to temper
his grief.'

She relaxed against him; and he read in that her understanding,
and her gratitude. She would not argue with him,
although he knew by the way she hid her face in his sleeve
that she wept for him, and for the fact that the ugliness of
politics must see her parted from his side in his hour of
bereavement.

'My Lady,' he said softly, and buried his own face in
her hair.

Behind him, across a floor littered with the fallen effigies
of Jiro's army, the toy maker slipped soundlessly out.

.,

12
Warning

The crowd shouted.

Acoma soldiers escorting their mistress fought to keep
even ranks against the relentless press of bodies, all calling
out in awe and appreciation of the Lady who was Servant of
the Empire, and all straining with outstretched arms to gain
even a touch of the curtains that shrouded her litter. Legend
held that the touch of a Servant could bestow good fortune.
Since the Lady herself was not within reach, her soldiers had
learned that the commoners would settle for her clothing,
or, barring that, for the curtains of her litter. After one time
caught off guard, when Mara had gone out with what had
seemed a suitable escort before the title had been bestowed
by the Emperor, and arriving at an appointment across the
city with both her robes and her litter hangings in soiled
disarray, her officers had learned better.

Now Mara did not venture forth in public with fewer
than an escort of fifty. Lujan decided in a sweat, even fifty
were barely sufficient. The folk loved their Good Servant to
the point where they would risk crushed toes, bruises, and
even a blow from a spear butt to get close to her. The worst,
the most unnerving aspect of her popularity, was that the
masses took no offense at the soldiers' roughness in holding
them back. They shoved willingly into abuse that came near
to serious injury, cheering and crying Mara's name.

Muffled in a plain robe, and out of sight beyond heavy
curtains that trapped the heat uncomfortably, Mara lay
with closed eyes on her cushions, her hands cradled
upon her swollen middle. She could barely smell the
temple incense that was particular to the Holy City, and
carried so many memories. The perfume of the flowering
trees reached her not at all, nor the musical calls of the
vendors. She could only endure the jostle of the masses, and
hear their deep-throated shouts. Wistfully she recalled the
days of her youth, when, as a novice of Lashima's temple,
she had walked these very streets on bare feet. She tried
not to think of another late time, when a tall, red-haired
barbarian had strode by the side of her litter, filling her ears
with impertinent comments, and her eyes with his smile.

In the suffocating darkness behind drapes dyed red in
deference to the Death God and the passing of Hokanu's
father, she pondered instead upon her husband, gone alone
to attend the state funeral, to face enemies and plotting, and
to determine which of his father's friends would stand by
him, now that he assumed the mantle of House Shinzawai.
Heirless, he would become scrutinised by the merchants
who sold courtesan contracts; he would be flirted with and
flattered by unmarried younger daughters who sought to
elevate their status by the chance to bear a powerful man's
bastard.

She wished, thinking of her husband, that their leavetaking
had not needed to be so hasty. But her birthing time
was very near, and with the passing of a Lord] so high in
the imperial power structure, more than House Shinzawai
must be secured through the change. The death of Kamatsu
left vacant a prominent post in the Emperor's council, and
political machinations would follow until that power had
been redistributed into other hands.

More than her personal safety required Mara to visit
the Emperor's family. And although the palace's Imperial
Whites would guard her young son, Justin, with all of
the vigilance they showed to the Light of Heaven's own
children, she worried.
For since the abolishment of the Warlord's office, with
the High Council Hall filled only with echoes of the past, the

302 Mistress of the Empire

palace had become the center of all intrigues. Arakasi had
agents there; they would keep watch to scent out plots. But
her life would be more confined, more chained to ceremony,
and bereft of the day-to-day challenges of commerce she
enjoyed while at home. Although Jican was more than
trustworthy to handle trade matters in her absence, that
fact did not console. Beneath lay the true apprehension:she
did not wish to lie in childbirth in a strange bed, in
the absence of Hokanu's loving protection. Were the child
to come due before she could return home, her time in
Kentosani must of necessity be prolonged, until the young
infant was able to withstand the rigors of travel.

Mara's fingers tightened over her damp robes, as if t o
stifle the unborn child's healthy kicks. She was visited by
an indefinable dread of the forces at work against them all,
Acoma, Shinzawai, and the Emperor, that would neither
wait nor rest while the babes who were in line to inherit
spent the necessary years growing up.

The litter swooped down, and came to rest with barely a
jet Mara pushed herself upright as the curtains were parted,
Letting in a dazzle of light off sun-washed marble. She had
reached the palace, and so deep was her preoccupation
that only now did she notice that the din of the crows
had become distanced; the commoners shouted and called
still, but from outside the wood and gilt gateway that led
into the Imperial Quarter of the City.

'My Lady?' questioned Saric. The Acoma First Adviser
offered his hand to raise her. Incomo was not along on
this trip, but had accompanied Hokanu to help assess the
machinations of the guests that would descend upon the
Shinzawai estates for the funeral. Though still in his thirties,
Saric had learned much since he had left soldiers' ranks to
take office with the Acoma. Mara had hesitated long
before formally bestowing the office, and for a while had
considered Incomo for the position, as he had served in that
role with the Minwanabi. But in the end she had trusted his
predecessor's first judgment: despite her constant scolding
of him, Nacoya, Mara's previous First Adviser, thought
highly of his nimble wit and quick apprehension. Saric
was proving a good choice. Mara looked up, measuring
the hazel eyes of the man, who looked steadily back, a
smile very like his cousin Lujan's upon his lips.

'What are you thinking, my Lady?' he asked as he raised
her from her litter. A gleam in his eyes belied the innocence
of the question, and seeing that his mistress observed as
much, he chuckled under his breath. Like Lujan, he often
dared informality close to insolence.
Drily, inspecting his well-made but otherwise plain
traveling robe, she said, 'I'm thinking we need to work
upon your perceptions of formal garb.'

'I have been too busy since gaining my office to find time
for tailors, my Lady. I'll see to formal garb at once.' Then he
grinned, 'I doubt the old grandmother's ceremonial regalia
would fit me yet.'

Meaning he had not an aged stoop to his shoulders, nor
nearly enough grey hair. Touched by a pang for old Nacoya
that held more of memory than grief, Mara said, 'You have a
free, loose tongue to speak of your responsibilities, when as
far as I can see, you have already lost charge of my heir.'

'Justin?' With a startled raise of eyebrows, Saric half
turned. The boy was indeed gone from his side, when
he had been there just a half-instant sooner. Saric hid an
impulse to swear behind a stony expression. He ought to

have anticipated the boy's restlessness, after the tantrum
that had erupted earlier, when Justin had been forced to
ride in a litter, rather than his preferred seat of conveyance:
perched upon Lujan's broad shoulders at the head of
the procession. That in the open streets, jammed with
hordes of people out to admire the Good Servant, a
boy left exposed offered a tempting target for enemy

304

Mistress of the Empire

assassins did not signify to his childish penchant for
adventure.

A fast glance around the marble courtyard, with its
beautiful trees festooned with flowering vines, showed
several archways the boy might have dashed through
to hide.

'Well,' said Mara regretfully, 'he's unlikely to get himself
killed in the palace, surrounded by two thousand Imperial
Whites.' She did not need to add that he was sure to
get himself neck-deep into other mischief. And with the
Emperor himself come out to greet her, to order soldiers out
searching before completing the proper formalities o!

welcome would be an insult.

She straightened her sash, raised her chin, and stepped:
forward, prepared to make her bow before the Light of
Heaven.

Ichindar himself offered his hand to help her back to
her feet before her gravid form caused her awkwardness.
His touch was warm, as if every bone in his hand could
be felt. Mara smiled, and gazed into his face, which was
Lined early by care. Although still in his prime, Ichindar bore
the weight of his mantle and the mark of his responsibility.
He had grown stooped since she had seen him last, ant
his eyes seemed larger, for his face had thinned. Never a
warrior, he relied on the cut and richness of his robes to
lend his figure the necessary majesty of his office. Today he
seemed drowned in a diamond sparkle of cloth interwoven with
priceless silver threadwork. His hair lay limp under
a massive, golden-plumed headdress, and at throat, west,
and waist he wore shining gold. His eyes were warm and
bright as he studied her in turn, and gave her the imperial

greeting.

Then, formalities dispensed with, he freed her wrists and)
removed his massive headdress. A servant ran forward
bowed to earth, and accepted its weight in silence. Ichindar

' .3

Warning

305

ninety-one times Emperor of Tsuranuanni, raked hands that
sparkled with rings through honey-brown hair and grinned.
'I've missed you, Lady. It has been long since you have
brought us your company.' His tone rang genuine, although
it was no secret that he preferred male company. Driven by
the need for an heir, he shared his nights with an endless
succession of wives and consorts, all chosen for beauty and
their prospects of bearing children rather than for wit.

But Mara he had named Servant of the Empire for her
service in securing his power upon the golden throne. She
had brought stability to the Empire at large through her
help in abolishment of the Warlord's office, contention for
which had dragged the Nations to the brink of civil war
far too many times.

Although the course charted since was still unsteady,
and although the traditionalist faction won itself more
supporters daily, Ichindar counted Lady Mara a powerful
ally and, more, a friend; her coming brought him rare
joy. He studied her closely, saw her surreptitious glances
toward the archways, and laughed. 'Your son ran off just
a moment ago with my eldest daughter, Jehilia. He's in the
fruit gardens with her, probably in a tree picking green
jomach. Shall we go there and slap sticky hands before
both of them give themselves bellyaches?' ~

Mara's face softened. 'Bellyaches would be the least of
it,' she confessed. 'If I know my boy, there are probably
sentries under dishonorable bombardment.'
But by the time Mara had extricated herself from her
train of servants and baggage, and the Emperor's personal
staff had rearranged themselves around her presence, a
high boyish shout of rage echoed over the sunlit serenity
of the courtyard. As one, Mara and Ichindar hurried their
steps, outdistancing their escort through the leftward arch.

They rushed down a path lined with bushes and beds of
rare flowers, and reached the garden courtyard in time to

306

Mistress of the Empire

hear a splash. The boy, Justin, stood on the marble rim of a
fish pool, his hands on his hips, and his chest puffed out like
a jigabird cock's. At his feet, dragged back by a sodden mess
of white-and-gold robes, the girl see in the water, her blond
hair plastered to her head, and expensive makeup dribbled
in smears down her furious face.

Mara's face assumed its sternest maternal expression,
while the Emperor choked back laughter. But before
either could intervene in what was about to develop
into a wrestling match, a third figure raced into the
fray, trailing robes as expensive as the girl's, but redolent
with exotic perfumes. She also was blond, and radiantly
beautiful, despite her hand-wringing protestations and an
evident uncertainty about the more forceful aspects of
parenthood.~

'Oh!' she cried. 'Oh! Miserable boy, what have you done
to my jewel?'

Justin turned red-faced upon her, and said glibly and
clearly over Jehilia's shouting, 'She slugged me in the face,
did your jewel.'

'Oh!' cried the woman. 'She would not have! My
jewel!'

At this point, Mara strode forward, grabbed Justin by
the arm, and hauled him off his perch on the pool rim. 'So
you tripped her, is that it?'

She received for her answer an insolent grin, and a flash
of blue eyes amid a sun-freckled face. Her open-handed slap
across the boy's cheeks ended the smile, and although his
eye showed the beginnings of a purple bruise, Mara gave
him no quarter. 'You will give the Princess your hand, help
her out of the fish pool, and apologise.'

As the boy opened his mouth for protest, she shook him
briskly. 'Do this now,Justin. You have sullied Acoma honor
and must make amends.'
The offended Jehilia dragged herself to her feet. Fish
darted in agitated swirls around her ankles as, glowering
with temper, she prepared to be indulged.

'Oh, my precious, get out of that water,' wailed the
woman, whose resemblance identified her as Lady Tamara,
Ichindar's First Wife, and mother to the girl. 'You could
take ill, standing about soaking wet!'

Jehilia scowled, her rose-and-gilt complexion flushed
crimson. She stared at Justin's extended hand as though it
were a viper, while her father - Emperor of all Tsuranuanni
and Light of Heaven - looked on in helpless amusement.
He was better at ruling between warring Lords than at
managing disputes between his offspring and those of his
adopted family.

Mara assessed the impasse, and crisply admonished the
girl. 'Take Justin's hand, Princess. It is the only right thing
to do, since you shamed his pride by striking him. It is
cowardly to strike a man, since he will not hit a female
in return. If Justin tripped you, you earned your ducking
first, and I'd say you must both learn manners from the
misfortune. Act like a grown lady, or else I'll see your nurses
thrash you both like the children you most certainly are.'

'Oh! My darling should never be thrashed!' cried the
mother of the Emperor's eldest. 'Were anyone to try, I
should faint.' ~

At this, Ichindar turned hazel eyes bright with irony upon

the Lady of the Acoma. 'My life is made miserable by a
surfeit of frail women. The children cannot be thrashed,
or they will faint.'

Mara laughed. 'Thrash the children as they deserve,
and let the ladies swoon all they wish. It might serve to
harden them.'

'Oh!' The Lady paled. As angry now as her daughter,
she retorted, 'Our Light of Heaven would not dare! He is
a gentle man, and his wives all adore him.'

Ichindar's mouth curved with distaste. Plainly, he would

308

Mistress of the Empire

withdraw rather than endure further disharmony. Women
confounded him, Mara knew. Saddened that he seemed so
browbeaten, and also given insight into how it must feel
to have been forced into matrimonial duty at the age of
twelve, with a different wife or concubine sent to share the
imperial bed each and every month thereafter, she again
intervened.

Justin completed his apology to Jehilia. He spoke his
words without sullenness or rancor, as quick to forgive as
his barbarian father. When he completed his bow, Mara
caught the girl's icy fingers and bundled her firmly toward
her distraught and angry mother. 'Jehilia,' said the Lady of
the Acoma, 'take Lady Tamara inside and see her in care of
a good maid. Then change your clothes, and come visit me
in my garden court. I will show you, as my brother showed
me, what to do when importunate boys try to trip you.' ;

Jehilia's fury dissolved into delighted surprise. 'You know
how to wrestle, Good Servant?'

Mara laughed. 'I'll teach you, and if Justin agrees to keep
you clear of fish pools, he will help.'

At her side, the heir to the Acoma mantle gave a whoop
of contentment, and Jehilia, no less restrained, shouted like
a warrior. Then she spun in a whirl of wet hair and chivvied
her distraught and protesting mother from the garden, while
Ichindar stared after in astonishment.

He turned toward Mara with a look of mystified respect.
'I should command your presence more often, to marshal
the conduct of my harem.'

Mara's smile died. 'Great gods, no. Do you know nothing
of women? The best way to foment dissension among them :-~
is to give them into the power of another female. I'd find
myself marshal of a nasty, robe-tearing rebellion, my Lord Emperor.
And the only problem I can see between your
august self and your harem is that they outnumber you,;
five hundred and thirty-seven to one.' ~

~_

Warning

309

The Emperor of all Tsuranuanni laughed. 'True enough.
I am the most jigahen-pecked husband in all of the Nations.
If the ladies were not all so beautiful, I might find it easier
to chastise them.'

Mara made a sound through her nose. 'According to my
Force Commander, who cuts a swathe through the maidens
in his leave time, the prettier the face, the greater the need
for chastisement.'

'Perhaps,' Ichindar allowed, a trace of wistfulness in his
voice. 'If I knew them better, I might be more inclined. Only
those who bear me a child remain, you must remember. Of
those five hundred . . . however many wives and consorts,
I've spoken to only seven on more than a handful of
occasioned His troubled tone was not lost on Mara. Palace
walls were no protection from the gossip of the streets: even
the Light of Heaven had heard the whispers of his lack of
manly power in fathering a son. Though almost twenty
years a husband, he had but seven children, all girls, the
eldest only two years older than Justin. Ichindar gestured
toward the coolness of the foyer. 'Refreshments await, my
Lady Mara. In your condition, it would be insult to keep
you on your feet in the sun for an instant longer.'

,~

A haze of smoke from the funeral rites hung heavy upon
the air. The acrid scent of ash stung Hokanu's nostrils
where he stood, elbow braced on the rail of a gallery that
overlooked a courtyard filled with guests. After the opulent
gardens of the Acoma estate and the imperial residence,

the Shinzawai garden looked tiny. Guests moved along the
crowded narrow paths, speaking in low voices, partaking
of light refreshments provided by servants at every turn.
With Kamatsu's rank and honor, many had come who had
no clan or family ties with him, straining the hospitality of
the house.

The ceremony to honor the Shinzawai departed had been
rushed, owing to the heat; the body of the patriarch had
been kept waiting only until the arrival of the heir. Many
of the guests had reached the estates ahead of him; those
more polite or less brazenly curious had waited to come
until after Hokanu was in residence.

Late afternoon sunlight slanted through the smoke that
coiled still from the fire. The recitation of Kamatsu's
honors had been long, lasting well past noon. Now the
ashes were yet too hot to scrape into the ceremonial urn
Hokanu would carry to the sacred contemplation grove
that sheltered the family natami. The air smelled of citrus
and cloves and almonds, to sweeten the stench of death
and of other, rarer scents, of the ladies' perfumes and
the sweet oils used to sleek the hair of the dandies. Now
and again the" breeze would part the smoke, and the scents
of the flowers bundled in the crockery pots throughout the
dooryard won out. Fainter was the ink-like pungence of the
dyes in the crimson death hangings. Sometimes there came
the redolence of cooked meats, new bread, and cakes. The
kitchen staff were busy.

Hokanu lounged in his red robes, his eyes half closed;
he could have been a man lost in daydreams, except for
the fist clenched white against the balustrade. Below him,
conversations centered on political topics. Two subjects
predominated: the eligibility of the bachelors who vied for
the ten-year-old Princess Jehilia's hand; and which Lord
was most likely to be appointed by the Light of Heaven to
take up the staff of office left vacant by Kamatsu's death.

The avaricious carrion eaters might have waited until
the old man's ashes were cold, Hokanu thought with
resentment.

A step sounded upon the worn plank floor behind him.
His back tautened in expectation of another servant who
would address him as 'my Lord'; but the title was not
forthcoming. Touched by vague dread, Hokanu half turned,
his hand closed in reflex over the heirloom metal sword he
wore to honor the day, and with which he had cut the red
cords around his father's wrists, in the ceremony to free
the spirit into the halls of Turakamu.

But he faced no assassin. A man of medium stature
awaited him, robed anonymously in dark fabric.

Hokanu released the silk-wrapped hilt of the weapon
with guilty speed. 'I'm sorry. Great One, I heard no chime
to warn of your presence.'

'I did not come by arcane means,' said the magician in
his deep, familiar voice. He pushed back his hood, and
sunlight flooded over features that were lined and, today,
looked almost bitter. The line of his cheek and brow bore a
marked resemblance to Hokanu; and if the mystery in them
had been less, the eyes would have been almost identical.
The Great One, whose name was Fumita, crossed the space
to. the gallery rail and gave Hokanu a formal embrace.

By blood, the two were father and son; but according
to the strictures of the Assembly, ties of blood could not
matter.

Cautious of the weariness in the older man's face,
Hokanu whispered, 'You should not be here.' Conflicting
emotions, barely contained, raged within.œhe warrior.
His father had come late to his powers, a rare but not
unheard-of event. As a man in his prime, he had left his
wife and young son to don the black robe. Hokanu's early
memories of Fumita were few but vivid: the roughness of
his cheek in the evening as a young boy threw his arms
around his father's neck, the smell of sweat as he removed
the armor worn in the soldier's yard. The younger brother
of the Lord of the Shinzawai, Fumita had been marked as

the future Shinzawai Force Commander until the day when
the magicians had taken him away. Hokanu remembered
with pain how his mother had never laughed again.

Fumita's peaked brows twitched, a frown suppressed.
'A Great One may go anywhere, at any time.' And the
dead man was his brother; power had separated them, and
mystery had kept them apart. Of the wife who had given up
name and rank to enter a convent, the magician never spoke.
He looked into the features of the son he could no longer
acknowledge, and his silken robe that the breezes fluttered
without effort seemed to drag at his stiffened shoulders.

He did not speak.

Hokanu, whose gifts of perception at times skirted the
edge of arcane talent, spoke for him. 'If I intend to endorse
my father's policies, and stand at the hand of the Emperor,
I must announce my intentions plainly, and soon. Then
the enemies who might otherwise ally against the Light
of Heaven must show themselves to me, as his shield.' He
gave a short, humorless laugh. 'As if it matters. If I stand
down, and let the honor of the Imperial Chancellorship be
awarded to a rival house, the enemies will strike next at
my wife, who carries the heir to our name.'

Coarse laughter lifted over the buzz of general conversation.
A servant passed the screen that led to the gallery; he
saw the young Lord in conference there with a magician,
bowed, and silently left. Preternaturally sensitive to the
scents, his surroundings, and the grief for his adoptive father
that left every nerve end raw, Hokanu heard a cousin call
out loudly in argument. By the slurred consonants, Devacai
had wasted no time in sampling the wines. Small need to
speculate what would happen to Shinzawai honor and
fortunes were that distant branch of the family to inherit.

Somewhere deep in the estate house, a maid giggled, and
an infant cried. Life went on. And by the intentness of
Fumita's gaze, he had not come just to honor the funeral
pyre of a departed brother.

'It isn't pleasant, I see, but you have something to tell?'
Hokanu said, his throat made tight with the effort it took
to find the courage to broach the subject first.
Fumita looked troubled, a dire sign. Even before his
donning the black robe, he was normally master of his
eXpression' which had made him a wicked opponent at
cards. He twisted his thumbs in his cord belt, and sat,
perched awkwardly on a flower urn. Blossoms crushed
beneath his weight, lending the thick scent of greens to
the sultry, smoke-tinged air. 'I bring you warning, consort
of the Good Servant.'

The choice of title told much. Hokanu longed to sit also,
but sap stains on his mourning robes might be interpreted
as a sign of weakness, as if he had forgotten himself, or
been overcome with prostration. He stood, his feet hurting
with the strain. 'The Assembly is troubled over my wife?'
he prompted.

The silence stretched out, broken by the voices of the
guests, raised now, as the wine heated their conversations.
At length, not looking at Hokanu, but at the
boards, as if they might harbor unseen flaws, Fumita
spoke carefully. 'Heed these things. First, the Assembly
is as any other body of men when trying to forge
an agreement. They argue, they deliberate, they splinter
into factions. No one wishes to be first to suggest the
ill luck of compromising the life of a Servant of the
Empire.' ~

Hokanu sucked a fast breath. 'They know about Mara's
toy maker.'

'And Jiro's ventures in experimental engineering.' Fumita
looked up, piercingly. 'There is little in the Nations my kind
do not know. If they equivocate, it is because they cannot

agree upon any one course of action. But provocation of
any sort will unite them. Fear that.'

The smokes and the scents seemed cloying enough to
drown in. Hokanu held the Great One's gaze, and behind
stiff features read anguish. 'I hear. What else?'

Fumita blinked. 'You will recall that a former member
of the Assembly, the barbarian Great One Milamber, once
visited great destruction upon the Imperial Games.'

Hokanu nodded. He had not been present, but Mara
had, and Lujan. Their descriptions of the event were the
stuff of nightmares, and nobody who had seen the tumbJ
stone, the scorched timbers where fires had fallen from the
sky, and the riven buildings from the inner precinct to the
dockside quarter where earthquakes had shaken the holy
City had forgotten.

'No Great One has the powers of Milamber. Most have
far less. Some are more scholars than spell crafters.'Fumita
fell silent, his eyes expectant.

Hokanu caught the cue, and added the telling surmise
'Some are argumentative, petty, and perhaps too embroiled

in self-importance to act decisively?' .

'If it comes to trouble,' Fumita said slowly, 'you were
the one who said this. Never I.' Very softly, he added, 'the
best you can hope for is a delay of the felling blowThe
who wish an end to these changes in tradition are grows
stronger. Forcing debate will buy time, but none of us w3
would aid you may stay the hand of another.' He fixed his
former son with a gaze that held unvoiced feelings. 'no
matter what, I cannot protect you.'

Hokanu nodded.

'Say farewell to my brother Kamatsu in my stead,' the
magician finished. 'He was joy and strength and wisdom .
and his memory remains my inspiration. Rule-wisely and
well. He often told me he was proud of you.' He withdrew
a small metal object from his robe and thumbed a switch

A low-pitched, unnatural buzz sawed across the murmur
of conversation, and Hokanu was left alone on the galle
above a courtyard that seethed with relations and guests;
among them were enemies, seeking weakness to exploit, ~
strengths, for the means to undermine. Such was the w;
of the Game of the Council. Only the newest Lord of the
Shinzawai thought, as he gazed through the haze at their
finery, that never before had the stakes been so high. This
time the prize, the bone of contention, was the Empire of
Tsuranuanni itself.

The last, most private rite for the departed Shinzawai
Patriarch was completed at dusk as a low ground mist
settled over the contemplation glade. The new Ruling
Lord lingered in the sanctity of his family's sacred grove,
soothed by the deepening shadows, and by the chance to
be alone.

The shadows spilled long and purple between the fruitladen
trees of autumn. Hokanu chose a stone bench and
sat down, but the heat still oppressed. No breeze came to
cool him, and ash from the burning drifted still in the air,
describing shafts through the foliage where the sun struck
through. Hokanu fingered the raveled edges of the garment
he had rent for Kamatsu's ceremonial farewell. His hands
closed, hard, bunching the fabric. He had an estate filled
with guests that he should be thinking of; it felt selfish to
steal a moment of peace for himself.

But the stillness of the contemplation glade, and the lazy
drone of the insects that fed upon windfall fruit, allowed
him space to think. Fumita's warning had not been only
for Mara, her consort perceived. Hokanu's brows drew
together. The magician's spare words had been for the
Shinzawai, and the son who now wore the Lord's mantle.
When he had said, 'I cannot protect you,' the 'you' was
not plural but singular.

For if, as Lord of the Shinzawai, Hokanu chose aggression
against the Anasati on Mara's behalf, the Assembly of
Magicians would have no choice but to act- because he
was Mara's consort; not her Ruling Lord, but half Acoma
in heart, if not in name. He was not Servant of the Empire.
He did not have Mara's rank and honors as his shield.
No, the core of Fumita's warning had not been for his
Lady. It had been for himself, a caution against trying the
patience of an assembly divided in opinion over issues that
had no precedents.

Hokanu understood with a flash of cold sweat that he
must at all costs keep the Shinzawai dear of the feud with
Lord Jiro. He saw, with the family's talent for perception,
just what Fumita had left unsaid. That he was now Lord o f
one of the most powerful houses in the Empire and, while
not officially Clan Warchief, would inherit the leadership
of Clan Kanazawai at the next Council. If, through ties
of marriage, Shinzawai and Acoma forces were seen to
unite in common cause, leading Clan Kanazawai and Clan
Hadama, no counterforce in the Nations could stop them.
The fragmented Assembly would end their contention,
forced by most desperate circumstances to act.

That reason must never be given, or Acoma and Shinzawai
would both be ground down into the dust, never to rise,
never to recover. Hokanu had seen the death of two hundred
warriors, followed by the annihilation of an honored house,
all at the hands of one magician. Hundreds of them, united,
no army in the Empire could oppose.

Hokanu arose to leave. The sacred grove of Shinzawai no
longer seemed a haven of peace, and the sweat on his skin
gave him chills. The place at his side where Mara might
have stood felt colder and emptier still.

13
Twist

.

Arakasi waited.

Below him, the sentry moved silently, upon feet clad
in padded stockings designed for stealth. He wore the
traditional short black robe and trousers of the Hamoi
Tong assassins, and his head covering masked all but his
eyes. Across his back a short bow was slung, and at his belt
a hip quiver of arrows and a variety of hand weapons were
hooked within easy reach. He moved beneath the tree where
the Spy Master perched, barely breathing, and vanished into
the dusk like a shade of the dead. Arakasi counted in his
mind, his numbers a complex formula he had devised over
years, that fixed an exact passage of time, independent of
breathing, heart rate, or any other condition that might
influence the count. Practice with sand-filled hourglasses
had perfected his system to a fine point. When he reached
the number that signified ten seconds, his searching eyes
caught a movement at the far end of the trail. He knew
satisfaction heady as triumph. The second sentry had
arrived exactly as anticipated.

The most perilous task he had ever undertaken was off
to an auspicious start. Arakasi held no illusions that such
luck would long continue; he was one man alone, and
in a position where even the favor of heaven could not
safeguard a man's life. Arakasi lay motionless on a tree
branch in the garden of the Hamoi Tong's Obajan. Below
him paced a guard who would kill him without hesitation.
Like his predecessor, this new sentry scouted grass, paths,
and bushes for the telltale signs of an intruder. The Spy
Master had left no tracks; yet he sweated. The guards were
uncannily thorough. The second assassin moved along his 9
beat. Counting for a specific interval, Arakasi judged his 4
moment, then noiselessly lowered himself from tree to ground.
Taking care to step only on the flat, ornamental
stones between flower beds, he scurried off to a small
depression within a drainage ditch where he had secreted
his few belongings. There, behind a masking of khadi brush,
just beyond the limit of the Hamoi Tong sentries' line of
patrol, he breathed deeply and settled taut nerves.

At the edge of the woods a hundred paces west, his
own backup man waited, knife already in hand to answer
unwelcome discovery. Arakasi lifted a stripped branch
and used gestures to indicate that the patrol was moving
according to schedule. The garden he sought to infiltrate
was protected by eighteen assassins, all alert, cautious
sentries, but human enough to be fallible. The guard
pattern they followed was complex and at first appearance
seemingly random. But few observers had Arakasi's iq
patience, or his keen fascination with mathematics. He had
thought nothing of the days spent crouched in dirt, bitten by
insects, and lashed by sun and rain. What mattered was that
he had unraveled their measure, and worked up formulas
to predict their routes.

His backup man wore the garb of a Lashiki bowman-a
mercenary guard from the northern province. As with
Arakasi, his outer trappings came no closer to his true
identity than any of a dozen guises he had worn and then
shed over the years. Nor was his real name Sabota. Arakasi
never pressed him on this foible; his true origin was his own
affair, for he had proven himself a reliable courier countless
times over. Of all the agents near Ontoset the Acoma Spy
Master could call upon, Sabota was the most trustworthy.
And Arakasi had to give this man a mission as critical to
the Lady's survival as his own.

A month's beard masked the Spy Master's face. He
appeared more like a beggar than anything else, from
the weeks spent in the countryside. Yet had there been a
watcher close enough to see his eyes as he began a second,
more complex signal with the stick, he could never have
been mistaken for other than what he was: a supremely
dangerous man about to embark upon a mission he did
not expect to survive.

At the treeline, the man called Sabota studied the Spy
Master's message. His memory was impeccable. He nodded
once and left without a glance backward.

Crouched behind a thin screen of thorn, Arakasi closed
his eyes. He did not pray. He substituted hope. For Sabota
took with him instructions to the second-in-command of
the Acoma spy network, a man Mara had never met whom
Arakasi had designated his replacement should he fail to
return from this endeavor.

The stakes were now set. If a countermessage was not sent
within a specified number of days, a new Spy Master would
present himself to Lady Mara. Every detail on the tong that
Arakasi had managed to uncover would be passed along,
and plans would begin afresh to seek the destruction of the
Hamoi Obajan and counter the infiltrations attempted by
Chumaka of the Anasati.

Arakasi closed his eyes. His head ached from tension,
which was not normal. Life to him had always been a
bloodless, calculated dance, with danger his dispassionate
partner. It bothered him to think he might have held Sabota
with him longer than necessary: he had discerned the key
to the patrols two days ago. The waiting he had done since
had not been for precaution; in fact, it had only increased
the risk that the tong might alter its habits to foil just the
sort of study he had finished. Arakasi rubbed his temples.
Unused to self-conflict, he drew a series of breaths to calm
himself.

Arakasi had been driven by an abiding loyalty to Mara

320 Mistress of the Empire

since his long-sought vengeance against the Minwanabi had:
been completed by the Acoma. Concerns for his Lady'.
safety haunted him now, for if he died in this insane task, a
man of even lesser gifts would be left to undertake his post.
After the attempt to infiltrate the City of the Magicians had
been abandoned, signs of tampering had surfaced since the
agents in Jamar had returned to active status. This could
only be the work of Chumaka of the Anasati. Through
sleepless nights watching the tong's patrols, Arakasi had
worried on the timing. With the net compromised, who
knew how deeply, this was a frightening moment to
contemplate handing over the reins. Arakasi gave himself
a mental jab of reproach. Were he to die, what did his life
matter? Never before had he wasted himself with worries
that had no bearing on circumstances outside his control.

It was past time to be moving. Pushing aside another
maddening incongruity, a memory of his hands sliding]
through the honey-gold hair of a courtesan he should have
forgotten, he forced his thoughts to track the immediate.
The next lull in the patrols was upon him. If he was to act
tonight, he must not tarry, for by every indication gleaned
through weeks of observation, the high, painted litter that
had arrived at the estate house that afternoon had carried
the long-absent master.

The Obajan of the Hamoi Tong was once again in
residence at his pleasure retreat.
Arakasi wormed out of the ditch, pressed through the
low bushes, and raced, bent over, down a garden path. He
threw himself belly down in the shadow of a low tile wall,
aware, now, that he was irrevocably committed. There were
no more gaps in the patrols along the perimeter, and would
not be, until daylight made it impossible to cross without
being observed from one of the guard posts set in wooden
balconies that jutted from the house's peaks.

The wait under the wall would last an hour. To use the j
time, Arakasi reviewed all of his preparations, turning over
each success and frustration that had marked his mission to
its current moment.

It had been a painstaking trail, which had begun with the
tracking of the honey-haired courtesan's sister. The slave
trader who had brokered the girls had been easy enough
to find, but at the market where Kamlio's sibling should
have been turned over to her tong purchaser, all traces of
her vanished.

The work then had been hampered by its proximity to
Ontoset, where the new network begun to replace the one
disrupted by the silk warehouse mishap was still in its
building stages. Weeks of following false leads had yielded
the conclusion that girls selected for the tong never reached
the Ontoset marketplace.

Arakasi had backtracked along the route, and from a
drunken driver's chance remark had learned that slave
wagons bearing girls of unusual beauty were on rare
occasions diverted into the rolling foothills to the north
of the city. More weeks had been spent scouting out that
area, to follow and map each footpath, game trail, and
swamp in the wide lands north of Ontoset. Sabota and three
other agents had done this, living off the surrounding land
like bandits, stealing jigabirds or vegetables from farmers,
fishing the brooks, even eating berries and nuts. One had
been killed as he attempted to purchase grain in a village
miles to the northwest - which had been a loss that yielded
knowledge, for it marked that settlement as subject to the
tong's control, where strangers were not welcomed. The
'farmer' who had done the killing had taken the Acoma
agent from behind with a knife; an expert in his own right
with dagger work, Arakasi had examined the corpse fished
out of the river. The murder was the work of a trained

assassin. Arakasi had lain in the loft of a mill downstream,
listening to gossip: the villagers who had observed the death

322 Mistress of the Empire

never commented, but continued with their daily affairs as
if nothing untoward had occurred.

No one had caught wind of the Spy Master's presence;
no one had noticed the trail he had erased when he left. He
reviewed again the checks he had run in Ontoset, counting
the farm carts that entered, and noting what color dust
filmed their wheels as they presented themselves at the
guard gate He had not been followed, for a certainty. ~
More weeks had been spent in a roadside ditch, living
off dried cakes and fruit. Months after the murder of his
agent, Arakasi had traced three carts from that village. Back
in Ontoset, he had worn a drover's robes and gone out for
hard nights of drinking. Carts came and went, until finally ~
one of chose he had been seeking pulled in. A trip outside
the tap with three swaying, singing companions: he had
leaned on that wagon to piss, and with a knife concealed
in his other hand had notched the hardened leacher that
bound the cartwheel's rim.

Sabota, watching at the roadside, had waited more days
for rain. Then at last, that distinctively marked wheel's track

had led to the location of the tong's pleasure palace. ~'

Arakasi knew his work was good. No one should have
connected his drunken binge in the tavern with another
poor, traveling laborer walking between harvests with his
head drooping in the heat. Still, he sweated. The man he
sought to take was the most secretive individual in the
Empire, and by far the best guarded. There were Lords
who had died for merely beholding the Obajan's face.

Tasaio of the Minwanabi had been the singular exception,
and the bribes he had paid in metal were the stuff
of legend, if a man did not know he had purloined
illicit contraband during his years of war service across

the rift. ::

The break in the patrol would come soon. Arakasi
chewed a strip of dried meat, though his appetite had

Twist

323

fled. Food was for survival now; or else this would be
the last meal of his life.

He swallowed the last of his stores and lay flat upon
damp soil. Eyes closed again, he tuned his senses to the
night, hearing every sound and insect, and smelling the
moisture-laden air. Any change would find him instantly
at the ready. His timing required absolute concentration.
He waited, sweating harder. His thoughts sought to wander,
marred by some new, formless apprehension he could
not name.

That anomaly troubled him sorely, but could not be
examined, for the moment had come. The crunch of
sandals crossed the gravel path just the other side of the
wall; ten seconds, twenty seconds, thirty: Arakasi flowed
through the night like a phantom.

Over the wall in a vault, he crossed the garden, leaping
over the paths and keeping to slate borders of the flower
beds that his step not disturb the raked gravel. Light
flickered through the trees. Arakasi dove belly down and
scraped under the arch of an ornamental bridge. The water
in the little stream was high at this time of year, its trickle
hiding his splashing. He barely had enough headroom
under the center beam to keep his face clear of the surface.
The sound of current over a rock underneath masked his
fast breaching as he froze, his heartbeat racing. Up the
path came a group of men. Four were wearing the black of
assassins, white sashes proclaiming them to be of honored
rank. Two more moved through the garden, flanking the
party as guards. Of the pair they protected, one was chin,
clad in silk woven in the Hamoi-flower pattern, his eyes
roving back and forth in nervous review. But it was to the
other man that Arakasi's attention was drawn.

This one was massively built, his wide girth carrying
not one ounce of fat. He wore a flowing brown robe, the
hood thrown back to reveal the face that would never be

324

Mistress of tl~e Empire

uncovered away from home. The man who might earlier
have posed as itinerant priest or monk proudly displayed
the long topknot and fall of hair that proclaimed him of
supreme rank. His shaved scalp bore the complex red
tattoos that adorned only an Obajan.

In the darkness under the bridge, as footsteps thumped
and creaked across the boards above, pressed tight between
the structure and damp mud, Arakasi grinned to know his
work had not been wasted. He was within striking distance
of the ruler of the Hamoi Tong.

But now was no time to strike. The flanking guards
were beating the bushes on either side of the path. The
abnormally high water made the cranny under the bridge
too small to shelter a full-sized man without backing up the
flow. And indeed, no ordinary skulker could have wedged
himself clear of the streamlet by bracing his elbows on the
side beams. Arakasi ignored his aching muscles. Now there
were twenty-four assassins in residence at the estate. He
held back elation. Even a chance gleam of light on his teeth
could betray him. Eighteen or twenty-four assassins, he was
sticking his head into the mouth of a harulth and daring the
most dangerous predator in Kelewan to bite down.
The Obajan's party passed, probably on its way to enjoy
the evening in the covered gazebo near the wall. Arakasi
had the night left yet to wait. At the last hour before sunrise,
he would attempt to enter the estate house. For there was
only one way he had determined to infiltrate this nest of
murderers, and after that, he grimly acknowledged, he had
no safe way out.

As deep night at last began to fade, Arakasi trembled with
fatigue. Lying now half in the water, he thanked Chochocan,
the Good God, that the guard patrols had not changed their
routine with the Obajan in residence. He forced himself to
gorge his belly with water. The single most desperate act t
of his life lay ahead, as he prepared to gain entry to the
estate house. The next sentry arrived on schedule. Arakasi
peered out from under the bridge. As the guard reached the
limit of his vision, the Spy Master slithered silently into the
open. Heavy dewfall would mask the drips that scattered
from his wet clothing. He moved fast, knowing that he
must maintain an equal distance between two men intent
on killing anyone they found. If the one ahead paused to
scratch an itch or the one behind walked slightly faster
than normal, Arakasi might die before he knew he had
been discovered.

The Spy Master resisted the temptation to hurry. Few
situations demanded such precise control. Scrambling as
quietly as possible, he moved sideways, forearms, knees,
and toes alone touching the ground. The toll on his already
depleted strength was tremendous.

After two hundred feet of progress, Arakasi collapsed
to the ground. He made himself dizzy choking back his
gasps for air, but forced his ears to listen for any indication
that he had been seen. No alarm was sounded. He studied
the sky. The predawn grey was brightening now. From
experience he knew that sentries had the most difficult
time seeing at dawn and dusk, when all was reduced to
blurred shadows.

Footfalls passed. The guard who had been to his rear
passed within a yard of his position. But the sentry had
his attention directed toward the outer wall, not upon the
ground to the left of his feet. And it was a shadow in the
grass beside the main house that Arakasi had become, his

breath stopped, and his hands braced to move.

The sentry paused. Arakasi counted, dripping sweat. On
a certain number, the guard moved on. At once Arakasi
leaped to his feet, removed a cord from his belt, and threw
its weighted end upward over a tree branch that arched
toward the house between the balconies that housed more

326
Mistress of the Empire

guards. Exposed on three sides, he had only seconds before
the next patrol appeared around the corner. Luck must be
his mistress here. Arakasi hurled himself upward staying
close to the thick trunk to avoid any rustling of leaves. He
threw himself prone on the branch and reeled in his cord
hand over hand.

His observations were now useless. He had had no way to
penetrate the life inside the house, and so had no knowledge
beyond an estimated floor plan gained by watching the
goings and comings of the servants.

Arakasi heard voices and knew the house staff awakened
Soon cooks and body servants would be about their duties
and he had to be in place.

Arakasi pulled himself along the limb. He had to be
careful. This was a takai tree, grown for its lush fruit; the
branches of bearing trees were weak and tended to break
when more weight was added. The foliage was thin and
provided little cover as he shinnied under the beams of a
guard balcony. The need to keep quiet knotted his muscles
and made his suppressed breath like fire in his chest.

Houses in Kelewan were usually constructed with a
breathing space between the inner ceiling and the roof to
let the heat under the eaves escape. This house should be
no different, but a grating of wood might have been added
to increase security. No clear safe haven remained to him,
and he was too far inside the estate to turn back with any
chance of safety. The sky might be lightening to silver, but
the gloom under the rafters was complete. Arakasi groped
into the shadow

The way inside he had hoped to find did exist, but
as he had suspected, thin slats of wood barred his way
into the crawl space between the tiled roof above and the
plaster ceiling of the rooms below. Arakasi drew one of
his rare metal throwing knives. The steel could endure
the punishment of prying the slats out at their pegged

Twist

327

ends, where a Tsurani blade of laminated hide would have
snapped. Arakasi worked quickly. He garnered scrapes and
splinters as he wormed his way through the small opening,
then used the grease of his own sweat to ease the pegs
back without squeaking. He allowed himself a moment of
silent exultation. He had done the impossible. Although
cramped in a space too small for comfort, he was inside
the building.
He rested while the guard changed in the platforms
outside. Then, he groped his way across the beams until
he located the rooftree. He settled in to wait, the day
before him to spy out the arrangement of the rooms unseen
beneath.

Arakasi lay supine, listening closely to the dulcet tones of
women's voices below him. His success now depended on
the chance that the Obajan would be visiting his women,
for the Spy Master doubted he could survive another day
of sweating in the airless space beneath the roof.

The coarse-cut wood of dusty rafters bit into his thighs
and arms, and chafed him through the light cloth of his robe.
He endured, flexing one limb at a time to relieve cramps
from impaired circulation. The air had grown stifling as
the sun heated the roof tiles. Although he had gone without
sleep for nearly two days, he fiercely resisted the need to rest.
To fall victim to the body's needs in this place was to die.
Should he doze, he might roll off the narrow crossbeam and
come crashing through the thin plaster ceiling below him.
With grim humor he also considered how the sound of his
exhausted snores might lead the vigilant guards to his-hiding
place. Now, ready with his steel in darkness, his cheek and
hands tickled by the aimless wanderings of crawling insects,
he felt a heady mix of exhilaration and regret: exhilaration

that he had won so close without discovery; regret that so
many tasks remained undone.

328 Mistress of the Empire

Below him, cracks in the plaster admitted an orange
glow of light. Servants had lit the lamps, which meant
that night had fallen outside. He could hear the silvery
laughter of women; among them now and again sounded
a voice that reminded him of another girl, and an afternoon
entanglement in silken sheets. Arakasi shifted, irked at
himself. Kamlio was on his mind far too much: the feel
of her rich hair under his hands, and her creamy skin, and
her kisses; the very memory of her made him sweat with
longing. Yet what haunted his mind, over and over, was
no simple coupling of flesh. He dreamed of her deep eyes,
the intelligence in them alternately dulled by boredom and
made cunning by abuse. Her manner seemed hard, but it
was a cynicism that roofed over a chasm of pain. He knew,
as surely as his hands and his body had pleased her, that
given time, he could reach the sweet nature hidden like
treasure within her.

If he survived this evening's endeavors, he would buy her
freedom, maybe show her the headier joys of a free life. If
she would have him; if, after a lifetime of pandering to the
whims of many masters, she did not find men distasteful
. . . Arakasi's lip curled in self-contempt in the dark. He
dreamed! He dreamed like a lovesick boy! Had life not
taught him never to give credence to the unpredictable
desires of the heart?

He smothered an impulse to curse.

It was irony, of the blackest and bitterest sort, that
the mission that had caused him to know her might
itself bring her to ultimate harm. With stark logic, in
the stifling heat under the rooftree, he knew: he would
require a miracle of the gods to emerge from his mission
alive. The odds now favored his getting the strike
at the Obajan he had planned for. But even should
his blow prove deadly, evading the best of the tong's
assassins - and after them, the vengeful wrath of the

Twist

329

Tiranjan, Obajan's successor - was an impossible expectation.


Arakasi shivered from fatigue and tension. He changed
grip on a knife handle gone strangely sweat-slick with
doubt. How could one enchantress of a courtesan have
tempted him to place her well-being above the will of
Mara, his sworn mistress, whose life he loved above his
own? Yet Kamlio had. For Mara, the Obajan of the Hamoi
Tong would die. But if the Spy Master who undertook the
deed escaped the consequences alive, he recognised that a
small, secretive part of himself must remain his own. His
care for the courtesan, which might or might not be love-and
could easily be rooted in foolish pity - begged to be
explored. The self-respect recovered with the destruction
of House Minwanabi demanded this: that he hear his own
needs as a man, and reconcile them with the duties that
daily led him into danger.

A thousand times, he might have died nameless, in the
guise of beggar, itinerant priest, sailor, fortune-teller, spice
merchant, costermonger, messenger. And a thousand times
he faced those risks without hesitation, for he had stared
into the abyss and did not fear death. But now, when
he needed hindrance the least, he found that suddenly
mattered. If death took him, he wanted his ashes honored
on Acoma lands, and the pretty, sullen-eyed courtesan
crying his name by his pyre. Now he found himself
shackled by sentiment when, at any cost, his identity must
remain secret.

The continuance of the Acoma, whose beloved Lady
had restored him to honor, and perhaps even the Empire
itself depended upon flawless self-restraint. Arakasi had
lived such a disjointed existence that love had but once
before fettered him, and then more through loyalty to the
woman who had restored his pride and honor. And though
he adored Mara, she did not trouble his dreams. Arakasi

330 Mistress of the Empire

cherished her as a priest loved his goddess. But Kamlio
had touched a piece of him that had been hidden from all
others. Especially himself, he rued silently.

The laughter of the women subsided. Arakasi tensed,
jerked from reminiscence by a tread that grated as it
crossed the floor. The sound indicated studded leather
sandals, and the weight of a large man. A female called
out a welcome, and bare, perfumed feet lisped over tile;
cushions and refreshments were being brought for the
master's comfort, Arakasi surmised. He shifted position
infinitesimally, his grip on his knife hot and dry.

The closeness of his attic perch seemed suddenly, unendurably
stifling. He fought the instinct to gasp for more
air, to move, to act prematurely; he willed himself against
pain to force each muscle to relax and hold position. The
mingled scents of perfumes wafted through the heated air,
admitted through the gaps between plaster and beams.
Presently Arakasi heard the clink of fine crystal, as serving
girls brought refreshment to their master, and later, a ville
player who accompanied a singer for his entertainment. He
smelled sweet oils, then, and heard the deep-pitched sighs of
contentment of a man being attended by skilled masseurs.
The Spy Master's own abused body obliged him by trying
to cramp.

Patience, he reminded himself inwardly.

Later still, a light tread betrayed a towel girl's departure,
her step shortened by her hamper of soiled linens. His eyes
half dosed, Arakasi pictured the tableau in the chamber
below his rafter perch. The musician had slowed his
rhythms, and the singer abandoned Lyrics, her voice sliding
into a languorous humming. The crystal jug that held the
spiced sa wine chimed as it was set on its polished stone
tray - nearly empty now, Arakasi judged by the ring of
the glass. Wax candles had burned low. The faint light
that escaped through the tiny cracks in the ceiling had
taken on the warmer tone cast by an oil lamp. He heard
the sigh of fine fabric as it fell away, and the master arose
with a creak of knees. His sigh was huge as he stretched.

For the first time since his entry into his pleasure
harem, the Obajan of the Hamoi Tong spoke. 'Jeisa.' He
paused after the name, his eyes perhaps glittering with
lust. 'Alamena, Tori.' He waited, cruelly drawing out an
interval of palpable tension, while the other, unsummoned
women arrayed at his feet waited to know whether they
would be chosen or spurned, their disappointment or their
joy at their appointed turn of fate carefully hidden.
The Obajan sighed again. 'Kamini,'he finished. 'The rest
of my flowers are dismissed.'

Arakasi blinked to clear the sting of what he hoped was
sweat. Not Kamini; the gods were not kind tonight. Kamini
he wished far away from the master's bedchamber through
this hour, for she was sister to Kamlio, the girl who haunted
the Spy Master's dreams.

Fiercely Arakasi wrenched his thoughts from the image of
Kamlio's face. Daydream and grow careless, and he would
die here.

A screen swished closed in the chamber below; presently
another slid open, and Arakasi heard the chirps of evening
insects over the hiss of the oil lamp. The attic had not
cooled; the roof tiles held the day's heat yet, though the
sun had long set, and the night was old enough for dew.
The musician and the singer subsided to the barest whisper
of a melody, over which Arakasi could hear the slither of
silken sheets, and the muffled giggle of a girl. He waited, still
as a predator, listening avidly for his prey's contented sighs
to become the quickened breaths of passion, and waited yet
as a girl began to moan in the throes of pleasure . . . or what
seemed like pleasure. Arakasi banished thoughts of another

girl, who had been taught since childhood to feign all the
subtleties of joy .

332 Mistress of the Empire

Arakasi reproached himself silently. He had sweated
too much, and dehydration was making him perilously
light-headed. He forced concentration, every muscle corded
with tension. The knife in his hand felt like an extension of
his living flesh as the Obajan, entwined in hot girls and
damp silk, opened his mouth and cried out in the fulfillment
of his release.

In that instant, the Spy Master shoved off, plunging
downward through warm air. He struck the plaster ceiling
and broke through, in a shower of fragments, and chips,
and dust. His eyes, long used to the dark, saw clearly in
the lamplight the humped mass of entangled forms on the
mat below as he fell. He chose the uppermost, the most
massive, and angled his knife accordingly.

He had but one instant to pray that the only time the
Obajan of the Hamoi Tong would be more than a hand's
reach from his weapons and guards would be in nakedness,
in the act of coupling.

Then he crashed atop the sweating mass of the Obajan
and his women, and sheathed priceless steel in flesh. Arakasi
felt his blade turned by sinew and bone. He had missed a
killing blow.
The Obajan was huge, but none of his bulk was fat.
His groan of pleasure became a shout of pain and alarm.
Arakasi was thrown off his prey like a fish tossed from a
bait boat. His heel caught on a woman's leg and he fell.
Besides being strong, the master of assassins was fast. His
hand shot out to a pile of weapons beside the bed. Three
darts smacked into silken sheets, even as Arakasi rolled
away. A girl screamed in pain and fear.

The oil lamp went out. A vielle fell with a crash, and the
singer broke off, screaming. Feet pounded in the corridor,
while Arakasi shoved free of entangling bedclothes, and
threw off a girl who clawed his shoulder with her nails. His
second knife slid into his hand as if it had life and breath

Twist

333

and a desire to match his need. He flicked his wrist, and
released, and the blade flew true, into the Obajan's neck.

The master of the Hamoi Tong bellowed again, enraged.
But the blade kissed the artery, and blood fountained. He
raised his hand to staunch the flow, and all but lost his
thumb on the keen edge still exposed. Against the pale
square of the door screen, Arakasi saw the man's shoulders
quiver in the stress of ebbing life. His scalp lock fell loose
over his back as he crashed to his knees, his chest wet with
the fast flow of blood.

Arakasi twisted around, flinging girls and sheets one way
and another in the darkness. He rolled, tossed a cushion in
the direction of pursuing footsteps. Someone tripped and
hit with a fleshy smack against the tile. Mistaking him
for the assailant, four incoming guards sprang and bore
the unfortunate man down. His protests masked Arakasi's
movements as, hand to the wall, the Spy Master scuttled
to the far side of the chamber.

He had just enough starlight to see by. Careful to keep any
chance gleam of steel from betraying his position, Arakasi
drew another knife from his belt loop. He threw, and one
of the guards went down, clutching his belly, and howling.
His noise distracted the rest, allowing Arakasi to draw
more knives and dispatch the four guards who entered
from the outer hall. They died, one after another, between
the screaming of the pleasure women and the cries of the
wounded sentry on the floor. The Obajan lay in the sheets,
motionless in death.

Arakasi slipped through the screen and ducked out of
sight around the lintel. He dared not wait to see if any of
the girls had seen him go, nor if they had the wits to make
outcry. With a leap driven by adrenaline, he sprang up and
caught the comer beam of the roof. Dangling by his hands,

he pulled himself into the shadows under the eaves, his last
blade gripped between his teeth.

334 . Mistress of the Empire

He was barely established in his hiding place when feet
pounded into the room from the direction of the adjoining
hallway.

'Outside!' shouted one of the assassins. 'The man who
killed our master fled into the garden!'

Desperate, Arakasi clawed a fragment of shingle from
the gutter. With an underhand toss he pitched the bit
of tile into a flower bed. The sharp-eared sentry who
bolted through the door dashed headlong into the bushes,
hacking the vegetation with his sword. Arakasi could have
brushed the man's head with his fingertips as the man
passed below.

More assassins rushed out. 'Where is he?'

The swordsman paused in his slashing. 'I heard movement.'

'Quickly!' called the second guard. 'Bring torches! The
killer makes his escape while we delay!'

They fanned outward, combing the garden, while men
with lights converged to aid in the search. Arakasi slung
himself off the roof. A moving shadow in darkness, he
sidestepped and ducked into an adjoining screen, back
inside the house where the pursuers had not yet thought
to check.

More men exploded from the bedroom. They met the
first man, returning. 'He must have gone over the wall.
Patrol the perimeter, quickly, before he gets away!'

Shouts of inquiry issued from inside the harem. News
of the Obajan's death roused the servants, some of whom
gave way to panic. The tong was swift and merciless
in retribution, and in a house this well guarded, the
members would suspect that whoever killed their master
must have an inside accomplice. The entire staff
might be put to death to ensure elimination of any
traitors. The more intelligent servants understood their
best course of action was to flee. Fear alone bound these
wretches to service with this murderous brotherhood;

Twist

335

most preferred to chance an uncertain future than face
dishonorable death.

Arakasi could only hope that the confusion caused by
dozens of terrified servants would lend him opening, for
while a saner man might seek escape, his mission was yet
incomplete. For Mara's sake, he must return to the Obajan's
study and steal the record journal of the tong.

Stillness had fallen over the adjacent bedchamber. Arakasi
risked that the guards had left their dead master in the heat
of the search. He reentered the screen he had broken earlier
and stepped into a scene of carnage.

Blood splattered everything within ten feet of the bed.
Beside the bulk of the slain master, a pair of naked girls
remained, starlight limping their forms faintly silver. One of
them stared at him, silent. With crazed, repetitive motions,
she sought to wipe blood from skin smeared hopelessly
scarlet. The other writhed in the sheets, moaning. Struck
down by a poisoned dart, she was unable to rise. With grim
purpose, Arakasi recovered two metal knives, one from the
neck of the Obajan and another from the stomach of a guard
who lay sprawled at his master's feet.

Arakasi stepped past the foot of the bed, his glance
passing over the wounded courtesan. He stopped, his
attention unwillingly arrested. The girl's hair pooled like
spilled oil in the moonlight, pale gold and glistening. Her
face was upturned, exposed to the flicker of torchlight
spilling in from the garden. Like a wound to the heart, he
saw that her features were the exact same as her sister's.

They were twins.

Logic could not stay the lurch of Arakasi's heart. In
moonlight, her slim hands worrying at the dart that pierced
her breast, she could not be distinguished from the girl he
had touched and bedded. Jolted by a pain of the spirit that
threatened to choke his breath, Arakasi fought to recapture
his icy, analytical nature. He was Acoma Spy Master, on a

336 Mistress of the Empire

mission for the Servant of the Empire. He must keep his
wits and locate the Obajan's scrolls.

But when he most needed steady nerves, his objectivity
forsook him. Before one dying courtesan, his own survival
suddenly seemed as meaningless as trying to capture
sunlight with bare hands.

Arakasi's intellect screamed that he must keep faith with
Mara, while his heart drove him to his knees beside the
stricken girl. Time and circumstance were blurred. He could
no longer separate which was the courtesan who had bound
him to her, and which the twin sister. In the dark, in the
moonlight, in the aching loss of the moment, their identities
seemed to merge. Against every instinct of self-preservation,
Arakasi gathered-her body into his arms. He cradled her,
wide-eyed and motionless, until she quivered, gasped and,
after what seemed an eternity, finally ceased breathing.

Arakasi felt as if he had been beaten. His nails had gouged
his palms, and his teeth had drawn blood. The salt-rich
taste on his tongue and the death stink that pervaded
his nostrils pushed him to nausea. He barely noticed the
living woman who muttered amid bloodstained sheets. His
mind recorded but did not comprehend her babble. Arakasi
snatched a tearing breath and forced himself to unlock his
rigid limbs. His heart seemed frozen as the dead girl slipped
from his grasp By rote, he reacted to a sound behind him,
turned, and whipped out a knife. His throw was almost true.
The servant who sought entry was a castrate who served
the harem, returned to look after his charges. The knife
caught him a glancing slash across the neck. He gagged
and slammed into the door post. Fast Arakasi had always
been; but tonight his limbs were clumsy as he stumbled
across the dropped girl. His feet caught in soggy sheets
and hooked upon cushions. He struck the castrate with a
wrestler's move in the middle, and knocked him sideways.
The dying man's strength was uncanny. Arakasi's hands

Twist

~ 337

sought a grip, and slipped. He dug his fingers into the
wound and, by the spray of blood on his face, knew he
had torn his enemy's artery. Using his knuckles to stop his
victim from crying out, he received a bite to the bone.

Had the dead Obajan's guards not been sweeping the
outer grounds for an assassin who by rights should be
fleeing for his life, the struggle would have brought notice.
As it was, hanging onto a dying man who careened into wall
hangings and crashed against chests and tables, Arakasi felt
a sense of the unreal. The castrate took a long time to bleed
to death. When he at last fell limp, Arakasi reeled out of
the room.

He had never seen the inside of the house. What sense
of direction he had garnered during his wait under the
rooftree now deserted him as he sought the journal that
was the heart of the tong. Such a book recorded each
contract and its disposition, in a cipher known only to
the Obajan. Intermediaries were told nothing beyond the
name of the victims directed to die.

The tong's records were the inheritance of the Tiranjan,
who must take over rulership for the leader just assassinated.
The journal would not be unprotected, and even before
the commotion of the search died down, the Obajan's
flower-robed adviser would be sending the Tiranjan to
collect it.

Arakasi heard distant voices and a scream. His time in
the house was now limited to less than a handful of minutes,
and his mind remained muddled by the memory of a girl's
tormented death. He whipped himself to review his past
surmises, made through the hot hours of waiting under the
rooftree. This was the pleasure palace. The Obajan was
on sabbatical. The record book that was never beyond his
reach would be here, in a place set aside for it. The door
screen with the stoutest construction must be the strong
room where the tong's scrolls would be kept.

338 Mistress of the Empire

Arakasi flitted down the corridor, keeping to the shadows
as much as possible. He doused lanterns where he dared,
shivering and starting at every distant noise. He rounded
a corner and all but collided with a man whose back was
turned. The chink of steel as he drew his last knife caused
the man to whirl. He was a warrior, assigned to guard a
locked door. Arakasi launched himself forward and sliced
the tendons in the man's wrist, even as his foe reached down
to draw his sword. The Spy Master felt no pain himself as he
chopped bitten, bleeding fingers into the guard's windpipe,
and rammed him with a crash against the wood.

Someone shouted at the noise.

Out of time, Arakasi bashed his enemy through the
panel. The guard resisted, eyes widened in soul-deep
terror. As he overbalanced backward into the confines of
the strong room, the hand that still functioned scrabbled
in desperation at the wall.

Then he went down. Tripwires mired his ankles, and
darts were released from the walls. The floor where he
struck dropped down with a grinding sound, and stakes of
sharpened, resin-hardened wood erupted through pierced
patterns in the tiles, impaling his twitching remains.

Arakasi paid his victim's death throes no mind. Clued by
the man's last living act, he surveyed the wall, and found a
niche between the murals. He recognised the hole for what
it was, an opening for a locking pin that would disable the
mechanical traps inside the room. He jammed his knife into
the gap and rushed ahead.

Chills chased across his skin. He could hear running feet
in the corridors, converging upon his position. Ahead of
him, lit by a single lamp, stood a tall desk-like structure
with a heavy book resting on the top. He leaped over the
corpse of the guard, his thoughts racing.

If the door had been trapped, so the desk must be also. It
followed that a thief who survived the defences to get this
far must be gifted, and a master of intricate mechanisms.
Therefore, Arakasi chose the unpredictable tactic: he would
make his attempt by force.

He swallowed the metallic taste of panic. He grasped the
heavy ceramic lamp stand, bent down, and bashed through
the inlaid paneling at the bottom of the desk. He looked
up to locate and disarm the maze of fine threads and levers
that would set off the snare were the book to be lifted, and
beneath them found something else.

A tightly rolled scroll lay beneath the trip mechanism.
He pulled it from its resting place and glanced at it. The
outer parchment was written over in cipher and tied off
with ribbons marked with the flower of the Hamoi Tong.
The book on the desktop was a fake, set up in plain view as
a trap. In his hand he held the true accounts of the tong.

The cries of alarm were now closer. Arakasi thrust the
scroll into his robe and hurried to the doorway. He yanked
his knife from the hole and ran, away from the voices that
converged around the corner from behind.

He made blind haste, shaken to fresh fear by his
success. As much as he had planned, as carefully as he
had arranged his safeguards, he had never anticipated
surviving beyond the moment of the Obajan's death.
Now the stakes were redoubled; for without the journal
scroll, the Tiranjan could not assume leadership of the
clan. Contracts would go unfulfilled, and the Hamoi
assassins would lose honor. In effect, Arakasi held the
murderous brotherhood's natami in his hands. Without it,
the tong would lose credibility and eventually drift away
like smoke.

Shouting erupted in the corridor Arakasi had just vacated.

The broken doorway was discovered, and screams followed,
as guards rushed inside and fell to the traps reset when he
had removed the dagger used as locking pin. Pursuit was
immediate, as the survivors scattered searching through the

340 Mistress of the Empsre

house. Arakasi barely slipped out the window ahead of one
hard on his trail.

A stinging in his shoulder marked a hit by an assassin's
dart. It would be poisoned, surely, yet he had no choice
but to ignore it. The antidotes he had brought on the
chance he might get hit lay with his stores, hidden outside
the perimeter. He rushed across the garden, leaped into
a tree, and flung himself over the first wall. Poised for a
moment, he heard darts and the heavier rattle of arrows
flying through the branches above his head.
He looked frantically for opportunity. A panicked party
of servants hurried past. Attempting to steal from the estate,
they hugged the wall in silence as they sought a clear avenue
to freedom.

Arakasi insinuated himself into their midst, causing one
woman to scream and a man to throw himself on his
knees and beg mercy. The Spy Master's black clothing had
caused them to mistake him for an assassin, he realised
with near-hysterical glee. Drawing a deep breath, Arakasi
screamed, 'The servants have murdered the Obajan! Kill
them all!' His ragged shout sent the menials scattering
in all directions, and he sprinted as they did, toward
the outer wall. Let the tong trackers pick out his spoor
from this confusion, he thought as he skinned his palms
leaping over.

At the edge of physical and mental exhaustion, he made
his way to a sheltered place he had selected against the
faint chance he would complete his mission. There he had
hidden his antidotes, and a cache of drugs that would force
him to continued alertness and energy, until safety or death
greeted him. He would pay a terrible price for their use,
and weeks of rest would be needed, but survival would
be worth the price. He dosed himself quickly and stripped
off his bloodied clothing. He left them under a large rock.
From another of his vials, he poured a pungent liquid that
caused his eyes to water. It was the essence of a slu-leeth,
a large swamp creature that other beasts found repellent.
No dog known would track one, and indeed, exposure to
its musk would ruin the animals' sense of smell for days.
As he rubbed the stinking ointment on his skin, the sting
in his shoulder reminded him he still had a dart in his flesh.
He drew the barbed shaft out and slipped on a fresh shirt.
The bitten knuckles he could do nothing for, and he cursed
at the certainty that the hand would swell and infect.

He could do nothing more but trust that the antidote he
had swallowed would counteract the poison. He had made
a fair guess at those required, a legacy of the knowledge
gained from his inspection of Korbargh's shelves.

Arakasi began to lope through the night, sandal-clad feet
slapping steadily over the rocky trail that led to safety. Now
as he coursed through dew drenched grasses, memories of
Korbargh's end, and another death, made him acknowledge
the changes in himself. Never again could he take such
measures against a man, not for Mara, not for duty, not
for honor. Not since he had held a dying courtesan and
confused her, for a moment, with another girl. Irrevocably,
he had perceived his own heart. If Korbargh's antidotes, and
the poison in his body were not a match . . . Arakasi was
fatalistic - until another memory surfaced: the ~dead girl in
the Obajan's chamber. Her tearful hysterics replayed in his
mind, her mumbling resolved with frightening clarity. She
had said, 'He knows Kamini!'

Kamini who was but one half of a pair of twins, one
belonging to an impotent old man, and the other dead with
the Obajan. Arakasi began to run then, out of breath and
hurting before he started. For the first time ever, he prayed
with fervor to the gods of Kelewan, begging Sibi, who was
Death, not to call him to her brother Turakamu's halls. He
needed luck, or a miracle, most likely both. For his lapse into
distraction back in the Obajan's chamber was sending death

342 Mistress of the Empire

to Kamlio's door. He had left the mad girl alive, and still
babbling, and a search was on for an assassin. The Obajan's
guards who remained alive might not cover every cranny of
the estate grounds in the dark. But come daylight, when the
Tiranjan arrived to direct the aftermath, a more methodical
hunt would begin. The courtesan would be questioned.

Arakasi recognised a second ugly truth: because of
Kamlio he could be made to talk should he be taken. He
choked back anguish. The only way to save the twin that
he loved was through Mara; and the only way to protect
his Lady was through the girl, who knew he had worked
for a powerful mistress with great wealth. There were few
such Ruling Ladies in the Empire. The tong would redouble
their attacks upon Mara. Where once the tong struck for
honor, now they would attack for survival. Arakasi would
be only minutes ahead of the assassins in his race to reach
Kamlio. If he could find one of his new operatives in
Ontoset he might pass along his precious burden, but he
had no moment to delay. From the instant the fact came to
light that the Obajan's murderer had recognised Kamini,
the brotherhood would investigate, working back along the
trail from the estate to the slave broker, to the surviving
twin. They would leave corpses after their inquiries. If their
agents in Kentosani received word before he could recover
Kamlio . . .

Sweating, Arakasi increased his pace, through fields and
gardens, and over the beaten earth of a game trail that led
in the direction of the main thoroughfare. Ah, if he could
have one of Hokanu's accursed horses, now . . .

Even in his affirmation of service to Lady Mara, he
also moved as he must, to meet his own need. Arakasi
became filled by a strange exhilaration, as if only now had
it registered that he was alive. His insane assault upon the
Obajan had succeeded, and he held the tong's records in
his possession. That victory made him giddy. The jarring

Twist

.:
<

.
:{

:;

.,

3

.

~`, _
343

of the road under his feet, the sting of splinters in his skin,
the burning of each labored breath, were all sensations to
be cherished. Part of his mind recognised the effects of the
drugs he had taken, but he also knew this preternatural
awareness arose from his discovery of the true stakes at
risk for him.

As he hurried through the night, he analytically examined
this epiphany. As son of a woman of the Reed Life, he had
never regarded love between man and woman as any sort
of mystery. He had lived, always, by his wits, his perception,
and his skills derived from level-headed study of his fellow
human beings. He had seen Mara's involvement with the
barbarian, Kevin, and been intrigued. He had attributed the
fire in his mistress's eyes when the man had been present to
a female's need to romanticise relationships. Why else go
through the encumbrance and the bother of childbearing,
he had coldly rationalised.

Now, running as if his heart would burst, his throat
congested with unshed tears, he thought of a honey-haired
girl, still living, and her dead identical twin sister. He saw,
as he bashed through dew-drenched branches and stumbled

with startling carelessness into the open moonlight on the
road, that he had been wrong. Stupidly, pitifully wrong.

Half a lifetime he had lived, and almost missed the
significance of the magic that poets called love. He skidded
to a stop, and glanced in both directions to locate the litter
pre-arranged to wait for him.

He pondered, as he gasped for breath, whether if he
survived to spare the other, living girl from the tong's
vengeance as this night's work was traced back to her he
wondered if the cynical nature, born of crushed dreams,
would ever permit her to teach him what he now most
wished to know. He ached to see whether the emptiness
he had discovered within himself could ever be fulfilled.
He spun around and, in the empty road, realised a second

344 Mistress of the Emp~re

thing, as fearful as any other in this night of reckoning: this
was the last mission he could undertake in the belief there
would not be personal consequences. For, irrevocably, he
had lost the detachment that had set him apart from his
fellows, and had given rise to the ice-dear objective vision
that had made him a genius in his craft.

A need had wakened in him that changed him from what
he was; no longer could he look upon others through his lens
of unfeeling indifference. No longer could he mimic
their ways, and assume any identity at will. The pale-haired
courtesan had forever changed that.

A night bird sang, somewhere off in the wood. The foliage
overhung the thoroughfare, dimming moonlight, and the
fine-grained scattering of stars. Left in drifting mist, with
an empty roadway and no clue, not even a flag of dust to
determine which way the litter might be waiting, Arakasi
chose a direction at random. Tortured to wry observation,
he considered whether his opponent at the game of intrigue,
Chumaka of the Anasati, had also possessed that flaw of
human nature, and lived in the absence of love. Or if he
had not, would Arakasi's newfound vulnerabilities leave
him open to attack by a man that already had an uncanny
penchant for spycraft, and who was Mara's implacable
enemy?

Arakasi agonised, as the sound of night creatures seemed
to mock him. Feeling more anguish in minutes than he had
known all the years of his life, the exhausted, frightened,
yet exultant Spy Master hurried on, toward a future and
a goal more fearful than any he put behind him.

14

Revelation

The fog lifted.

Arakasi walked through the river quarter of Jamar in
bone numbing fatigue. Although he had shed all signs of
pursuit nights past, he dared not stop for rest. The tong
was behind him somewhere, following him like hounds on
a game trail. They would lose him in this city, among ten
thousand strangers, only to turn to their other lead - the
clue that led to Kamini's sister. He had only a matter of
days before they found Kamlio.

With Mara still in residence at the Imperial Palace, he
would forfeit what precious lead time he had gained. The
fastest commercial litter, with two extra crews of runners,
had carried him from Ontoset to Jamar in a week. He could
not sleep though the jouncing ride, but his drug depleted
body had fallen into a stupor for the few hours a day the
bearers required to rest.

Now, six days after he had killed the Obajan, he had paid
off the exhausted crew of litter bearers by the entrance to
Jamar's main market, then lost himself amid the workers
who set up the merchant's stalls and laid out the day's
wares. Jamar was the busiest trading port in the Empire
and the dockside quarter formed a small community on its
own, where seagoing ships met river craft. Arakasi found a
beggar boy sitting before a brothel, closed at this early hour
of morning. He held up a shell worth a hundred centis, more
wealth than the boy would beg in a year. 'What is the fastest
way upriver?'

The boy sprang to his feet and with gestures indicated he
had no voice. Arakasi motioned for the boy to show him.

l

346 Mistress of the Empire

Darting through the early morning crowd that collected
by the sausage seller's shack, the boy led him upriver to
a pier where a half-dozen small craft were tied up. There
in plain view of a StoUt riverman, the boy pantomined that
this was where Arakasi wished to be. The Spy Master gave
him the shell.

The transaction was not lost upon the riverman, who
until that moment had counted the filthy man another
beggar. Seeing that shell, he reassessed his evaluation and
smiled broadly. 'You seek quick passage upriver, sir?'

Arakasi said, 'I need to reach Kentosani in haste.'

The man's chubby face showed pride. 'I own the swiftest
craft in the city, good sir.' He pointed toward the river,
indicating a low, trim messenger boat, with a tiny cabin,
moored some distance from the pier. 'I call her River
Mistress. Four banks for eight oarsmen, and full sail.'
Arakasi assessed her lines and efficient lateen sail. She
might not be quite as good as her master's boast, but he
would lose any time he might save in looking for one that
might be marginally faster.

'She appears worthy,' Arakasi said neutrally. 'Are the;
rowers aboard?'

The captain said, 'Indeed. We are waiting for a merchant
from Pesh, who desires transport to Sulan-Qu. He has the
cabin, sir, but if you are willing to ride on deck, you may take
over the accommodations from Sulan-Qu to Kentosani. The
price would normally be five hundred centis, but as you are
sharing the boat halfway, I'll take three hundred.'
Arakasi reached into a hidden pocket in his sleeve and
withdrew a slug of silver the size of his thumb. At the glint
of metal, more wealth than any riverman might expect to
see in one place, the captain's eyes widened. 'I will have
the cabin,' Arakasi said firmly. 'And we leave now. The
merchant from Pesh can make other arrangements.'

Whatever ethical protestations might have been made

Revelatior'

347

died in the captain's mouth. Offered incalculable riches, he
all but fell over backwards in his hurry to escort Arakasi to
the dinghy that bobbed at the bottom of the pier. Down the
ladder they went, and the captain cast off and rowed as if
ten thousand demons pursued him, lest the discommoded
merchant appear and raise outcry.

Arakasi boarded the River Mistress while the captain
made fast the dinghy and cast off the mooring. The green
hull was sloppily painted, but there was no rot or other
signs of slack care. The captain might be a frugal man, but
he kept his boat sound.

The rowers and tillerman were given their orders and
the captain escorted Arakasi to the tiny cabin as the River
Mistress swung around into the current and began making
her way upriver.

Little more than a low shack amidships, the cabin was
large enough for two people. The interior was dark, and
stale with the smell of lamp oil mixed with the lingering
perfume of its previous passenger. The ports to admit light
and air were covered with silk curtains and the cushions
were worn, but Arakasi had often endured worse.

He said, 'This will do. Now, one thing I demand: no one
is to disturb me. Anyone who enters the cabin before we
reach Kentosani will die.'

Arakasi was not the first strange passenger the boat
owner had accommodated, and given the price he had
paid, no objections were raised over conditions.

Arakasi sat and closed the louvered doors, then removed
the bundle he carried inside his robe. The tong's journal had
never been out of touch of his skin from the moment he had
fled the Obajan's estate. Now, as he had his first chance to
scan the pages, he began his study of the encoded entries. But
the strange characters blurred before his eyes. With his head
bent over yellowed parchment, he fell into exhausted sleep.

When he next regained consciousness, a glance through
a porthole showed that they were halfway to the Holy
City. He had slept for two days and a night. Snacking
from a basket of fruits presumably left for the merchant
from Pesh, he began to unravel the tong's cipher. It was a
clever code, but not beyond Arakasi's gifts to solve, given
that he had nothing else to do for three more days. He saw
four columns, and surmised that each entry was comprised
of four pieces of information: the date of the contract, the
price agreed upon, the name of the target, and the name of
the person buying the contract. Next to all but the last

few were checkmarks.

Arakasi scanned backward through the records until he
found another entry without a checkmark. He assumed
this to be the name Mara of the Acoma, and the person
paying the price, Desio of the Minwanabi. Another
missing checkmark, farther back in the record, would be
Mara's name again, with Desio's father Jingu beside it. v
Comparison of the characters revealed that the code was
a complex substitution, using a key that was modified with
each use.

For hours Arakasi studied the pages, attempting one
solution, then another, discarding a third. But after a day
and a half of work, he began to identify the pattern of
change.

By the time he reached Kentosani, he had translated the
journal, and reviewed its entirety several times. He secured
pen and paper from the captain, and made a key for Mara,
not trusting to transcribe the text lest the journal fall into
other hands. But he did mark one entry he had disclosed
in some distress, for its ramifications demanded his Lady's
attention.

When the boat reached the Holy City, Arakasi leaped
from deck to pier before the owner had fully tied up the
craft, disappearing into the press of the crowd without
a word. He paused only long enough to acquire suitable
clothing, and made his way to the palace. There he sent
word, enduring the torment of waiting with the Imperial
Guards as his message made its way from servant to servant,
at last reaching Lady Mara. Had he more wits or time, he
might have devised a disguise to approach her more directly.
But the scroll he carried was too important, and he could not
risk being killed as an assassin by the Imperial Whites.

When at last he was escorted into Mara's presence, in
her private garden, she smiled, though her gravid condition
prevented her from rising to greet him.

An afternoon breeze blew, whipping dust across the
stones between the planters, as the Spy Master arrived
before Mara and bowed.
With emotion that belied his usual dry manner, Arakasi
said, 'Lady, the task is done.'

Mara did not miss the change in her Spy Master. Her
eyes widened, and she motioned for the servants to leave,
then indicated that her Spy Master should sit beside her
upon the bench.

Arakasi obeyed and handed his mistress a bundle,
wrapped in silk. She opened it and saw the scroll with
its red ribbons and Hamoi flower stamping. .'

Mara said, 'The tong is destroyed?'

Arakasi's voice reflected unprecedented weariness. 'Nearly.
There is a small matter left to resolve.'

Mara glanced at the cipher, saw the key, and put the

journal aside for later study. 'Arakasi, what is wrong?'

The Spy Master found words difficult. 'I discovered . . .
something about myself . . . on this journey, mistress.' He
took a deep breath. 'I may not be the man I once was . . .
no, I am not the man I once was.'

Mara resisted the impulse to look into his eyes. She
did not try to read his doubts, but waited for him to
continue.
'Mistress, at the time when we are most challenged, by
the Assembly and by Jiro of the Anasati . . . I am not sure
I am equal to the tasks before us.'

Mara touched his hand in gentle affection. 'Arakasi, I
have always admired your resourcefulness and the amusement
I took whenever you would appear mysteriously, in
this garb or that.' She regarded him with seriousness underneath
her light warmth. 'But for each curious garb there was
a story, a mission in which you endured danger and pain.'

Arakasi said, 'A girl died.'

Mara said, 'Who was she?'

'The sister to another.' He hesitated, painfully unsure of
himself.

'She is important to you, this other girl?'

Arakasi stared at the green sky above the garden,
inwardly recalling a face that seemed to shift from that
of a taunting courtesan to a dying, frightened girl's. 'I don't

know. I have never known anyone like her.' ;

Mara was silent a moment. 'I have said that I admired
you the most among those in my service.' Her eyes looked
into his. 'But of my closest officers, you have always seemed
the least in need of affection.'

Arakasi sighed. 'In truth, my Lady, I also thought myself
without that need. Now I wonder.'

'You feel that the Spy Master of the Acoma cannot afford
friendships?'

Arakasi emphatically shook his head. 'No, he cannot,
which leaves us with a problem.'

'How much of a problem?' she asked.

Arakasi rose, as if giving rein to restlessness might ease
his turmoil. 'The only man I would trust to have the skill
to keep you safe in my place is, unfortunately, the one who
is trying to destroy you.'

Mara looked up at him, a spark of humor in her eyes.
'Chumaka of the Anasati?'
Arakasi nodded. 'I must continue to seek out his agents
and destroy them.'

'What of this unfinished matter of the tong?'

Arakasi saw at a glance that she would have all the tale,
so he told her of his trip to the South that had led to the
death of the Obajan. He mentioned the risk the courtesan
Kamlio posed to them. 'As long as the tong holds out any
hope of regaining their journal, its assassins will torture
and kill anyone they suspect of having information. Only
after their honor is compromised publicly will they begin
to wither and die.

'That scroll is the only means they have of ascertaining
who they are contracted to kill. Once it is learned that
the journal has been stolen, any man may claim the tong
owes him a death, and they have no way to prove him a
liar. More, it is their natami, and its absence shows that
Turakamu no longer looks upon their efforts with favor.'

Arakasi tucked his fingers in his sash. He paused as if
choosing words, then said, 'Once you have reviewed the
records to your satisfaction, I will insure that every rumormonger
in the Holy City is aware of the theft. As word
spreads, the tong will disburse like smoke.'

Mara once again was not diverted from the underlying
issue. 'This courtesan. She's the one who has. . caused
such a change in you?'

Arakasi's eyes betrayed confusion. 'Perhaps. Or perhaps
she is but a symptom of it. Either way, she is . . . a danger to
your safety. Out of prudence, she should be . . . silenced.'
Mara observed her Spy Master's posture and manner,
then made a judgment. 'Go and save her from the tong,'
she ordered. 'Silence her by bringing her under Acoma
protection.'

'It will require a great deal of money, mistress.' His
voicing a practical concern barely hid his relief and embarrassment.
'More than you have asked for before?' she said with -]
mock alarm. Arakasi had been her most expensive retainer
over the years, and the lavish provisions she had allowed
him had earned her many a scolding from Jican.

'This is not something I do on behalf of the Acoma,' he
revealed, an implied plea that somehow won past his iron
control. He was not the sure servant, but a supplicant.
Only once before had Mara seen him like this, when he
had thought himself a failure and begged her permission
to take his own life with the sword. She arose and gripped
his hand tightly. 'If you do this for yourself, you act also for
the Acoma. That is my will. Jican is inside. He will provide
whatever funds you need.'

Arakasi started to speak, but found no words. So he
simply bowed and said, 'Mistress.'

She watched him depart, and as he entered her apartment
in the palace, she beckoned to a servant hovering in the
doorway. She needed a cool, soothing drink. As the maid
came to attend her, Mara pondered upon the consequences
of countermanding Arakasi's judgment. She took a risk,
encouraging him to spare the courtesan. Then, she thought
with a bitterness left over from past losses, what would the
future bring for any of them if she made no allowance for
matters of the heart?

Light shone through the dome. It caught like fire on
the golden throne, and cast triangular dapples across
the pyramidal dais. Twenty levels down, it warmed the
marble floors and flashed on the rail where the supplicants
came and knelt for audience with the Light of Heaven.
Despite the small slave boys swishing plumed fans, the
Emperor's throne room was airless. Officials sweltered
under their finery, and the younger of the two present,
Lord Hoppara, sat still. It was too hot even to fidget. The
elderly Lord Frasai reclined upon his cushion, now and
again nodding under his ceremonial helm, as if he fought
off sleep.

The five priests in attendance murmured, and tended their
censers, adding the reek of incense to the already stifling
atmosphere.

On the golden throne, weighed down beneath layers of
fine mantles, and the massive plumed crown of the Empire,
Ichindar looked too worn and thin for a man in his late
thirties. The day had been fraught with tense decisions,
and the session was not over. Once weekly, the Emperor
held a Day of Appeals, when, from dawn to sunset, he was
available to his people. He must sit in his chair of state, and
give judgments for as long as supplicants should appear,
until the hour of sundown, when the priests sang their
evening invocations. Once, when a Warlord had held office
over the Council, the Day of Appeals had been ceremonial.
Beggars, low priests, commoners with petty grievances these
had gathered to hear the wisdom of a ruler who
shared mystery with their gods. Ichindar often had napped
in his chair while the priests acted as his voice, dispensing
alms or advice as their gods allowed in righteousness.

Since then the nature of the Day of Appeals had changed.
The supplicants who came to beg audience were often
nobles, and many times enemies, seeking to weaken, extort,
or break the imperial rule over the Nations. Now, Ichindar
sat rigid on the golden throne and played the deadly Game
of the Council, in words, in judgments, in the knowledge
that the stakes were often his own supremacy. Sundown
always found him exhausted, and many days he could not
be trusted to recall the name of the consort selected that
week to share his bed.

Today he dared not bend his head more than a fraction,
lest the weight of his crown of state bow his neck. He flicked
fingernails dusted with gilt toward the woman who sat on
the white-and-gold cushion at his feet.

354 Mistress of the Empire

'Lady, you should not be here, but resting in the cool
gardens by the singing fountains.'

Heavily pregnant, and tired enough that her skin looked
transparent, Mara dredged up a smile. 'If you try to
command me, I'll spoil your image of authority by refusing
to leave.'

Ichindar muffled a chuckle behind one wing of his
pearl-crusted collar. 'You would, too, you insufferably
willful woman. When I named you Servant of the Empire,
I created a monster.'

Mara's smile vanished as she inclined her head toward
the floor below, where the next supplicant approached and
made his bow. Her eyes turned hard as precious metal, and
the hand on her lap fan clenched white.

Ichindar followed her glance, and muttered what might
have been a profanity under his breath. One of the priests
twitched around in annoyance, then quickly faced front
as the voice of the Emperor rang out through the domed
chamber of audience.
'Lord Jiro of the Anasati, know that you have the ear of
the gods through our ear. Heaven will hear your plea, and
we will answer. Rise. You have leave to speak.'

The slight snap to the consonants warned of Ichindar's
irritation. His hazel eyes were chilly as he watched the
Anasati Lord straighten up from his obeisance and stand
at the rail, his avid, scholar's gaze trained intently upon
the golden throne, and also the woman who sat before it,
at the Emperor's feet. Jiro bowed. Although he observed the
forms of courtesy, his graceful delivery somehow managed
to mock.

'The imperial dais holds company today,' he opened,
shifting to Mara. 'Good day, Lady of the Acoma, Servant
of the Empire.' His lips thinned in what a friend might have
construed for a smile. An enemy knew better.

Mara felt a chill chase across her skin. Never before

Revelation

355

had a pregnancy made her feel helpless; now, under Jiro's
predatory regard, she felt her clumsy heaviness, and that
unnerved her. Still, she did not lose control and allow herself
to be baited.

Ichindar's voice cracked across the interval that followed,
as Acoma Lady and Anasati Lord matched stares. Slender
and worn as the Emperor was, his authority was real, a
palpable air of force even in that enormous chamber. 'If
you have come to us as supplicant, Lord Jiro, you will not
waste our time in idle social that.'

Ever the smooth courtier, Jiro waved aside the reprimand
with a flash of gold; he wore metal rings, his one affectation
to flaunt his wealth. The rest of his attire was plain. 'But my
Sovereign,' he protested in gentle familiarity, 'I do come as
supplicant. And my reason, I must admit, is a social one.'

Mara resisted an urge to shift uneasily on her cushion.
What could Jiro have on his mind? His informal tone was
itself an insult to the Light of Heaven, but not one that could
be noted without setting shame upon Ichindar's dignity. To
react to Jiro's presumption was to give weight to him as a
man. No one who sat on a god's throne could acknowledge
so petty a slight.

The Light of Heaven maintained a frosty silence through
the minute that Jiro stood with his brows suggestively
raised. The subject under discussion would have to be
pursued by the Anasati, were it to continue.

Jiro tilted his head, as if he only then recalled his true
purpose. His face very subtly leered, and one eyelid drooped
suggestively toward a wink. 'I came because I have heard

many rumors concerning your daughter Jehilia's famed
beauty. I ask a boon, my Sovereign: that you share your
joy in her with your people. I ask to be presented to her.'

Mara reined back a burst of fury. Jehilia was but a girl,
barely ten, and not yet come into her womanhood. She
was not a woman of the Reed Life, to be gawked at by

356 Mistress of tl~e Empire

men who were not relatives! She was certainly too young
for courtship, or even for the suggestion that she should be
entertaining suitors. Jiro's subtleties were twisted and deep,
that he should come here and dare such a thought in public.
The ramifications were endless, not least the implied slight
to the Light of Heaven's manhood. Without sons, he must
secure the imperial line through his daughter's marriage, but
how presumptuous the Anasati Lord was to imply credence
to the gossip of the streets, that the Emperor would have
no son, and that the ninety-second crowned head of the
Nations would be the man who won Jehilia's hand.

But angry words could not be spoken; Mara clamped her
teeth, aware of Ichindar's advisers standing red-faced with
fury to the sides. Made sensitive to her own vulnerability,
she was mindful that the three priests on the pyramid dais
were affronted, but powerless to intervene. Lord Hoppara
had taken a stranglehold on the place at his sash where
a sword should hang, were weapons not forbidden in the
presence of his Emperor. As father of the girl, Ichindar sat
stone-still. The jewels on his mantle were frozen sparks, as

if he had restrained himself from breathing.   .

For a long, tense interval, nothing stirred in the grand
audience hall.

With unprecedented audacity, Jiro ventured a lazy-voiced
addendum to his petition. 'I have done some interesting
reading recently. You do know, my Sovereign, that before
your reign, seven imperial daughters were presented on
or before their tenth birthday. I can tell you names, if
you like.'

Mara knew this was a second slap against a man whose
office had once revolved around memorisation of his family
pedigree and other issues of religious context that had
nothing to do with rulership. Ichindar would know of
those seven girls, if not the mitigating circumstances of
history that had forced their public presentation before

Revelation
357

puberty. And his office was much more, now, than religious
ceremony alone.

The sun shone hot on the topaz and marble floors, and
the Imperial Guards stood like statues. Then, with icy
deliberation, Ichindar set his clenched fists on the arms
of the golden throne. Anger stiffened his face like a cameo
against the mantling weight of his collars. Yet his voice was
controlled to its usual regal pitch when he deigned to give

answes

'My Lord of the Anasati,' he said, precise consonants
echoing off the high dome overhead, 'it would please us
better to present to you our son, when the gods choose
to bless us with an heir. As to our daughter Jehilia, if the
Lord of the Anasati enjoys paying heed to the gossip of her
nurses, who boast that every infant they dote upon is blessed
with extraordinary beauty, then we grant permission for a
portrait to be made by one of the artists we patronise, and
to be sent to the Anasati estates. This is our will.'

The traditional phrase rang into silence. Ichindar was
not the figurehead his forebears had been but an Emperor
fighting to retain his authority. Mara sat back, limp with
relief; his handling of Jiro's aggression had been exemplary.
A portrait of a child! Ichindar had neatly taken the blade
out of the dilemma. But, sadly, the greater issue remained.
Jiro had dared to be first to voice the thought that
Jehilia would become a husband's path to the golden
throne. She would not remain a pretty royal child for
much longer, but would become a hotly contested prize
in the Great Game. Once a girl torn wholesale from
the Goddess Lashima's order into the throes of the
Empire's bloody politics, Mara felt her heart go out to
the child.

Ichindar's hold upon the reins of rulership would slip
on the day his eldest daughter married. Unless he could
conceive a male heir, the traditionalists would use Jehilia

358 Mistress of the Empire

as a powerful means to undermine him, especially if her
husband was a well-placed, powerful noble.

On the floor below, at the supplicants' rail, Jiro crossed
both arms over his breast in the time-honored imperial
salute. He bowed before the Emperor's honor guard, and
arose, smiling. 'I thank my Sovereign Lord. A portrait of
Jehilia to hang upon my chamber wall would be very
pleasing indeed.'

The dig was petty; Jiro had not quite dared to say
'bedchamber wall,' Mara noted with vindictiveness. But
that he had stooped to so mean a comment in public
hearing demonstrated his contempt for the man who sat
upon the golden throne. And Mara realised, with a stab
of intuition, that Jiro would not have been quite so vicious
had she not been present. The taunt to Ichindar had been
intended to goad her as well.

'I fear this day I have not been a benefit to you,' she
murmured as the great doors boomed closed behind the
Lord of the Anasati.

Ichindar started to reach out to her in sympathy, recalled
his formal audience, and restrained himself before an
adviser needed to step forth and intervene. 'My Lady,
you are wrong,' he murmured back. His hair clung to
his forehead, too damp with perspiration to be stirred by
the fan boys' efforts, and his fists had not loosened on his
throne arms. 'Had you not been present, strong as rock
at my feet, I surely would have lost my poise!' He ended
with a viciousness he had kept back from the enemy who
had angered him. 'It is a very unscrupulous man who will
stoop to attack through a father's love for his child.'

Mara said nothing. She had known many such unscrupulous
men. Her memory fumed poignantly to two murdered
children, a boy and a girl both under five years of age - the
children of the late Minwanabi Lord - who died as a direct
result of her actions. Her hand rested upon the mound of

Revelation

359

her belly, over the swell of her unborn child. She clenched
her teeth in resolve. She had lost a son, and another child
by Hokanu she had never had the chance to know. Again
she swore that the deaths of all of the young ones must not
be for nothing. She would die and the Acoma name be as
dust before the wrath of the Assembly of Magicians before
she let Jiro reinstate the Warlord's office, and bring back
the unconscionable bloody conflicts that had comprised the
Game of the Council in the name of honor.

Now that the first steps toward change had been taken,
she was determined not to give back old ground.

Her eyes and Ichindar's met, as if the thought had been
spoken aloud between them. Then the doors opened, and
the imperial herald announced the next supplicant.

It seemed a long time until sundown.

Hokanu stripped off his sweaty leather riding gloves.
'Where is she?' he demanded of the white-clad personage
that stood blocking the doorway.
But the immensely fat servant did not budge. His gleaming,
moon-round face went stiff with displeasure at the
Shinzawai Lord's poor etiquette, in showing such unseemly
haste. The imperial hadonra was a man attentive to nuance,
and he ran the vast complex of the Emperor's private
apartments in the palace with unflinching, cold-hearted
proficiency. Moths did not infest the imperial closets, the
servants went about their duties like oiled clockwork, and
anxious husbands did not disrupt the hadonra's morning
round of inspection with commands better suited to the
battlefield.

Fixed squarely in the vestibule's entryway, the huge man
folded meaty forearms. 'You may not pass at this time,

my Lord.'

Hokanu restrained himself from a pointed comment.
'My wife, I was told, went into labor two days ago. I have

360 Mistress of the Empire

been riding on horseback at speed from my estates beyond
Silmani since then, and have not slept. I will know if my
wife is safe and well, and whether my heir was born whole,
if you will kindly let me pass through to her apartment.'

The imperial hadonra curled his lip. The redolence of the
barbaric creatures that permeated Hokanu's presence was
an offence. No matter how powerful the Lord, no matter
that he was a staunch supporter of the Light of Heaven, he
stank of his horseflesh, and he should have bathed before
making an appearance in these hallways. 'You may not
pass,' said the servant, unperturbed. 'The Emperor has
commanded a performance of sobatu for this morning.' He
referred to a form of classic opera, in the grand high style,
of which only ten had been-composed. Then, as if Hokanu
were not educated, and the son of a preeminent house,
the servant added, 'The Imperial Shalotobaku Troupe are
using the chambers beyond for their dressing, and as I
need not remind you, none may lay eyes upon them but
the Emperor's immediate family.'

Hokanu bit back his irritation. Too hurried and too proud
to argue over nuances of genealogy with a servant when he
had yet to know the status of his family, he held himself
rigid lest he reach out of rage for his sword and resort to
threats. 'Then, good and faithful servant, you will do your
duty by the Emperor's players and show me another way
around the wing that they are using.'

The hadonra dug in his toes, and jerked his larded chin
up another notch. 'I may not leave, my Lord. It is my duty
to watch this doorway, and see that no one passes who is
not of the royal blood.'
The comment was more than an anxious father's patience
could stand. Hokanu bowed at the waist as if in accord
with the hadonra's pompous adherence to etiquette. Then,
without warning, he charged forward. His leanly muscled
shoulder drove hard into the fat servant's belly. There was
an explosion of air, and a grunt. Then the imperial hadonra
folded like a fish and dropped, deprived of wind to give
voice to his outrage.

Hokanu was beyond hearing in any case, having broken
into a run the instant he gained access to the vestibule.
Two nights and a day spent on horseback had not stiffened
him to the point where he could not command his body.
He dashed through a bustle of men in bright costumes,
some wearing the provocative robes of courtesans, and all
without exception painted with layers of gaudy makeup. He
leaped over the humped back of a saganjan, the beast out of
legend that past Tsurani heroes fought; the masked head
turned to watch him go, while an inattentive midsection
was jerked into an ungainly trip. The player dressed as
the forelimbs twisted to stop disaster, while the belly
section behind him stepped in the opposite direction. The
concoction staggered, and a moment later the whole length
went down in a muddle of kicking legs, and curses muMed
under scales sewn of fabric and leather.

Unmindful that he had downed a dragon, Hokanu forged
ahead, through a gaggle of girl vocalists wearing little but
feathers. Plumage unmoored by his passage drifted in
flurries in his wake. He ducked a wooden swnr~d tied with
streamers, and sidestepped a lacquer-masked karagabuge,
which reached out dwarf hands and tried to trip him.

He cursed, and avoided stepping upon what looked like
one of the imperial daughters, sucking her knuckles, and
staring at the surrounding panoply with huge, three-yearold
eyes. She spotted Hokanu, remembered him for the
man who had amused her with stories of monsters, and
obligingly shouted his name.

Some mornings, Hokanu concluded, the God of Tricks
had a man's measure, and no act of appeasement could
bring respite, one bad moment leading to the next without

letup. He was going to have to pay a stiff fee to compensate

362 Mistress of the Empire

the honor of the imperial hadonra; not to mention whatever
extortionate worth could be set upon the bruised dignity of
a saganjan. He was red from embarrassment, and stinking
of sweat as well as horse, by the time he left the chaos of
the opera troupe behind and gained access to the corridor
that led to his Lady's quarters within the Imperial Palace.
Outside the ornately carved screen that led to the
women's chambers he met Misa, Mara's personal maid.
Unable to contain his anxiety, he blurted, 'How is she?'

The maid gave him back a brilliant smile. 'Oh, my Lord!
You will be proud. They are both doing well, and she is
beautiful.'

'Of course she is beautiful,' Hokanu said, stupid with
relief and loosened nerves. 'I married her, didn't I?'

And he never thought to pause or question Misa's
explosion of giggles as he hurried on, into a chamber
filled with sunlight and breeze, and with the gentle song
of a fountain in the gardens outside. There he felt his
unwashed state most sorely, as he skidded to a stop on
the waxed floor in the longed-for presence of his wife.

She sat on embroidered cushions, her newly slender body
robed loosely in white. Her hair was unbound, her head
bent, and a smile of rapture curved her lips as she raised
her face and saw her husband restored to her. And yes,
another white-wrapped bundle kicked in her arms, with
dark eyes like hers, and rosebud lips, and swaddling ties of
Shinzawai blue: his own blood heir by the Lady he loved.

'My Lord,' said Mara in delight. 'Welcome back. Let me
present to you your daughter and your heir, whom I would
call Kasuma after your brother.'

Hokanu's excited step forward checked in mid-stride.
'Kasuma,' he said, sharper than he intended, but surprise
made him clumsy. 'But that's a girl's-' He stumbled to a
stop, comprehending. 'A girl?'

Mara nodded, her eyes dancing with happiness. 'Here.'

Revelation

363

She raised the little bundle, which made a sound of
contentment. 'Take her, and let her know her father.'

Stunned, he stared unmoving at the infant. 'A daughter.'
The words would not sink in. He could only stand in mute
shock, caught in outrage that the gods should be so cruel,
that Mara be allowed only one child, and that he should
be deprived of the son he needed to continue the greatness
of his house.

Mara saw his confusion, and her smile died. The babe
in her arms waved in abandon, making her difficult to
support in an extended position; yet still Hokanu made
no move to accept her warm weight in his arms. 'What's
wrong?' Mara asked, distress creeping into her voice. She
was still weary from childbirth, and unable to fully master
her poise. 'Do you think she is ugly? Her face will be less
red and wrinkled in a few more days.'

Helpless, cut by his wife's growing distress, and by his
own hard knot of rage that fate should be so unkind,
Hokanu shook his head. 'She is not ugly, my beloved Lady.
I have seen newborns before.'

Still holding the baby out toward the father, Mara
stiffened with the beginnings of outrage. Baffled by her
husband's distance, she flared, 'Then this one displeases
you, my Lord?'

'Oh, gods,' Hokanu burst out, annoyed with himself
for losing all vestige of tact, but unable to rein back his
disappointment. 'She is very lovely, Mara, but I wish she
could have been a son! I need a strong heir so very badly.'

Now Mara's eyes flashed hurt, which slowly turned to
anger. She withdrew her upraised arms, clutched little
Kasuma to her breast, and stiffened in regal affront.
Coldly she asked, 'Do you imply that a woman cannot
assume the mantle of a great house, and make the name of
her ancestors prosper? Do you think House Acoma could
have been led to greater glories by a man? How dare

364 Mistress of the Empire

you, Hokanu! How dare you presume that our daughter
should become any less than I have! She is not deformed
or stupid! She will have our guidance in her upbringing!
She will embody Shinzawai honor, no less, and she does
not need to be any swaggering boy child to find her way
to the greatness that is her destiny!'

Hokanu raised opened hands. He sat down heavily on a
handy cushion, confused, tired, and heartsick with disappointment
that he lacked the ability to convey. He wanted
what he had lost in Ayaki and Justin: the comradeship of
showing a boy the warrior's path and a ruler's perceptions
and guile. He needed the heart bond he had lost with his
brother, gone to the barbarian world; and the man's love
he had known for his father, lately departed to Turakamu's
halls. He could never have back those ties to family, but he
had yearned to pass on their heritage after him to a son.
'You don't understand,' he said softly.

'What don't I understand!' Mara cried back. She was
very near to weeping. 'Here is your daughter, from my
body. What more do you need in an heir?'

'there,' said Hokanu. 'Mare, please, I have been thoughtless.
Of course I can love Kasuma.' He responded to the hurt
behind his wife's anger and reached out in comfort.
'Don't touch me!' Mara burst out, flinching away. 'Touch
your little girl, and bid her welcome.'

Hokanu shut his eyes. Inwardly he berated himself that
his normally sharp perception should have deserted him in
this most critical of moments. Better the saganjan had fallen
on him, or the imperial hadonra had prevailed, than to have
burst into Mara's chambers and made such a botch of his
greeting. He reached out, gathered the swaddled infant
from his wife's stiff arms, and cradled her. His heart did
warm to Kasuma's energetic thrashing. The little pink lips
puckered, and the eyes opened to show him bright jet jewels
in a wrinkled red face. She was delightful, and beautiful, and

..~

;

.

__

Revelation

36S

indeed his heir; but she could not reverse his disappointment
that she had not been born a boy.

Hokanu considered his alternatives, since Mara could
have no more issue. He could take a mistress, or a courtesan,
and get a son for the Shinzawai. But the thought of another
woman in his bed made him ache in fierce rejection. No,
he did not wish to have women about for breeding. Most
Lords would not blink at that choice, but Hokanu found
the thought repugnant.

He looked up to find Mara weeping. 'My wife,' he said
softly, 'you have given me a perfect child. I had no right
to be clumsy and spoil what should have been a joyous
moment.'

Mara choked back a sob. After weeks in the Imperial
Palace, attending the Emperor's councils, and standing as
his right-hand adviser, she was aware of the factions that
sought to undermine the authority of the golden throne.
She felt the tides of politics churning to upset new change,
and to bring back the older, bloodier order of the Warlord's
office. Like a blade against her neck, she sensed how near
the Nations were to outright civil conflict. Now more than
at any other time, they needed to present a solid front to
the factions that favored traditionalist rule. ~

'Kasuma is part of the new order,' she said to Hokanu.
'She must carry the torch after us, and she will have Justin
as her brother. She will lead armies, if she must, just as
he will strive to maintain peace without force of arms that
will be needful to build a better future.'

Hokanu shared that dream. 'I know that, beloved.
I agree.'

But he could not entirely shut off his grief, and his
disappointment that his dreams would not be shaped by
a boy who could share his love of rough sports.

Mara sensed the half-truth behind his tone. She hardened,
visibly, as she took her child back, her hands stroking the

366 Mistress of the Empire

blanket that covered little Kasuma. The fact that Hokanu
could not embrace the concept of his firstborn as heir was
not a thing she could readily forgive, unaware as she was
that the priest of Hantukama had imparted the fact that
she would have no other children.

That bit of information Hokanu kept to himself, although
he knew that to break his silence would bring Mara's
immediate understanding. Looking at her, realising that
her cheeks were hollow, and her face aged with worry after
her stay within the Imperial Palace, he decided that the
slight estrangement in their relationship would repair itself,
over time; but the grief that knowledge of her barrenness
would impart might never leave her, life long. Let her cling
to hope, he decided, his gaze upon her and his newborn
daughter grown fond, but distant. 'We will all manage,'
he mused, unaware he was thinking aloud. Then, mindful
of the Great One Fumita's warning, he added, 'Thank the
gods, though, that the Shinzawai have no cause against Jiro
of the Anasati. That would make a complication that none
of us could afford.'

Mara was looking at him strangely. Her preoccupation
with her infant was eclipsed by an unpleasant recollection,
Hokanu saw as he looked across the sunny chamber, and
fully interpreted her expression. 'What is it, my love?'
he asked.

Her former hurt was not forgotten, but only placed in
abeyance, for she answered sharply. 'ill news. Arakasi
completed his mission against the Obajan of the Hamoi
Tong, and he brought that.'

She inclined toward the journal that lay upon a side
table. Hokanu moved to inspect it. The writing was in a
heavy black hand, and the words appeared to be in cipher.
Hokanu was on the point of inquiring where the journal
had come from, and what was its significance, when he
noticed the water mark on the parchment that showed in
Revelation

.

__

367

slight relief where the sunlight struck it. The configuration
of the pattern shaped the flower of the Hamoi Tong, and
the scroll, with its ugly inked lines, could only be the record
roll of purchased assassinations.

Aware still, and piercingly, of his wife's gaze upon him,
the Lord of the Shinzawai said, 'What is it?'

Mara took a deep breath. 'Beloved, I am sorry. Your
father had enemies, many of them. His death was not due
to old age, or natural causes, but to an obscure poison
delivered by a needle dart while he slept. Your father's
death was executed by a tong assassin, paid for by Jiro
of the Anasati.'

Hokanu's expression went wooden, the flesh over his
skull taut as a drumhead with shock. 'No,' he murmured
in disbelief, yet aware of the truth of Mara's statement. He
considered Fumita's warning at the funeral in a fresh light,
and knew that his blood father, a magician, had somehow
known of the tong's intervention in the natural order.
Grief pierced him afresh, that Kamatsu's days had been
shortened, that a wise and perceptive old man had been
stolen away from his last days under sunlight.

It was outrage! An insult to honor! A Kanazawai Lord
had been sent prematurely to the halls of the Red God,
and warning or not, Assembly or not, Jiro of the Anasati
must answer for the offence. Family honor and clan honor
demanded a death to right the balance.

'Where is Arakasi?'Hokanu said harshly. 'I would speak
to him.'

Mara shook her head sadly. 'He delivered the scroll and
broke the cipher, so that we could read its secrets. Then he
requested a leave from duty, a matter of personal honor.'
Mara did not mention the sum of money he had requested
of her, or that the reason involved a young woman. 'His
coup against the Obajan was a brave and risky deed. He did
well to survive. I granted his request.' She frowned slightly,

368

Mistress of the Empire

recalling the interview, and her thought then that he would
never have asked her a boon at so precarious a time had
the confusion in his heart not been compelling. 'He will
report back to us when he can,' Mara concluded. None
had been more aware than the Spy Master of the explosive
potential of the contents of the tong's record scroll. More
than Kamatsu's death had been listed; and there were other
assassinations as yet incomplete on the rolls, alongside the
monetary payments made by the Lords who wished rivals
or enemies dead.

Assassination in any form was a dishonor, both to the
victim and, if the truth were found out, to the family who
paid for the deed. The scroll recovered by Arakasi
contained enough sensitive information to plunge the
Empire into a chaos of feuding families, all vengeance
bent, as Hokanu was.

But that Kamatsu should have died by an assassin's dart
was an outrage she could not let pass. Her words were
hard as barbarian iron as she said, 'My husband, we have
no choice. A way must be found to evade the Assembly's
edict and bring down Lord Jiro of the Anasati.'

'For Ayaki's sake also,' Hokanu broke in. Never would
he forget the sight of the boy's dying, with the huge black
gelding broken with him.

'No.' Mara's word held gentle regret. 'For Ayaki we have
already paid.' And, tears in her eyes, she told Hokanu of
the Obajan's personal feud with House Acoma, brought
about by a forgery of Arakasi's that had caused five
Minwanabi servants to be put to death, to end a past
threat of enemy spying. 'The tong took offense at the
Acoma,' she finished. 'It acted on its own initiative to
end my line, operating beyond the scope of the contract
agreed to with Tasaio of the Minwanabi.' Her last sentence
came bitterly. 'They failed. The Obajan is dead, fittingly, by
Arakasi's own hand.'

Revelation

369

Hokanu stared at her, hard as flint with her motherhood
forgotten in the face of dark thoughts and bloody politics.
Kasuma fretted at the lack of attention, her face screwed up
in the beginnings of a loud cry. 'My wife,' he said, saddened,
and angered, and frustrated by the injustices of life, 'let us
go home.'

His heart went out to her as her eyes turned to him, liquid
with unshed tears. 'Yes,' she said. 'Let us go home.'

But it was not of the beautiful lakeside estate that she
thought as she said the word, but of the wide pastureland
estate where she had grown from childhood. Suddenly,
strongly, irresistibly, she wished to return to the lands
of her family. She wanted familiar surroundings, and the
memories of her own father's love, and a time before she
had first tasted the heady wine of power and rule. Maybe
on the land of her birth she could come to terms with the
heartache and her fears for the futures of both House
Acoma and House Shinzawai.

,


15

Secrets

Mara sighed.

Hot, tired and discouraged after her journey to the
original Acoma estates, she found relief from the noon
sun in the cho-ja tunnels, a nearly forgotten haven. Her
marriage to Hokanu and the close-knit rapport shared
between them had come to replace her need for such
solace. But before that, in her early years as Ruling Lady,
the spice-scented dimness of the underground passageways,
with their scurrying workers, had provided a sense of
protection when seemingly insurmountable dangers had
oppressed her on all sides.

Yet her perils then had been from the plots of human
foes. Overwhelming as her straits had seemed, unpleasant
as her first marriage to an Anasati son had been at the
time, she could not have imagined the trials that would
beset her this day. Physical abuses had been replaced by
wounds of the spirit, a betrayal by the only man who truly
understood her heart. Whatever underhanded injury Jiro of
the Anasati might contrive in the future, her true enemies
were the magicians, who might on a whim annihilate the
Acoma name, even to memory of its existence. And it was
their edicts that sheltered Jiro as he plotted.

Kamatsu's murder had left a hard knot of rage in
Mara's chest. Fears that must never be spoken of for
Tsurani and house pride caused a constant grinding of
teeth. Mara had felt this way before as she faced enemies,
but never over so long a period, and never for stakes so
high. All that she loved was in jeopardy. Since Ayaki's
loss, stress had become familiar to the point where she
had forgotten what it was to sleep and dream without
nightmares.

The subterranean dimness shielded her. Isolated within
her own silence, but not alone, she relaxed as her litter
moved deeper into the familiar tunnels of the hive. Her
bearers jostled past the bustling cho-ja, surrounded by
the high-pitched commands of soldiers, and the clashing
ring of chitinous forearms as patrol leaders slapped their
midsection in salute to her retinue. Knowing her surcease
was only temporary, Mara surrendered to the illusion of
relief. For a space, she felt restored to past days when her
responsibilities and her heartaches had been few. Her inner
barriers loosened and moisture gathered in her eyes. She
bit her lip, but did not blot away her tears. In the cho-ja
hive, scantily lit by the violet-blue glow of light globes, her
weakness would pass unnoticed. The worry, the frustration,
the daily ache of her helplessness to redress the wrongs
done her family by the Anasati, combined to oppress her.
She could deny her emotions no longer. The death of two
children, the break in rapport with her husband and closest
confidant, threatened to overwhelm her.

The years when Mara had grown in confidence and ability
to control any situation seemed empty. Her' emergence
to dominance in the time-honored Game of the Council
became a false achievement, the edict of the Assembly at a
stroke preventing the established ways of avenging wrongs
against honor. Politics and intrigues had taken a turn down
nontraditional paths. The advantage that Mara had always
enjoyed, a willingness to break with convention, was now
lost to her, as every Ruling Lord in the Empire scrambled
to contrive new means to dominate ancient rivals.

The old ways had all been upset.

Even the destruction of the Hamoi Tong, and the dear
knowledge of where Jiro's true culpability lay, brought little
relief. For although one menace to the Acoma had been

372 Mistress of the Empire

ended, the Great Ones yet prevented her from avenging a
deep insult to honor.

Mara's return trip by river barge to the homelands of
her ancestors had been a stopgap effort to set hurt and
confusion at bay because, in truth, she had no sane place
to seek solutions to the dilemmas that beset her.

Mara dosed her eyes, rocked by the slight sway as her
bearers wended their way downward into the tunnels. The
air here was warmer, thick with the alien scents of the
hive. Light globes were spaced at wider intervals, and
the throngs of scurrying workers thinned. The tramp of
humans' sandals became more prevalent than the click of
chitinous claws. Mara knew her retinue must be nearing
the Queen's cavern. But the route was no longer entirely
familiar. Since, her last visit, walls and arches that had been
roughly hewn were now polished smooth, or carved and
overhung with richly dyed hangings. If the arrangement of
colors and tassels was unusual to human eyes, the effect
was prosperous. The differences here seemed strangely at
odds with impressions like untouched memory. But for the
silver hair beginning to show at her temples, Mara might
have been revisiting her girlhood. The house where she
had played as a child, where she had first married and
given birth, and acquired her taste for power, had initially
appeared the same - until she remembered with a hollow
stab to her stomach that silence ruled where once a young
son had run roistering through the corridors.

She had felt a pang of loneliness. Ayaki was not the only
loved one lost to her. The all too familiar surroundings
brought heartache along with solace. By the gods, how she
longed to see Nacoya, her onetime nurse and First Adviser,
whose scolding and sage advice had more often than not
averted disaster. Another trail of tears seeped from Mara's
eyes as she thought of her red-haired barbarian, Kevin
of Zun, who had taught her the meaning of love and

Secrets

373

womanhood in the kekali gardens here. Although Kevin
had often infuriated her with his headstrong, mannerless
ways, and Nacoya's fussy proprieties had sometimes been
a hindrance, she missed them both. The understanding she
had shared with Hokanu, which had grown to replace those
lost relationships, had seemed a bastion of infallibility, until
now. A shadow lay between them since his misgivings
over the birth of his daughter. Still angry with him, Mara
rubbed her cheeks on her fine silk cuffs. The fabric would
water-stain, but she did not care! It-had taken the near
obliteration of her line to make Hokanu see her need to
name Justin as Acoma heir. That she had needed to suffer
the loss of their firstborn infant to convince him had caused
less pain than this!

Now Hokanu's incomprehensible reluctance to accept
Kasuma as Shinzawai firstborn was building another wall
between them. A son, and only a son, would satisfy him, so
it seemed. As if she could not bear a boy child in the future,
Mara raged bitterly; or as if he were not free to exercise
his right as Ruling Lord to lie with a dozen concubines to
give him issue. No, the message behind his behavior was
hurtfully clear: what he could accept in his wife he found
unimaginable in a daughter, that a woman could be worthy
of ruling a great house. ~ ~

As she had so many times in the past when disheartened
by despair, Mara had entered the cho-ja tunnels seeking an
alien perspective, a different point of view that could give
rise to new ideas.

A light touch roused Mara from reminiscence; Lujan
nodded ahead, reminding that her retinue had reached the
chamber of the Queen.

As her litter was borne through the final arch, with its
squatting rows of sentries so still they might have been
polished black statues, Mara composed herself. Entering
the huge cavern, she used an old, silent meditation chant

374 Mistress of the Empire

to shed her smoldering resentment. when at last her bearers
lowered her town before the grand dais, she had recovered
her proper decorum.

The cho-ja Queen dominated the chamber, her bulk
supported by a massive pedestal of earth. Mara remembered
how tiny the Queen had been when they had first met, far
away in the hive where she had been hatched. The delicate
creature had matured, coming to her full growth within the
first year of her accoutrement at the Acoma estate. Now she
bulked many times the size of her attendants, dwarfing even
the largest of her warriors, with just her upper torso and
head retaining their original size. Workers scurried around
her mammoth body, keeping her dean and comfortable, as
she produced the eggs that provided the different classes
of cho-ja: warriors, workers specialised in any of a dozen
different crafts, and, should the hive became prosperous to
the point of overcrowding, a new queen.

Mara gave a bow of the head, as was proper between
equals.

'Greetings, Lady of the Acoma, Servant of the Empire,'
said the Queen, her high-pitched tones dear over the bustle
of workers in the gallery.

'Honors to your hive, Queen,' answered Mara as Lujan
provided a hand to guide her to the cushions waiting for
her. The rapidity of cho-ja communication was still a
mystery to Mara; somehow the Queen always seemed
to know in advance of her arrival, and as much could
be determined, the hive ruler seemed to enjoy these visits.
Mara had ceased trying to understand the cho-ja in human
terms; living with an outworld barbarian had taught her
that persistently seeing through Tsurani eyes kept her blind
to refreshing insights.

~while Lujan oversaw the placement and disposition
of her honor guard, her servants laid out sweets and
Midkemian tea for her refreshment, and also to share

Secrets

375

with cho-ja factors. Against Jican's pessimistic predictions
after the poisoning by the false Midkemian trader, Mara
had developed a fondness for the pungent drink. Never one
to waste an opportunity, she had overcome her personal
misfortune and had cornered the market in tea, coffee, and
chocolate.
Once the banalities of tea-tasting and trade were concluded,
the Queen tilted her head in what Mara had come
to interpret as inquiry. 'What cause brings you to us, Lady
Mara? The delicacies you have brought as samples could
as easily have been sent by runner.'

Mara floundered for a reply. Her hesitation was unusual
enough that Lujan broke his warrior's formality to glance
askance to ascertain nothing was amiss. Made aware by
his lapse that her quiet might be misinterpreted as duplicity,
Mara chose honesty, though she risked appearing foolish.
'I had no set purpose, beyond a need for your wisdom.'

The Queen was silent. Around her, the attendants scurried
on about their tasks. The guard warriors remained
squatting in immobility, but Mara knew how swiftly they
could move upon command. Uneasy lest she transgress
some alien point of etiquette, she resisted an impulse to
follow up with excuses. If she should cause `,offense, and
then show weakness before cho-ja strength, she might never
escape these tunnels alive.

As though the Queen sensed her guest's discomfort, she
said, 'Many of your concepts are unknowable to us, Lady
of the Acoma. This you name "wisdom" is such a thing.
Your human tonalities indicate an idea handed down from
a past generation to a mind of less life experience. Forgive
me, I do not wish to imply that our kind are in any way
superior to yours, but our consciousness is not isolated. The
hive mind we share by your terms would span millennia. To

us your perspective is fleeting, tied as it is to the duration
of one human life. Insomuch as we cho-ja can share a

376 Mistress of the Empfre

thing outside our understanding, we shall seek to give
our aid.'

Here the Queen folded her tiny, vestigial forelimbs, to
indicate patience and an attitude of waiting.

Mara stared unseeing into the dregs of her tea. She was
aware that a cho-ja's individuality was never separated
from the hive mind; personal autonomy played no part
in their culture, and only centuries of interaction between
species had allowed the insectoids to conceptualise any
sense of a human identity apart and alone from the
whole. Individuality, to hive thought, held puzzling and
conflicting ironies. The concept of foolishness, of someone
acting against his own best interests or those of his family,
seemed an insanity of irredeemable proportions to cho-ja
perspective. And without foolishness, Mara thought wryly,
the process of human learning could hold no meaning; the
abstract term 'wisdom' became too ephemeral for the hive
mind to grasp.

Mara frowned, and tried afresh. 'In my brief experience,
your counsel and that of other humans has taught me I live
in a small world. Until recently, I thought I had some control
over that world.' She need not repeat Ayaki's fate; nor any
other event. word of the Assembly's intervention between
herself and the Anasati had spread to the most remote
province of the Nations, and although the cho-ja might
not understand all the nuances of human affairs, they held
an astute recollection of events.

Perhaps the hive mind sensed that the interdiction of
the Assembly lay at the root of Mara's inquiries; certainly
something warned them off. While the Queen customarily
sat massive and unmoving, for the first time in Mara's
experience the attendants around her went from frenetic
motion to utter stillness. All activity in that vast hall ceased,
though no apparent order called for silence.

Mara's uneasiness coalesced into fear.

Secrets

377

The Queen had long ago revealed that cho-ja alliances
were sold as commodities. Mara had paid lavish sums for
the loyalty of the hives on both her estates. She shivered
at the thought that the Great Ones' influence might extend
even here, and that in words or inference she might call
down their chastisement. A spell-wrought earthquake even
a fraction as violent as the one that had shaken the Holy
City when the Black Robe Milamber had unleashed his
might would utterly devastate these tunnels. Arches and
vaults would crumble into dust, and tons of black earth
would fall . . . Aware how her hands trembled, Mara thrust
them into her sleeves. She must not think! Only act. And
in truth, the Queen had not spoken to indicate which way
hive allegiance might lie.

All that could be done was wait.

The silence became eerie in its intensity. In time, Mara's
hyperextended senses detected a faint buzzing, high-pitched
as the beat of insect wings. She wondered whether this
sound might signal some sort of wide-ranging communication,
then decided it indeed must, since the Queen spoke
with the authority of one who had reached a decision.
'Mare of the Acoma, you made a point which, if I venture
to presume, your kind might call wise. You observed that
you live in a small world. You would do well to. redefine
the boundaries of that world, and look to other worlds that
coexist with your own.'

Mara chewed her lip, thinking fast. Behind the stilted,
careful etiquette of the cho-ja Queen's phrasing she sensed
reluctance. Alert for hidden opportunity, Mara pressed
for more information. 'What sort of worlds should I
examine?'

The workers remained frozen in postures of repose as
the Queen said, 'This world of Kelewan, firstly. You have

visited with us often, something no noble of your people
has ever done. Even at the dawn of the Nations, when our

378 Mistress of the Empire

two races forged the treaty that still binds, no Tsurani Lord
tried this.'

Mara raised her eyebrows. No scrolls of history she had
seen ever mentioned any formal agreement between cho-ja
and human. Relations between Tsurani and cho-ja were
dictated by tradition, she had assumed, as were all other
facets of her life and culture. And yet the Nations extended
back into antiquity; as the Queen so tactfully reminded,
human memory was brief. 'I have never heard of this treaty
you speak of. Could you tell me more?'

The Queen's massive bulk held so motionless, she might
have been a monument in black lacquer. 'That is forbidden.'


Astonished, Mara forgot the unearthly quiet and the
frozen attitudes of the breeding workers. Her words echoed
as she blurted, 'Forbidden? By whom?'

'That is forbidden.'

Shocked back to caution by the Queen's whipcradc:
inflection, Mara analysed. If she had been rude, she hat
not yet been ordered from the royal chamber. Though
Lujan's hands had whitened in alarm on his spear heft,
the warriors of the Queen stayed crouched at rest. Pressed
by curiosity and need to aggressive risks, Mara chanced that
the Queen's reticence might stem from some outside source.
As best she had determined, the cho-ja had no religion, no
devotion to or belief in gods and forces beyond an earthly
nature. If the prohibition were not from heaven, what
remained? Tradition? Mara rejected that idea; the cho-ja
were mercenary in their interactions, by human standards.
Their consistency was due more to hive consensus than
to habit. A covenant of secrecy seemed unlikely, since the hive
consciousness disallowed the very concept: privacy was
only possible between individual minds.

Choosing her way carefully, Mara ventured, 'What of the
cho-ja, my Queen? What is the history of your race?'

Sccrcts
379

The Queen clicked her front claws in response to
some unknowable impulse. Except for the fact that her
attendants stayed lodged in place, her tone might have
been conversational. 'We come from the Beginning, like
any race, growing and gaining knowledge. There was a
time, ages gone, when we lived simply. We were one of
many intelligences that sought our place on a rich world
and who strove at the time that man first came-'

'The Golden Bridge?' Mara interjected, trying to tie into
what she knew of her own people's origins.

'So our history tells us,' said the Queen. 'Cho-ja eyes did
not witness the arrival, but one day there were no men, and
the next day a nation of refugees was encamped upon the
shore near the place you name the City of the Plains.'

Barely able to hide excitement, Mara asked, 'You have
tales from before the Golden Bridge?'

'Tales?' The Queen twitched a forelimb, as if in deprecation. '
Your word translates to imply exaggeration, or
embellishment based upon imperfect recollection. Please
take no injury at my bluntness, but our kind need not
dramatise for posterity. We remember.'

Mara felt her heart race. 'Do you tell me that you have
that record in the hive mind?' she said, probing carefully
because she sensed something momentous was at issue here.
'Or that you actually have recall, as if you saw with your
ancestors' eyes?'

'We are of one mind, and one people.' At no discernible
signal from the Queen, the breeding attendants surged back
to their customary frenetic industry. 'What is experienced
by one is shared by all, save when one dies in isolation, far

from others.'

Relieved to be restored to a less sensitive subject, Mara
considered the implications. She had long known that
messages seemed to reach other hives with unbelievable
speed; but in her wildest imaginings, she had not conceived

380

Mistress of the Empire

that such communication might be simultaneous. 'You can
. . . speak with the voice of one who was there . . . ?' Ha
mind fought to encompass the immensity of a consciousness
that held complete recall of the past.
The Queen clicked her mandibles, amused. 'We were
there, Mara. As you humans might frame the concept,
I was there ... not this body, of course, or this mind;
but ... we were there. What my forebears saw I know
as they knew.'

Mara signaled a servant to fill her teacup, forgetting that
the water by now was cold. Lujan suppressed a grin at her
absorption. While not so nimble of wit as his mistress, he
had watched her turn obscure knowledge into advantage
in the political arena too many times to discount her
fancies as wim. As no man's fool, he,-too, could imagine
the profound impact of the Queen's revelation. Whatever
one cho-ja saw was remembered by all cho-ja, obviously
over centuries. Intrigued, he observed as Mara turned the
discussion once more onto sensitive ground.

'What of the cho-ja, since the coming of man?'

The attendants kept up their ministrations as the Queen
said, 'We were first among many, though not so numerous
as now. We were forced to contest with other races, the
Thun, the Nummongnum, the Cha-desh, the Sunn.' Of
those names, Mara knew only the Thun. She resisted the
temptation to sidetrack in pursuit of details. If she survived
to find means to secure her safety from the magicians, she
would have years and leisure to pursue her fascination. ~

As if the Queen sensed her guest's bent, or perhaps
from other, more sensitive reasons, the facts she revealed
remained general. 'Our warriors are bred to protect; cho ja
is never set against cho-ja, save in times of starvation when
one hive may contest with another so that only the most
vigorous line will continue. A hive challenge for survival
is performed without hatred; killing is not our preferred
nature. But against other races we made war, for they have
a different sense of their place in the worlds. Much hive
life perished needlessly, for beings came among us who
were terrible beyond intelligent law, who slew for more
than food or protection. They make war for the love of
slaughter, it seems to us then and now. They seize land
they do not need, and start battles to award themselves an
essence of thought we cannot comprehend, called honor.'

The blood drained from Mara's face. 'Tsurani.'

'Humans,' the Queen amended in gentle sadness. 'You
we see as different, Lady Mara, but the hive mind knows
well: no other race upon this world you call Kelewan
could match your people for viciousness. For men will
fight without reason. As your Empire grew over the years,
we cho-ja strove to see all issues between us resolved, yet
again and again humans would come, seeking this dining
or that, this right or that. And when we refused to grant
unreasonable terms, bloodshed would follow. Many times
we quit the contest, thinking the issue settled, only to be
assaulted yet again for reasons that had no logic. In the
end, we yielded.'

Mara tapped her fingers on her cup, watching ripples
flick across her chilled drink. 'You were forced to treaty?'

The chamber's occupants snapped to total stillness, and
the Queen's ringing tone went icy. 'That is forbidden.'

Mara's eyes widened. 'You are forbidden to speak
by us?'

'That is forbidden.'

Now convinced she had not offended, but that the Queen
must be bound by some term the cho-ja could not or had
sworn not to violate, Mara let her thoughts leap ahead.
'Who holds the power to silence you - the Assembly? The
Emperor?'

'That is forbidden.'

Mara unclenched her aching hand before she broke

382 Mistress of the Empire

the fine porcelain cup. 'Forgive my curiosity. I-shall seek
that answer elsewhere.' Trembling in apprehension and
frustration, Mara tried a new thrust. 'What other worlds
should I know?'

The tension in the chamber did not relent. Mara held her ;
breath while the Queen kept silent, the subliminal buzzing
again ringing down the tunnels. Eventually she clicked her
mandibles and spoke. 'There are but two things I may tell
you without violating my trust. First, there are those who,
for their own purpose, seek to oppose you, against whom
you must find protection. Hear well, for we know: there
will come a day when you must defend your Acoma against
powers considered supreme.'

Mara released a pent-breath, her stomach suddenly
queasy. She set down her teacup before her fingers, nerveless,
dropped it. The only powers considered supreme in
Tsuranuanni were the will of heaven, and the Assembly of
Magicians. Since cho-ja adhered to no religion, the Queen's
reference could not be more fearfully plain. The Acoma
must prevail against the Great Ones!

While Mara struggled to stay poised, the Queen continued, '
Perhaps, Lady, you might ask yourself: if other
worlds exist, where are they?'

Mara struggled to reason past unknowable dangers that
loomed deep as an abyss before her. 'Do you mean
Midkemia beyond the rift?'
'You may cross there through the portal fashioned by the
Great Ones, but where is Midkemia within the cosmos?'

Mara straightened in astonishment. The last word was
one she did not understand. Every Tsurani meaning that she j
knew of translated to mean 'arch of the sky,' or 'star field.'
Did the cho-ja Queen imply that Midkemia was placed in
the sky with the gods? But the concept was absurd, even
laughable! Yet Mara had learned better than to make light
of the beliefs of other cultures. A long-past war in the deserts

Secrets

383

of Tsubar had taught her so, as well as many a frustrating
argument with her barbarian lover, Kevin. Though she
tactfully kept her own counsel, her dubious surprise must
have showed to the keener perception of the cho-ja.

'Would it challenge you less to chink that worlds exist
in multitudes, many no farther from here than you can
walk in your lifetime?' the Queen inquired. Her attendants
had awakened again from immobility, and were once more
scuttling to and fro through the curtained-off alcove that
housed the egg chambers.

Thrown completely off balance, Mara strove to find sense
in the Queen's words. This was no mystery created by
alien thought patterns; in human terms, the Queen almost
seemed to be leading her in lea-ta-go, a guessing game played
between Tsurani children, where hints and suggestions led
two rivals in a race to name whatever object, or animal,
or plant their opposing teams might choose. Mara decided
she was being deliberately led around the subject the Queen
had been forbidden to speak of. After deep consideration,
she said, 'I could walk many places beyond this Empire's
borders before my time came to die.'

'Yes.' The Queen's mandibles shifted in parody of a
human smile. 'You could do so, certainly.'

Encouragement, if not direct confirmation; Mara's excitement
grew. 'The Thuril!'

The Queen stayed carefully noncommittal. 'There are
others. Consider the boundaries of your nations.'

Convinced now that the information she sought had been
proscribed, Mara leaned eagerly forward. 'Beyond . . .' Of
course! How naive she must seem! Like most Tsurani, she

considered all nations to lie under sway of the Empire, save
the lost lands to the south and the Thuril to the east. Softly
she asked, 'Are there folk who live to the east of the Thuril
Confederation?'

Instantly the Queen said, 'They are called the Chadana.'

384 Mistress of the Empire :

Barely able to contain her excitement, Mara whispered;
'Human?'

'They are like unto you and the Thuril, my Lady.'

Mara glanced at Lujan, who looked as astonished as she
felt. How provincial her people were, to count themselves
and their Empire the center of all the worlds. Tsurani
philosophy could more readily accept humans living o''
another world across a rift than on other continents i'
Kelewan. 'What lies beyond the lands of the Chadana?'

'An expanse of vast waters,' the Queen replied. 'They are
salt, like the Sea of Blood, and are the home of the egu.'

Mara had never seen one of the egu, the gigantic serpents
that inhabited the depths of the oceans, but she had sailed
and had heard deckhands describe fighting off the creatures'
depredations with lances tipped with fire. 'Are there lands
across those" oceans?'

'Many nations, Lady,' the cho-ja Queen allowed. 'As
many as the lands beyond the sea to our west.'

Amazed to the point where he forgot protocol, Lujan
risked a question. 'Why do our people not know of

these?'

Quickly Mara nodded in allowance of his impertinence
'Why?'

'That is forbidden.'

Mara's thoughts crashed together. What was forbidden
? Not the knowledge of the other nations beyond
Tsuranuanni, or the Queen could not have given even
these sparse facts. Did those foreigners across the sea'
have knowledge that the Black Robes deemed threatening'
Mara repressed a shiver. Such thoughts were too perilous to
voice aloud, even here. She and the massive cho-ja Queen'
regarded each other through a silence made tense with'
frustration. If only their two species could speak plainly, so
much might be understood! Still, the unstated implication'
piqued driving curiosity. Mara felt enlivened with fresh'

Secrets

385
hope. For while the powers of the Assembly might yet prove
to be omnipotent, and her family's name become forgotten
to time, still she had been made aware of a larger world
beyond the Empire. She could journey across the borders
in search of new knowledge, and perhaps find an answer
to her quandary. Suddenly awakened to the hours she had
spent in the caverns underground, Mara longed to depart.
If she intended to leave the Empire on a quest, subterfuge
would be needed, as well as supplies and careful planning.
Her enemies, particularly Jiro, must not get wind of her
departure. And as she reviewed practicalities, it occurred
to her that areas of her own culture remained for her to
explore. She could start with the temples, whose priestly
initiates were schooled in powerful mysteries; and there
were also the practitioners of magic of the lesser path,
adepts and sometimes charlatans, who had not merited
study in the City of the Magicians.

Anxious to get started, Mara prepared to end her
audience with the Queen. 'My Queen, the Goddess of
Fate must have guided me here, for I have been given a
fresh start on my difficulties.'

The Queen waved a forelimb. 'We are pleased. Though
we yet think it odd you should journey so many miles
downriver when we were so close at hand.', r

Mara raised her eyebrows. 'Then the mind of the
hives is also one? I could address you by speaking to
the Queen of the hive upon the lands where I now
dwell?'

'Always.'

Hopeful of a way to maintain communication wherever
her journeys might lead her, Mara said, 'If I were to leave
the Empire, would I be able to consult you if I sought out
the cho-ja in some distant nation?'

'That is forbidden.'

Mara straightened, tantalised again to the edge of

386 Mistress of the Empire

discovery. 'One question, if you may answer. Why do you
treat with me and others, we who were your conquerors?'

The Queen hesitated. Fearful that at last she had transgressed
prudence, Mara dared not so much as breathe. Then,
with the continued activities of the breeding attendants,
she reassessed: the Queen was less angered than weighing
words. For a while, Mara expected to hear that this answer,
also, was forbidden.

But the Queen relented, her head tipped slightly back,
and her words stern. 'We are not a conquered people, Lady
of the Acoma.'

'The treaty?'A far step from understanding, Mara sighed
in vexation.

The Queen strove valiantly to clarify. 'Even a captive
nation may bargain.'

Mara rose from her cushions, so that the servants she
had signaled to pack up the tea utensils could go about
their duties without disturbing her. 'Why do you tell me
these things, Queen?'

Black, multifaceted eyes fixed upon Mara, unknowable
as the alien thoughts behind them. Then the cho-ja ruler
spoke in what seemed almost wistful reminiscence. 'Before
I merged with the hive mind, a young Queen recalls a human
girl who was kind and who said she was beautiful. Of all
your nation, you alone come to us with the intent to create
harmony. You bargain like others, but you are more . . .
you are what I believe you humans would call a friend.
If the burden that has oppressed my kind throughout this
nation is ever to change . . . we will need friends with bold
minds such as yours.'

So the 'treaty' was not an accord, after all, but a forced
acknowledgment of terms! Mara sucked in her breath. She
dared not press for more, not when the Queen had waved
her Force Commander forward to usher her from the breeding
chamber. The discussion was being brought to a close.
Uncertain what the protocols might be for formal
acknowledgment of friendship between races, Mara settled
for the bow that denoted an alliance between houses, adding
personal words of her own. 'You have always been a friend
to me. I would accord your people the same considerations
as I would any house within my clan.'

After the cho-ja Queen had nodded her own form of
acknowledgment and awarded the Acoma retinue her
gracious leave to depart, Lujan offered his Lady assistance
into her litter. Gone was the lackluster quiet that had
marked her sojourn back in her childhood home. Now
Mara's eyes shone. Her movements were eager as she
gestured to her bearer slaves to take up the poles of her
litter. The Force Commander donned his plumed helm and
marched at her side from the breeding chamber.

Companion of many years, commander of her armies,
and onetime bandit, Lujan could not help but grin. Here
went a mistress he would die for, without hesitation, not just
for the honor and duty due any Ruling Lady, but for love
and pride as well. Despite the overwhelming threat posed by
the Assembly of Magicians, Mara showed the indefatigable
spirit that had captured his heart from the start. For where
a tired woman of middle years had entered these warrens,
a Lady vigorous with renewed confidence, at the height of
her power, would emerge. Against all probability, Mara had
defied the limits of her circumstance: she had found a clear
focus and a hope where none had existed, to find reprieve

from difficulties that her culture believed unassailable.

Many were the Tsurani Ruling Lords who would have
fallen upon their swords in despair at the breach of honor
the Acoma Lady had been forced by the Great Ones to
swallow. Her late enemy Tasaio of the Minwanabi, once the
most powerful man in the Nations, had committed suicide
rather than endure beyond shame. It was not cowardice
but her own indomitable will that bound Mara to life.

388

Mistress of the Empire

The Assembly, Lujan decided in a moment of unabashed
cockiness, had better look after its interests. Though how
his diminutive Lady might find a way to face down powers
of magic on a scale as vast as that commanded by the Black
Robes, only the gods might know.

Afternoon sunlight fell through the screens and striped the
~parquet floor, and the akasi vines beside the garden walk
scented the air of the room that had served Mara as study
in the original Acoma estate house. The cho-ja-made clock
still chimed softly on the hour; mellowed now by layers
of wax was the patch of flooring by the screen that had
been sanded and refinished since the day her first husband
had stomped indoors wearing studded battle sandals in
the aftermath of a sarcat hunt. Older memories acwded
behind: of Lord Sezu setting the family chop to documents,
while her brother, Lanokota, scrawled pictures in chalk on
the floor by their father's feet. Mara recalled rubbing at the
scribbled figures, her fat lime-girl's palms a smudged and
dusty white. The smell of chalk filled her nostrils now, even
as in those bygone days of her girlhood. But the baby by
her knee was Kasuma; and the boy who scrawled pictures
only he understood onto sanded wood, a fiery redhead of
a barbarian father. Hers were the hands that set the Acoma
chop in the ink to seal the last letter of the day. A bin of
ribboned parchments beside her writing desk awaited the
arrival of the messenger runner, who would see them taken
to the guild for swift delivery.

Mara set aside the heavy chop and mentally reviewed
her instructions for Jican, Incomo, and Keyoke, back at
the lakeside estate. They would keep her affairs running
smoothly through what might become a prolonged absence.
Irrilandi, her second Force Leader, was currently off with
the Shinzawai, supporting Hokanu as he consolidated his
control as Ruling Lord. There had been minor attempts by
enemies, and one or two ruptures of alliances caused by
pressure from traditionalist factions. Hokanu had not yet
sent formal reply to the Emperor's request that he assume
his father's imperial post. In his letter to Mara he had
explained that his delay was a ploy designed to draw an
unfriendly rival into the open.

He had written: 'My father's First Adviser Dogondi is
a treasure - fiendishly clever, and a humorist. He likes
to humble our foes by making them seem ridiculous. As
he said to me the other day, "Kill a man, and you cede
him honor in the eyes of the gods. Laugh at him and you
shame him."'

Mara gave a half-smile in reminiscence of this truth.
Then her pleasure faded as she considered the rest of her
husband's missive. Although he was under much stress,
and subject daily to criticism from several jealous cousins,
he still might have asked in more depth after the health
of his daughter. That Mara proposed a long and possibly
dangerous journey while the child still needed a wet nurse
did not seem to trouble him.

But then, in all fairness, Hokanu was not a man to harp
upon his worries. He might be sick inside with concern, but
not wanting to burden her. Mara might disguise her journey
as a pilgrimage all she wished, and her traditionalist enemies

might be fooled. The Anasati might swallow the ruse for
several months before Jiro's First Adviser discovered the
truth, but the Assembly of Magicians would quickly sift
through subterfuge if they perceived any reason to question
her motives. Mara shut her eyes and rubbed damp hair back
from her brow. She put aside the nightmare memory of the
fiery rain that had beset the Imperial Arena when Milamber
had manifested his arcane anger.

If the Black Robes chose to stop her, all would be lost in
one wrenching, brutal instant. She must not give them cause
to suspect, and that meant weeks of careful planning.

~u MIstPcSS Ot thC F;mptrc

Ag.un Mara cried to thrust the horror of Milamber's
destruction of the Imperial Games from her thoughts. The
barbarian Black Robe had been unruly, even stubborn, she
had heard. The Assembly itself had exiled him, after his acts,
which had crossed the Order of Heaven by causing slaves
to be freed. A thought occurred then perhaps this Milamber
viewed life in the same quirky fashion her lover Kevin had
. . . that life meant more than honor, and that religion did
not rule the lives of men but instead offered guidance. Mara
frowned. If Milamber had been considered a renegade by
his fellows, might he not be a source of inspiration in her
present dilemma?

Acting with headstrong inspiration, Mara clapped her
hands. The boy appointed by the servants as her runner
slave appeared at the door, a tow-headed youngster scarcely
ten years of age. He had been promoted from the post of
herd boy to that of house slave, and still felt awkward
wearing livery. Mara saw that he trembled in awe as he
made his bow.

She took pity, though shy boys her sons were not, and she
had better experience bullying young warriors into line than
drawing a quiet one out. 'Kalizo,' she said. 'Come here.'

The boy scrambled back to his feet, all knffl and wide
eyes. He came to her, tripping awkwardly on the edge of
the carpet. His sandals were new, the soles not yet softened
with wear.

Mara fished a cho-ja-made candy from the vase by her
desk. She tossed it into the air, and smiled as the boy shed
his clumsiness and caught it. 'Kalizo, can you tell me when
the next silk shipment is bound for the City of the Plains,
for export into Midkemia?'

'Next week, Lady.' The boy had a lisp, made more
pronounced by his mouthful of hard candy.

Mara debated a moment, then reached for her pen with
shaking fingers. 'I have a letter to go with the factor,'
she instructed. 'Fetch him here, for I would have words
with him.'

'At once, Lady.' The boy bowed, spun, and departed with
a speed that justified his appointment to his new position.
Mara bit her lip as he raced out past the screen. Then she
hastily sealed her brief missive, which was addressed to
mil-amber, Magician, Kingdom of the Isles, Midkemia. As
she set the wax and inked the Acoma chop, she wondered
whether with the seal upon the letter she was inviting her
own doom.

Then the silk factor arrived, escorted by Kalizo. Her
misgivings fled before the need to give the man instructions
that caused him to tremble. His evident nerves made little
Kasuma fussy, and Mara had to call for the child's nurse.
Justin tossed aside his chalk with a loud announcement
that he was hungry. Straight and lithe, where Ayaki had
been stocky, he sprang to his feet and challenged Kalizo
to a race to the kitchens. Mara nodded dismissal to the
runner slave, who shouted and grinned, not at all abashed
at the prospect of a contest. As the two boys bolted off at
top speed, Mara half expected to hear a squawk of protest
from old Nacoya . . . but those days were gone forever

Left alone with her thoughts as the sun dipped in the west,
Mara called a servant to open the screens. Years had passed
since she had seen the shatra birds fly at sundown over
Acoma lands. Considered the lucky symbol of her house, the
creatures were a source of delight to Mara, as they greeted
the night like a ritual with a celebration of flight and song.
As her eyes followed the dance patterns of birds against
gold-edged clouds, Mara thought more on her husband.
He had not taken any concubines, nor had he made
further issue of his disappointment at Kasuma's gender.
Mara supposed the matter was left dormant deliberately.

Hokanu's sole reference had involved the promise of a deep
talk upon her return to the estates. A boat, he had said, with

392 M'strcss of thc Ernp~re

only themselves inside ant a tray of light supper ant sa
wine, on calm waters; no slaves, no servants, only a lantern
ant himself at the oars. That he left the matter unexplored
in his writing spoke volumes about his discomfort. Mara
rest-ed her chin in her hands ant sighed. Whatever he hat
to say, it would be months before she hat the liberty to
meet with her husband, on water or try land. For all hat
been tone to prepare for her departure on her quest to seek
protection against the Assembly. All that heft her now was
a final consultation with Arakasi, who was due to report
back at any time.

Much later, when the study room was lamplit, and the
stars pricked the sky where the shatra birds had flown,
Mara was disturbed in her resting by the door servant,
who brought word that a shabby itinerant poet had arrived
to beg the Lady's indulgence.

Mara looked up from her scroll in mild interest. 'You
did not send him on to the kitchen,' she stated. 'This poet,
did he say he had verses for me in so-mu-ta rhyming?'

The door servant frowned, the academic reference beyond
his education to fathom. 'Indeed, my Lady. He insisted
that would mean something to you.' His face creased with
misgiving. 'I should have sent him off. He is very ragged.'

Mara's expression warmed to a smile. 'Very ragged,
unbathed, and perhaps with a woman in tow?'

The servant's eyes widened. 'You know him?'

'I do.' Mara rolled up her scroll, taut with anticipation.
'Have him shown in.'

The door servant bowed, still mystified. 'Your will,
Lady.'

Presently the poet and his woman were brought into
Mara's private study. Arakasi wore a mantle that looked
as if it were fashioned out of moth-eaten blankets, sewn
over at the cuffs and hemmed with tawdry fringes torn
off a floor carpet. His companion was muffled under a
patched, sun-faded robe that had once been adorned with
shell sequins. Most had been ripped off with wear, leaving a
sad collection of hanging threads. Her feet were filthy, and
her sandals in tatters.

Mara, with one swift glance, clapped for attendants.
'Wash water. Towels, soap, and something from my clothes
chest that is pretty and clean.' She peered under the
concubine's hood, and glimpsed a shining sweep of hair
so heavy and thick it looked as if spun from red-bee honey.
'Make the color green,' she suggested to the maid. Then she
smiled at Arakasi. 'How large a supper tray do you wish?
As always, you appear famished.' She raised a finger as her
Spy Master drew breath to speak. 'The verses can wait until
after you are both refreshed.'

Arakasi offered a performer's bow and raked back the
hood of his mantle. In the lamplight, he looked exhausted,
bruised in spirit, and held together by sheer nerves. Mara
was taken aback. Then the concubine slipped off her
overrobe, and the Lady of the Acoma watched Arakasi
look at her, and understood all.

'You must be Kamlio,' she greeted. 'I bid you welcome.'

The girl started to sink into the deep bow that denoted
lowly station. Mara fractionally shook her head, and, fast
as reflex, Arakasi cupped the girl's elbow, stopping her
obeisance by dint of her slight recoil from his touch.

As though her gesture had not implied rejection, Arakasi
addressed her quietly. 'The mistress has bought your
freedom, not your service. Your contract is your own, to tear
up or resell, as you please.' His deft hands smoothed back
the hood of her underrobe, baring a face of breathtaking
beauty, and pale eyes bright as sparks with resentment.

Mara stifled an urge to recoil, so much did the manner
of this girl remind her of another, a courtesan and a spy
named Teani, who had once tried to kill her. 'Gods,'
she whispered below her breath. 'Gods take pity.' Her
expression was for Arakasi, and the tortured girl he had
rescued from usage.

Kamlio spoke, her low, modulated voice perfectly tempered
in hate. 'I would hear such a promise from the Lady
whose centis have bought me.'

Mara thrust aside her anger at the impertinence. 'You
may trust my servant, Arakasi, as myself in this matter.
Kamlio, I' too, owe him my life. I chose to accept that
gift from him with joy. He may have found you, child.
But never forget: it was I who bought you from bondage.
You are not brought here as a reward for his service.' The
lamplight glittered off the girl's eyes as she tensed. Mara
sighed softly and continued. 'You are your own woman,
Kamlio. Because of you, I have a son and a daughter who
may survive and achieve their inheritance. My gratitude is
unconditional^You may leave Arakasi, leave these estates,
and go your own way at this moment. I will provide you
with enough wealth to establish yourself, in business, as a
trader, or simply to live in modest comfort for the rest of
your life. Or you may use the gift as a dowry, should you
seek a husband. However, should you wish to take service,
I would be pleased to have you stay.'

The faint hiss of the oil lamps filled the stillness that
followed. Kamlio's fingers clenched and unclenched on
the ragged cloth of her gown. She did not smile, or
settle, or relax, but stayed poised, like a creature caught
and cornered. Mara forced herself to meet that hostile,
gemstone gaze. 'What is your desire, Kamlio?'

Plainly the girl distrusted kindness. Her eyes shone too
bright, and her manner posed a defiant challenge as she
said, 'Good Servant, great Lady, I'd prefer to be alone. I
do not wish a pretty robe but an ugly one. I do not want
the eyes of men upon me. I want a sleeping mat and a room
to myself.'

'As you ask, you shall have,' Mara allowed. She sent
for her personal maid, Misa, who had been many years
in Acoma service, and ordered Kamlio shown to a guest
chamber and made comfortable. When the girl had gone,
and the servant who entered with wash basins and towels
had allowed Arakasi to refresh himself, she gestured her
Spy Master to the nearest comfortable cushion.

He sank into his seat as if his knees gave out. His eyes were
sunken, almost haunted, and his mouth twisted aooked
with irony. Softly he said, 'Thank you, Lady.'

Mara looked upon him with pity. 'She means that much
to you?'

The Spy Master steepled his hands under his chin, an
old habit he had when attempting a difficult explanation.
'She has changed me. When I look at her, I see my mother,
sometimes. When she speaks, she reminds me of my sister.
Both of them could be vicious, at the moments they hurt
the most.' He paused, then added, 'She blames me for the
death of her sister. Quite justly, I fear.'

Quietly Mara gestured to the servant who waited at the
door with the food tray.-As the man entered with his burden
in deferential silence, she regarded the Spy Master whom
she had known for years, but whose life remained a mystery
to her. After the man had served them, Mara motioned for
him to leave. When she and Arakasi were alone;, Mara said,
'You never mentioned any of your family to me before.'

Arakasi's gaze flicked up, sharply defensive. 'There was
little of worth to mention. My mother was a woman of the
Reed Life, disease-ridden, run-down, and finally dead from
her trade. My sister followed in her footsteps. She died at
eighteen, at the hand of a violent client.'

'I am sorry,' Mara murmured, and meant it. She should
have guessed, since Arakasi set such store by his house
allegiance, that he had been born to an honorless family.
'How did you come to take service with the Tuscai?'

Arakasi made a self-deprecating gesture. 'There was a
warrior who frequented our brothel. He lay often with
my mother. I was just three, and was impressed by his
loud voice, and the sword he carried with a jewel set in
the grip. Sometimes he gave me candy, and ruffled my
hair, and sent me on errands. I took them very seriously,
only later coming to realise that he was just more tactful
than most, sending me out of the way so he could take his
paid woman without a foolish boy underfoot. At the time,
I decided he was my father.'

Mara did not prompt, but waited, while Arakasi picked
a stray thread from a rip in his mantle. After a moment, he
continued of his own accord. 'When my mother died, and
the soldier came to bed another girl, I climbed out a window
and followed him to his barracks. He was a Strike Leader
for the Tuscai. His wife was a cook. She fed me, behind his
back. I lived mostly on the streets, lurking around hostels
and guild halls, keeping my ears open. I sold information to
the Lord of the Tuscai's hadonra, and over the years became
invaluable to him. When I alerted the Lord of the Tuscai to
a plot against his life at the hands of the Minwanabi, he
allowed me to swear to his service.'

Quietly, Mara wondered how much of the spy net had
already been in place when Arakasi had sworn to the Tuscai
natami. Probably most of the area around the Tuscai estates,
for an honorless street boy to have caught the notice of a
hidebound traditional Ruling Lord. It awed her, to learn
how far her Spy Master had risen from such humble
beginnings. Now there was the girl, Kamlio, whose fate
had entangled itself with his in ways she did not want.
As the servant poured sa wine and departed, Mara handed
Arakasi a glass.

'Drink,' she urged. 'You need it.' In fact, he looked
wretched, and worn thinner than she had ever seen him.

The Spy Master returned her regard levelly, his lip
curled in distaste. He disliked drinking: alcohol dulled
his reactions. 'Lady,' he said in a voice that was rust and
velvet, 'I am not at all what I was.'

'Drink! That is a command!' Mara snapped back. 'You
are human, and have a heart that can bleed, even if you only
discovered that fact recently. And I say you are wrong. You
are more than you were. The change that has happened is
for the best.'

'Not if you wish me to continue in my post as Spy
Master.' The admission itself seemed to shake him. Arakasi
reached out, took a goblet from the tray, and downed it in
one violent draft. 'What would you know of best or worse?'
he challenged.

'Everything.' Her tone reproached. 'I had Kevin and lost
him. I had the perfect husband who understood my heart,
until one foolish misunderstanding has set him at a distance.
I had two children who are dead.'

Shamed, Arakasi wrapped his long, expressive fingers
around his glass. He said nothing, only stared at the rug.
For a while the lamplight revealed his rigid effort to keep
his breathing steady. 'I had hoped the example of you and
Hokanu might open her eyes to a new life.' He shrugged
fractionally, a self-conscious hitch of his shoulders. 'You
have both been my teachers, Lady.' .

Mara regarded the man who sat hunched and tight before
her. His competence at times had humbled her, until now,
when she realised how much of his achievements had been
rooted in pleasureless, calculating logic. 'Arakasi, set her
free. Let her find herself.' As his eyes swept up to meet
hers, beseeching, she found she needed sa wine herself.
She reached out for a goblet, tasted its bittersweet edge.
'Think, most cunning of my servants. You were never

resentful because you did not love. Kamlio can hate, she
can feel bitterness, because she can be hurt. Her basic
nature is a caring one, or why should she defend herself
so savagely?'
His gaze dropped. 'I pray to the gods you are right.'

'I am right.' Mara's conviction rang across the room's
familiar dimness. But no truth could ensure the outcome.
Whether Kamlio could outgrow her past and survive
without scars, only time would tell.

Arakasi sat like a man tortured, twisting the fine-stemmed
crystal around and around in his hands. It
occurred to Mara, watching him, that he had lost his
piercing insight. She spoke kindly in reassurance. 'Your
little lady will not leave these estates. She will stay, and
serve here. That much I know.'

'Or else she would have left at once?' Arakasi released
an edged laugh. 'How can you be sure?'

'She would not have accepted my hospitality.' Mara
smiled. 'She has pride like fire.' She speculated, 'In my
years I have come to judge human nature quickly. You are
a fitting match for her.'
He relaxed a little at that, setting the goblet on the
polished floor, empty, and helping himself to a plate of
fruit, cheese, and bread. In a fast change of subject, he
said, 'I received your message, Lady. I can guess why you
called me.' He mashed the bread together over a thick wedge
of cheese, his feelings for the concubine certainly not set in
abeyance. But his voice showed none of his conflict as he
added, 'I can already assure you. The City of the Magicians
is impregnable. Send anyone there to attempt entry, and
you will call down the Assembly's wrath upon you. We
have attempted seven times to find entrance; four men are
dead, the other three unaccounted for, and I number them
also dead. None can be traced to us, but even so, another
attempt may cause us to fall.'

'I supposed as much.' Mara watched him eat with
an inner surge of relief. The day Arakasi ignored his
appetite brought cause for major worry. While he chewed,
she related her findings in the hive of the cho-ja, and
then told of her plans to leave for the Thuril Confederation.


Arakasi gave back a dry grin. 'I did not think you
seriously intended a pilgrimage.'

Mara's brows arched. 'I am devout. Did I not once plan

to vow service to Lashima's temple?'

A spark of irony touched her Spy Master's eyes. 'That,'
he allowed, 'was long before you met one red-haired
Midkemian barbarian.'

Mara colored deeply. 'True.' She laughed. Arakasi had
always stimulated her wit. The heart he had kept hidden
all these years was proving a delight to her. 'I'll need you
to hide my trail with subterfuge. Also, I want you to comb
the Imperial Archives for history texts that might show us
what circumstances led to our mysterious treaty with the
cho-ja.'

She looked across the low table and realised Arakasi had
ceased eating. The bread had fallen into crumbs between
his fingers, and his eyes looked deep as pits. Gently she
asked, 'What's wrong? Are you afraid to leave the girl?'

'No.' The Spy Master knuckled back his tangled dark

hair. The poet's braid at his temple had slipped half-undone,
the violet ribbon that tied it frayed at the ends, and
sun-faded. 'I am no longer the best man for the job, my
Lady. My heart is no longer ruthless.'

'Was it ever?' Mara countered.
Arakasi looked at her, open and pained as he had been
but once in her presence, and that the time he believed
he had failed her and caused old Nacoya's death. 'Yes,
Lady. Yes, it was. Once, I would have let Kamlio die at
the hands of the tong without conscience. I have increased
risk to you by returning for her. It took some persuasion
and significant funds to extricate her from her existing
term of employment. The transaction was far too public
for my taste.'
Mara considered the weight of his admission. She stared
a moment at her wineglass, barely touched, and warm now
in the soft evening air. 'The Acoma have no one else to
send,' she said finally, and hid from him the cost of that
confidence. She had Justin and Kasuma to think of; if, as
Fumita had hinted, her being Servant of the Empire had
been all that stayed the Assembly from annihilating her,
she had to find the children protection, or they would be
helpless, good for nothing, but to be puppets of the Black
Robes' whim, after she was gone.

'Arakasi, let me tell you something the cho-ja Queen
implied to me. What if, all along, it was not tradition
that has held this Empire static all these thousands of
years? What if our people strove for growth and change,
but were kept from it? What if the great Game of the
Council, our bloody, violent heritage of honor, was not
ordained by the gods but was used as a contrivance to
keep us in our place?'

Arakasi's left eyebrow quirked. 'You claim to be devout,'
he said in a low voice. 'You know, beloved Lady, that what
you say is heresy.'

'I suggest instead,' Mara said, 'that our Great Ones
have done more than keep the imperial peace. If I rightly
understood what the cho-ja Queen tried to impart, the
Assembly has held our whole culture stagnant. The Black
Robes are the ones who barred us from change - not the
gods, not tradition, and not our code of honor. That is why
they intervened between the Acoma and the Anasati. For I
have created too much change, I hold too much influence
with the Emperor, and, as Servant, I am too much a talisman
of the people's luck. If what I think is correct, the magicians
are not just hoping I will break their prohibition on making
war upon Jiro; they are depending upon it. Some may even
be contriving to bring it about. They are awaiting any
excuse to step in and annihilate me.'
A breeze through the screen caused the lamp to flicker,
making Arakasi seem a shadow cut from stillness. 'Hokanu
will never let go of honor and allow his father's murder to
pass unavenged.'

'Precisely,' Mara almost whispered. 'That would be
expecting too much, even for a man raised by the progressive
thinker that his foster father was. His blood father,
Fumita, as much as warned him at Kamatsu's funeral. I
believe, as does Hokanu, that the Assembly knew of Jiro's
contract with the tong assassins. They did not act to stop
him. Deliberately. It is me and my line they want dead. And
sooner or later, fate will provide them with a reason.'

The wick brightened. As the darkness shrank back,
Arakasi sat staring at his emptied wineglass, his eyes
fathomless as obsidian. 'And so you need me to sort
through the Imperial Archives, and to cover your absence
when you journey outside the Empire in search of answers.'
His fingers tapped an agitated tattoo on the floor as he
continued to think aloud. 'You ask this of me, not for the
Acoma or the Shinzawai, but for the people of the Nations
whose cause you have adopted for your own.'

'You understand.' Mara reached out for the carafe and
refilled both of their goblets. 'I do what I do for more than
my name and ancestors. Because I hold hope that slaves
may one day be allowed to go free, and that boys such as
you were, and girls like Kamlio, may have the chance to
earn honor through their merits.'

'A large task. I salute you, Lady.' Arakasi tossed back
his wine. He regarded her, his bearing still bleak, but his
expression one of admiration. 'Once I said I wished to
follow in the wake of your path to greatness. I was
arrogant, and cold, and fascinated as a man who prides
himself on solving puzzles. Now I wish nothing beyond a
house with warmth, and a woman to smile at who does
not know the secret of joy. To my sorrow, I have learned.
It is not a lesson to benefit a Spy Master who must act only
for reason.'

Mara returned the smile that softened the sharpened
angles that trials and years had lent to her face. 'Then
when we have found our means to defeat the Great Ones,
we shall have to appoint you to a new post.'

Arakasi released a cracked laugh. 'What post? I have tried
them all. Which shall I choose, when all of them suited me
no better than a suit of borrowed clothing?'

'When the time comes, you will know,' Mara assured
him. But the words were a banality. Arakasi looked like
an unmoored boat that spun untended in a current. She
worried for him, and for the jaded, bitter girl who slept in
the Acoma guest suite.

Arakasi set aside his glass. A moth spun in crazed
circles around the oil lamp, sending shadows swooping
and arrowing through the light. He felt as giddy. The time
had come for him to take his leave. The food tray held only
crumbs, and a crushed crust of bread. His eyes stayed deep
as he concluded, 'I will undertake what you ask, for I see
that you comprehend the price. But this once, I would dare
to ask a boon from you.'
Mara raised her wineglass and drank to his health in
return. 'You have always had from me whatever you have
needed, without question. That has not changed.'

Her Spy Master looked up at her, for the first time she
could remember showing nerves and uncertainty. 'Take
Kamlio with you to Thuril. Even the chance of a passing
trader glimpsing her and remarking on her beauty in
Sulan-Qu might bring the tong in search. By the time you
return, the tong should have begun to wither.'

Mara's smile returned like the sun. 'I was going to suggest
that very course.' The hidebound tenets of Tsurani culture
had deprived the courtesan of hope; Kamlio had been born
as a pleasure toy for men to waste as they pleased. If she was
going to come to her senses, if she was to escape becoming
the twisted, tormented creature that Teani had been, she
must rediscover the stifled personality she had been trained
since childhood to hide. The chance might come to her more
quickly if she experienced a strange culture, and customs
outside her experience.

Arakasi bowed deep in gratitude. 'Gods bless you,
mistress.' He looked as if he would say nothing more,
but wound up by blurting, 'Take care of her. The Acoma
are my life, but she is my heart.' Then he arose to his
feet, his poet's braid falling the rest of the way undone.
He yanked off the violet ribbon as if it had offended him,
and made his way silently through the screen.

Mara stared after him long after he had disappeared
into the darkened hallway. Before her, the moth spun in
one last, suicidal circle, and flared up as it passed through
the flame.

'Gods pity them,' Mara murmured to the empty chamber.
Whether her words were for the courtesan and the Spy
Master who loved her, or whether she referred also to her
husband, who was being made to dance to the tune of the
Assembly, was unclear.


16

Countermoves

The game ended.

Chumaka set down his shah piece with a click, and a
deep-chested sigh of satisfaction. 'Checkmate, master.' The
raw dawn light only emphasised his bright-eyed alertness.

Perfectly groomed also, Jiro was once again chagrined
to prove his servants' gossip, that his First Adviser's wit
remained sharp, even before daybreak and breakfast. The
Lord of the Anasati regarded the captured pieces clustered
to one side of the game board. 'You're filled with life this
morning,' he observed. 'More so than usual, if I may speak
my mind.'

Chumaka rubbed his hands together. 'Mara's spy net has
become active again. I knew it was just a matter of waiting
her out! Whoever her man in charge may be, he has just
made a misstep. He thought to outlast me in this waiting
game, but after years of dormancy, at last he has moved!'

Jiro stroked his chin to hide a smile. 'There are few
servants like you, who can bear to abandon years of work
on the basis of mere suspicion.'

The Anasati First Adviser warmed to the praise. He
slipped off his heavily embroidered morning robe, and
adjusted the thinner silk garment underneath to ascertain
it hung without wrinkles on his narrow chest. On
a plaintive note he added, 'You invited me to your
suite for breakfast. Do I have to beat you at a second
round of shah before we can eat, my Lord?' His
nervous, nail-bitten fingers reached to reset the board
out of habit.

Jiro laughed. 'You old tigindi,' he accused, comparing
his adviser to a foxlike predator renowned for cleverness.
'You'd rather play games than eat.'

'Perhaps.' Chumaka looked up, his eyes bright.

Jiro signaled another game by inclining his head. 'What's
on your scheming mind, anyway?'

Chumaka slid the last piece into place and gestured for
his master to make the first move. 'It's what Mara has in
mind,' he corrected.

Knowing better than to interrupt with questions, Jiro
advanced a pawn. Chumaka's countermove was immediate.
Forced to a brisk contemplation of strategy, Jiro wished
he could match his opponent's penchant for following
simultaneous topics as his adviser defined his comment.

'Later this week, your master engineer will be in Ontoset
hiring carpenters and craftsmen to build war engines
after the prototypes you have had re-created from the
ancient texts.'

Jiro looked up from the game board, not at all intrigued.
His siege weapons were his most coveted plan, a secret
kept even from his closest allies, or so he believed. He
did not like the topic bandied about casually, and his
tone showed controlled irritation. 'Mara can't have heard
anything about our prototypes in the charcoal burners'
sheds-' ~
'In the forests north of Ontoset,' Chumaka filled in, at
his most irksome when he finished sentences out of sheer
impatience. 'Yes. She has known for quite some time.'
Chumaka waved at the shah board. 'It's your move,
master.'

Jiro advanced his priest to a new square with a flick
of one finger. A flush stained his cheekbones, and his
eyes narrowed as he demanded, 'How did she hear?

Why didn't you tell me our security was compromised
sooner?'

'Patience, my Lord.' Chumaka moved his empress onto
the front line. 'I tell you, always, when the timing is to your
advantage.'

Very near open anger,Jiro forced self-control. Chumaka's
cleverness at times could be excessive: as if the man could
not resist playing the game within his master's household.
But what Chumaka lacked in humility he more than made
up for in innovative service. The Anasati Lord pieched his
pent-up fury against the shah board, and waited, icily quiet,
for his impertinent adviser to qualify.

Chumaka smiled with the glee a child might show at
discovering an insect could evade his goading through
flight. 'My Lord, it is good to see you have mastered the art
of patience. We have allowed Mara's machinations against
us to come to flower, the- better to spoil her design. She
has conceived a cunning plan to infiltrate your craftsmen
at the construction site with a few of her own. Once there,
they would work very handily to be sure your great siege
engines have design flaws. We then use them in battle, or so
the Mistress of the Acoma hopes, and the mechanisms will
misfire and cause damage to our own troops, or at the least
simply not function, leaving you with some very expensive
kindling wood outside the walls of the city.'

Startled into inadvertent admiration, Jiro raised his
eyebrows. 'Mara came up with such a plot?'

'A master toy maker in her employ.' Chumaka moved
another shah piece and placed Jiro's priest in jeopardy. 'It's
quite an amusing plan, really.'

Frowning, inconvenienced by the game, but unwilling to
concede himself outmatched on both fronts, the Anasati
Lord considered his next move with thinned lips. His First
Adviser's tendency to keep secrets bordered on disrespect.
But Jiro held back from criticism. His weakness at shah was
his desire for fast conclusions. He needed Chumaka's love
of intricate plotting, which was content to spin webs and
set traps against enemies long years in advance. Jiro chose
to save his priest from attack; today his mood was prudent.
'What move did you have in mind, First Adviser?'

Chumaka gave back a reptilian smile. 'Why, to steal
Mara's gambit from her. I have a list of her infiltrators'
names. We can arrange to have them hired on, bring
them deep into Anasati territory, and then have them
disappear.'

'Kill them?' Jiro's distaste for crude measures diverted
his attention, and he had to force himself to keep pace
with Chumaka's next move.

The First Adviser advanced another pawn, setting two
of his master's pieces under threat. 'I'd like to take the
infiltrators quietly.' He spoke as he did when contented,
low-pitched, as a cat might purr. 'Not kill them. They may
have useful information for us. I'd like to know just how
Mara's toy maker planned to sabotage our siege equipment,
for one thing; I'm sure the modifications would be very
clever to elude the notice of those overseeing construction.
That's more idle curiosity than anything else.

'But far more important, if we can force one man to
talk, and learn their method for passing information as
well, we can send back false signals through the Acoma
spy net. The Lady will not know her plot has been spoiled
until the actual day we take the field against the Emperor.
When our engines assault the walls of the Imperial Precinct,
she will expect them to fail and cause us chaos, and she
will have her forces arrayed to take advantage of that
situation.' With an almost sensual glee at the possibility
of reversing Mara's plot, Chumaka said, 'Instead, our new
equipment will function flawlessly, and the Acoma will find
themselves upon the field, outside the walls, while we are

already securing our position within.'

Jiro sacrificed his fortress, and tipped his head to concede
his First Adviser his argument. 'I will leave you to oversee
the arrangements.' extracting information by force from a
captive was not a detail he relished thinking about. He did
not have a weak stomach; torture simply did not interest
him. The treatises he had read told as much as he cared to
know on the topic. 'And as far as Ichindar is concerned, I
thought we'd agreed I should goad a traditionalist fanatic
into assassinating him rather than take him head on with
an army.' Almost spitefully, Jiro finished, 'The Black Robes
seem to dislike the idea of a civil war.

'Of course; nothing is more destructive to any society.'
Chumaka advanced another piece and looked up to accept
the satchel of new correspondence brought in by his
assistant. 'But as we discussed, even a dead Emperor
will have supporters. They will hole up behind walls
with his heir. If you, as the nations' savior, step in and
divert chaos by restoring the office of Warlord, you must
also seize Jehilia as your power base. Even without Mara
and Hokanu's resistance, you will need to break the city's
defenses to get to the Imperial First Daughter . . . before
someone else does.'

But for the gleam that wakened in his eyes from review
of future hopes, Jiro seemed absorbed in the shah game.
Chumaka turned from the board and riffled through the
rolled dispatches. He selected one, squinted to be sure it
had not been tampered with, then split the seal. He scanned
the lines, not needing to pause to interpret the cipher.
'Interesting,' he mused to himself. Idly, he wondered how
irritated his master was likely to become when he learned
of the ex-Minwanabi warriors that Chumaka maintained
in secrecy in a remote northern province.

If they became useful in arranging Mara's downfall,
Chumaka decided, he would receive a citation for them.
His lips quirked. How he wished he belonged to a household
that did not have touchy internal politics! Or a
master of such heated pride. As Jiro completed his next
move, Chumaka flicked his empress to a new square.
He speculated whether a woman's rule would follow the
same fashion as a man's; was Chumaka's Spy Master
counterpart in the Acoma household permitted a free hand
with his work? Only exceptional brilliance could keep such
a network intact past the fall of House Tuscai. And Mara's
willingness to take masterless men into service had shown
the falsehood of counting such without honor. Certainly
those who had labored as spies for the Lord of the Tuscai
seemed even more diligent on behalf of the Acoma.

Or had the creature who directed them been Lord
Sezu's man all along? Chumaka judged not, since Mara's
father had dealt straightforwardly in council and on the
battlefield. The Anasati First Adviser stroked his chin,
peripherally aware of his master's expletives over the shah
board as he saw his attack plan threatened. He set aside
the dispatch and reached for the next, the contents of which
caused him to snap off his cushions with a thoroughly
uncharacteristic oath.

Diverted from his straits on the shah board, Jiro raised
his eyes in languid inquiry. 'What passes?'

'The devil!' Chumaka gestured with the parchment scroll,
which appeared to contain random squiggles. 'I've miscalculated,
maybe; underestimated him, almost certainly.'

'Who?' Piqued, Jiro pushed the board out of harm's way
as his adviser began pacing. 'Do we have a problem? A
setback?'

Chumaka looked askance, his eyes deep as still pools.
'Maybe. The Obajan of the Hamoi Tong has been assassinated.
In his pleasure harem.'
Jiro gave a small shrug. 'So what?'

'So what!' Chumaka curbed his agitated movement.
Seeing Jiro's darkening expression at his sharp tone, he said,
'Master, the Obajan was one of the best-guarded men under
heaven, and he has been stabbed to death. What's more, his
killer escaped. Clean. Very professional work.' Chumaka
consulted his scroll more closely. In dawning astonishment,
he added, 'It says here that the tong brotherhood have
disbanded. They are now masterless men: grey warriors.'

It pointed to one possible conclusion. 'That can only
mean their records were lost?' Jiro's voice was forced
and level. The contents of the tong's accounts could
dishonor his house several times over, not least for the
latest cash outlay, to buy an attempt on old Frasai of the
Tonmargu, who lent his ear to Hoppara of the Xacatecas
too often when he wanted advice on policy decisions. As
long as Frasai remained alive, Kamatsu's death would serve
traditionalist causes very little. Hokanu would stand in his
father's post soon enough, but his tie to Mara and the
Acoma would hamper him against any move made by Jiro's
allies only when Frasai's vote of support was eradicated. If
the Imperial Overlord fell, the imperial Chancellor would
find his powers in the Emperor's council crippled at a
stroke. But Jiro needed Frasai's death to be caused in
discreet fashion; killing one's own clansman, especially
one's own Clan Warchief, was an extreme act even by
Tsurani standards.

Chumaka responded, bemused with thought. 'The secret
accounts were stolen, or so every rumormonger in the
Holy City now reports. I wonder if Mara has the tong's
records?' She must, he deduced. If an ally had access to
such sensitive secrets, Anasati agents would have been
informed; a foe would simply turn the information to
immediate advantage, unless ... the only enemy the
Anasati had that was under constraints not to initiate
conflict was the Acoma/Shinzawai faction that centered
on Mara. Chumaka stroked his chin, the shah game utterly
forgotten. What if he had miscalculated? What if the Acoma
Spy Master was a better player than he? What if a trap
yawned under Anasati affairs, just waiting for a misstep
to snap shut?
'You're worried,' Jiro observed, in his best tone of false
boredom.

Observing that his master was hiding extreme displeasure,
Chumaka did his best to wave the matter away. 'I am
careful,' he allowed, self-aware enough to know that his
worst nightmares seldom resolved in daily life. His active
imagination helped make him master of his job. In his
eagerness to close with his Acoma opponent, he could
easily have been drawn into carelessness. He must pull
back, wait, and watch, like a patient hunter. The train
of Mara's toy maker must be taken with utmost caution.
Then, as if a sixth sense reminded him that he had been
still too long, and that his master's restless intellect was
on the verge of expressing annoyance, Chumaka smiled
brightly. 'Shall we eat? Or shall we finish our game, which
you are very close to losing?'

Jiro glared at the arrangement of the players on the
game board. He made a deprecating gesture that turned
into a clap to summon servants. 'Two defeats on an empty
stomach are more than any master should face before
daybreak.' He must have followed that observation with
thought of the dead Obajan, for he looked nettled enough
to eat floor pegs. 'Damn her,' he murmured in a voice
he thought too quiet for his First Adviser to overhear. 'If
not for the Assembly's protection, I'd see her shamed and
begging.'

The gardener blotted his brow. Leaning in apparent idleness
on his rake handle, he surveyed the surrounding flower
beds under the afternoon sunlight. The blooms were the
brilliance of rainbows, no dried seedpods or wilted petals
left shriveling in the heat to mar their freshness. The soil
was level, and weed-free as it had been since the hour the

worker had started. Each shrub was trimmed to provide
beauty at an economy of space. The retired imperial officer
assigned to this household used his apartment infrequently.
Since he valued peace and silence, his gardens had been
arranged to set the bustle of the Holy City at a distance.
Half blind from cataracts, he tended to forget the faces of
his gardeners. Hence his lovely, private little garden across
from the city library offered the perfect rendezvous point
for a Spy Master who desired clandestine exchanges of
information bought through a bribe to one of the archivist's

COpyists.

Arakasi spat on his palms as any diligent gardener might
do, and again took up his rake. His sun-browned hands
looked as if he had practiced such labors life-long as he
scratched parallel rows in dry soil. Except for his eyes,
which kept covert surveillance on the entrance to the
archives across the thoroughfare, he assumed his role to
perfection.

In this he was even more meticulous in his caution than
usual. After the change in outlook triggered by Kamlio, he
distrusted his reactions. He no longer held confidence in
his ability to act with his former speed. As he raked, he
worried; would emotion make him hesitate? He no longer
saw people, even enemies, as ciphers on a game board. His
personal conscience, as opposed to his duty as a servant,
posed a conflict he feared to put to the test.
Since his thwarted attempts to infiltrate an agent into
the City of the Magicians, he understood that any inquiry
into old texts on arcane subject matter, or probing into
proscribed eras of history, might draw notice. Also, the
libraries were Jiro's passion, and Anasati spies comprised
half the staff. Since the Imperial Archives were rarely
visited except by students of history, most of them initiates
at one temple or another, any stranger sent in as agent
would cause inquiry. Since Ichindar's ascension to absolute
rule, the Day of Appeals had become the place to air
disputes over obscure points of law. The High Council
no longer sent couriers to peruse the stacks of fading
parchments for clarification on the fine points of tradition
under debate by merchants or guilds.

Arakasi had been hard pressed to find a student initiate
whose loyalty was not already compromised. In the end, he
had needed to call in a favor from the acolytes of the Red
God, who felt they owed Lady Mara their favor. As the Spy
Master raked, and darted surreptitious glances at the carved
doorways across the thoroughfare from the garden gate,
he felt disquiet over how useless his established operation
had become. He dared not try calling upon his resident
agents in the palace, since by now, Arakasi assumed, they
were all under Chumaka's surveillance. Enough signs had
arisen to indicate that the palace branch of his network was
compromised. So Arakasi had sent in an otherwise harmless
student, to lead Chumaka's agents off the trail. The Acoma
Spy Master knew the enemy could not be misled for long.

Two priests of Turakamu, and a student acolyte bearing
sealed requests from the High Temple, had all recovered
texts on the subjects Arakasi had requested. His nights had
been spent by candlelight, reading lines in faded ink. Each
dawn he had sent coded messages to Mara at the old Acoma
estate, narrowing down the possibilities: the time of the
conflict that had resulted in the secret treaty with the cho-ja
could have been tied to a civil disruption eighteen hundred
years earlier, two centuries after the founding of the Empire,
or to another period four hundred years afterward, when
no war was mentioned, but a review of family pedigrees
showed inheritances passing to first and second cousins,
and an inordinate number of underage heirs. If a plague
was responsible for such breaks in otherwise established
dynasties, the texts of the time held no reference to such.

The tax rolls of those times had also shown increases in

levied funds; treasury ledgers held strange gaps, blank lines,
for entries showing how such wealth had been spent. Now
Arakasi waited to receive the list of imperial commissions
for the two periods under examination. If the Emperor's
seneschal had paid sums to guild artists to paint battle
scenes, or sculptors to design commemorative victory
arches, surely there would have been a war. Temple records
could then be followed up for prayer-gate donations sent
in by wealthy widows who wished the spirits of husbands
departed on the battlefield to be kindly judged by the gods.
Arakasi frowned over his raking. If he could establish proof
of a war, he could root through family records, and perhaps
in the private sector ferret out facts, or entries in the diaries
of dead rulers, telling of a conflict that might have been
excised from the public record.

Mara had been circumspect in her instructions, most
likely out of deference to her Spy Master's misgivings over
continued pursuit of his trade. She had no illusions: she
knew, as he did, that his tie to Kamlio left him vulnerable..
But spare his heart and his talents, and the Acoma would
fall to the greater, more sinister design of the Assembly
of Magicians. For more and more, the fact emerged:
the Black Robes prevented change. They had allowed
Ichindar's ascension because it suited them to balk Tasaio
of the Minwanabi; but sooner or later they were going
to support the traditionalist view and a resurgence of the
Warlord's office, forcing Ichindar once more to a role of
religious ceremony.

Resisting an urge to wipe his sweating forehead, Arakasi
scraped his rake through the earth in an inward storm of
resentment. His studies of the records showed by omission,
in subtle twists and turns, just how the Great Ones had
directed the Empire to stagnation. It did not take a historian
to ferret out the unexplained holes in the fabric of Tsurani
history.

Like a weaver worrying a tangle of threads, picking apart
one knot at a time, Arakasi followed from one cryptic
reference to another to map out a report conspicuous by
its absence. His pulse quickened as it never had, throughout
his hunt for the Obajan of the Hamoi Tong. All objectivity
was displaced by recognition that he was involved in the
greatest match of his life; for while he ached to restore the
feelings of the girl who had captured his affection, he must
aid his mistress to challenge the mightiest body the Empire
had ever known: the Assembly of Magicians.

Arakasi shied away from contemplation of the future.
He saw each day as risk. He knew, as Mara did, that he
could no longer continue as her Spy Master, in the unlikely
event that her house could stand against the Assembly's
will and survive. Adjusting the sash that bound his smock,
and brushing the weapon belt beneath that held his hidden
knives, he regarded the swept walkways and the rows of
fragrant flower beds. If fate should destroy the Acoma,
or if when he resigned his post Mara should have no
honorable position to offer him within her household,
he had his laborer's skills to fall back on, he thought
on a note of black humor. Inspecting his hands, thick
with dark soil that hid the calluses of a dozen trades, he
considered there were less worthy pursuits than tending
growing things. ;.
Killing was certainly one of them. His decoding of the
tong's record scrolls had nearly made him ill at their
dispassionate listing of generation after generation of death
and cruelties. Mara had been right to use him as her own,
ruthless instrument, to destroy the Hamoi Brotherhood at
their root.

But her rightness did not make Arakasi any more able
to forgive himself for such usage.- Where Tsurani ways
admitted only honor won for his mistress, his interaction
with Kevin the barbarian had tainted his thoughts; Mara's
own forgiveness of his very human failure in the bleached

heat of a kekali garden had shocked the first cracks in his
outlook. The bastions of his isolation had crumbled since,
until now, naked of self-deceit, he saw.

He had trained himself to be set as a weapon against
others of his own kind. Kevin was right; the cho-ja were
right; Mara and Hokanu were right to desire change in the
stagnation of old ways. Although unconditional consent
had been the way between master and servant for all of
the Empire's long history, Arakasi had seen the evils of
such thinking mirrored in Kamlio's hardened eyes. His
awakened vision showed him guilt.

'I am not what I was,' he had said to his mistress in their
meeting after his successful assassination of the Obajan. It
had been less a statement than a baring of his spirit to
her view. He sighed, profoundly saddened that, through
the hours he had spent gardening in the past, he had
never pause] to appreciate the results of his labors. Now
he saw the neat rows of young blossoms with changed perspective.
Feeling a strange tightness in his chest, the
Spy Master considered that the lowly gardener might be
closer to finding balance upon the Wheel of Life; certainly
it was pleasant to imagine a life in constant harmony with
the universe.

Arakasi rubbed his hands and returned to work. His
awakened awareness, here, became a liability. Despite the
apparent tranquillity surrounding him, destruction was
very close.

The day waned. Reddened sunlight fell through the
pillared entrance to the garden. An elderly hawker pushed
his cart along the street outside, his singsong patois offering
bundled tanzi bark to the wives of the free workers headed
homeward from the temples to the dockside quarter
Shabby, just one step higher than slaves, such families
burned tanzi to sweeten the air and mask the stinks of the
fisheries on the river front side of town. Incense wafted
from the Square of the Twenty Gods, where the priests
threw open the massive doors of the temples. Sundown
rites drew the aristocracy out to worship, when the streets
were cooler and the merchants departed; the first lacquered
litters of the nobles swept by, interspersed with the rumble
of the empty costermongers' wagons, returning to the
farmlands after the day's market.

The hour just before sundown was a time when all
classes of people mingled in the streets; when couriers
removed their headbands and guild badges and walked
home to their wives and supper, whistling. Arakasi fetched
his wheeled barrow and began to gather up his hoe, rake,
and trowels. He watched the arched doorway of the library
keenly, anticipating the distractions of the hour to cover the
emergence of his errand boy; workers were wearied from
their labors and thinking of the evening meal, while the
curtains of the nobles' litters would be drawn closed, to
sequester them from the gaping of commoners.

The moment the youth appeared, Arakasi would leave
the garden, pushing his barrow, and the scribe would pass
him but for a brief moment, close enough to deposit his
report among the tools.

Arakasi heard the sound first as a distortion upon the air,
almost dismissed amid the rumble of a wine broker's dray
that ground over the cobbles beyond the gate. then instinct
had him ducking down behind his wheelbarrow before the
vehicle passed, and his ears identified the disturbance for
what it was: the bone-aching, arcane buzzing that preceded
the appearance of a Great One.

An icy sweat drenched the back of his neck. Had they
come for him? Traced his presence to a ploy of Lady Mara's?
Habit alone held Arakasi to his cover, that of a sunburned
gardener putting up his tools at the end of his day's labor.

His heart raced and his hands shook like those of a man
with the palsy. He had known fear in his life, many times;
but never before had it held any power over him. It had
never, until Kamlio, breached the guarded inner core of
his heart.

The pair of Black Robes appeared an eyeblink later. The
unnerving buzz died away, leaving a silence no longer filled
with the drone of foraging bees. The sounds of the street
seemed strangely removed, as if the world began and ended
at the marble pillars that flanked the garden gates.

Arakasi did not have to feign awe as he threw himself
down behind the wheelbarrow, his face pressed against the
dusty furrows his own rake had scribed in the earth.

The Great Ones took no heed of him. As though he
were no more alive than a carved statue, they moved
down the garden path toward the gateway and stopped
under the shadow of the arch. Their eyes stayed trained
intently on theœ library's front stairs across the street. Their
backs were turned; from Arakasi's vantage, their feet
were shod incongruously in velvet shoes better suited for
carpeted indoor floors. They ignored the common gardener
crouched behind them as if he were but another feature of
the surroundings, not a person able to overhear them.

One dark, hooded head bent close to that of his comrade.
'He should be along any moment now. The scrying showed
he would cross the street and head in this direction.'

The magician so addressed returned a barely perceptible
nod.

Arakasi felt little relief when he realised that the Black
Robes had not come for him. Still trembling, nearly
paralysed with fear, he dared a peek outward. Above
the tines of the rake, framed between the enigmatic black
forms of the magicians standing under the arch, he saw his
messenger at last emerged from the library, a laden satchel
slung from a strap across his shoulder.

'There!' The Great One who had spoken pointed at the
young figure of the scribe as he moved at a normal pace
down the steps. 'There he is.'
A nod of the second hooded head answered, and in an
unusually deep voice. 'As you guessed, his satchel carries
scrolls.'

'Subject?' The first magician's voice was curt.

His fellow closed his eyes, placed one hand against his
forehead, and gestured in the air with the other. His
passes perhaps described a spell, or a symbol, or some
incomprehensible ritual of power. The Spy Master felt his
flesh prickle, as the tingle of magic visited him.

The low voice rumbled as the magician said, 'It's a list.
The imperial requisitions for funds for the arts. Victory
arches, commemorative statues, memorials ...' A pause
while the two Black Robes seemed to ponder this. Then
the cold-voiced one said, 'The time period of these lists is
sensitive to our interests. Very.'

Arakasi clenched his hands in his plain worker's smock,
fearful that the drum roll of his heartbeat could be heard
over the stillness of the garden.

A lady's litter passed, hurried along by bearer slaves
adorned with silk headcloths. Delayed by the traffic, the
scribe paused on the other side of the street. Traces of
a woman's perfume twined over the scents of blooming
flowers, and the earthier odor of needra soil left by
animal-drawn conveyances. The Black Robes whispered,
craning their necks to regain sight of Arakasi's messenger,
who, all unsuspecting, now crossed the teeming main
thoroughfare with the jaunty stride of a boy who anticipates
a reward in centis to spend at the taverns.

'Certainly he should be questioned,' said the magician
with the cold voice. 'It's unlikely the boy is conducting
such research on his own. We must detain him and find
out whether anyone might have hired or forced him to
ferret out such facts.'

The other Great One murmured agreement.

Arakasi felt a jolt of near panic. If the scribe were forced
to talk, his cover would instantly become forfeit. And,
even before Kamlio, even without his awakened sense of
vulnerability, the Spy Master understood he would have
no chance of keeping secrets through an interrogation
by those able to read thoughts. Mara's hand would be
revealed, instantly and inescapably, and the continuance
of the Acoma be put in jeopardy.

He must act.

Cold under his worker's smock, Arakasi felt the metal of
his throwing knives. Propped up on one forearm, he groped
to loosen his sash. His hands felt sweat-slick and numb as
he reached under his robe and grasped the ebony handles
of two blades: one for the hapless scribe, the second for
himself. He must kill an innocent man in cold blood, and
immediately cut his own throat. After that he must hope the
Red God would take him before the magicians could bind
his wal to his body and force him to speak in betrayal.

The Black Robes had stepped together, obscuring Arakasi's
view of the street. Fear bound his chest like a rope. The
blade in his trembling hand, poised to throw, felt like a
dead thing, a splinter. His belly was on fire with nausea.
Almost, he hoped the worst might happen: that the
magicians would not move, and that the scribe would
step in through the arches to his garden rendezvous,
unknowing.

'He comes,' murmured the first magician. The pair moved
apart, deeper into the shadows. Like still, hooded statues,
on either side of the gateway arch, they waited for the man
who wove across the busy thoroughfare.

The press momentarily thinned. A cake seller walked
by, trailing the scent of cinnamon. Two boys ran, chasing
each other and shouting, while a puppy gamboled in and
out between their legs. The scribe dodged around a portly
water seller, his expression preoccupied, and his ink-stained
fingers taut on the flap of his satchel.
He stepped into the shaded walkway before the garden
gate.

Arakasi fought back revulsion. He had killed, many
times. Never had he reacted like this. Mortality had held
no meaning to his stone-hard heart, and he had felt no
weakening rush of empathy for his victim. His will faltered,
even as he cocked his arm to throw.

Sunlight flashed silver on the knife blade, drawing the
scribe's notice. His eyes widened, even as the Great Ones
stepped into view, clearly intending to intercept him.

Arakasi bit his lip. He must act! He measured distance,
aimed, and battled to banish his inner sickness.

'Halt,' the leftmost magician commanded in his ringing,
metallic voice.

The scribe did as bidden, paralysed with terror.

'We would question you,' said the second magician, his
voice a gritty bass.

In a state of trembling pallor, the scribe said, 'Your will,
Great Ones.'

Gripping the wheelbarrow as though his fingers might
punch through weathered wood, Arakasi forced his clamor
of feelings to stillness. Murder must have shown in his eyes
as he rose to one knee to throw, for the scribe staggered
back, panic written plain on his face. He saw certain death
in Arakasi's hand, and in a knife blade flashing downward
into the beginning of a throw.

He broke and spun. His satchel banged against his hip
as he dodged in desperation back into the crowded street,
running as though his heart might burst.

The deep-voiced magician stiffened in surprise. The other
shouted, outraged, 'He defies us!'

The Black Robe nearest the gate raised his hands. A
crash like thunder shocked the air, rattling the tools in
the wheelbarrow, and flattening the flowers in a suddenly
scything breeze. Arakasi was thrown flat against the earth.
He shoved his blades under his prostrate body and hid his
face behind his hands, while blast after blast shook the
garden, accompanied by flashes like lightning. Screams
erupted in the street, and sounds of fleeing footsteps and
the bawl of terrified needra. A carter snapped his goad
to whip up a laden wagon, and the puppy that had been
frolicking with the beggar boys began yelping. Shivering
uncontrollably, Arakasi peered between his fingers.

Except for the passersby who ran helter-skelter away
from the garden entry, the street looked little different;
the setting sun still cast red light across the library stair,
and temple incense wafted upon the air. Except that its
sweet odor now mingled with a scent of charred meat, and
a pitiful smoking lump lay on the cobbles, unrecognisable
as anything human. Nearby, untouched by the blast, rested
a spilled satchel of scrolls that turned and rolled, their ends
flapping in the dying eddies of wind.

'Why would the fool have run?' ruminated the magician
with the low voice. To his companion, he added, 'You
should have not been so quick to burn him to a cinder,
Tapek. Now we have no idea who employed him. This time
you've indulged your temper at the cost of information.'

The other Great One defended his act in disgust. 'There
are only two possible suspects, the Acoma or the Anasati.
No one else has a motive to send for inquiry into the
archives. And it is unthinkable that any lesser man should
defy us, and be allowed to disobey.' He turned from the
gate, his downturned mouth clearly visible beneath his
hood. His gaze flicked over the wheelbarrow, and the
gardener's tools, and settled, ice-hard, upon the prostrate
figure of Arakasi.

Mara's Spy Master felt the touch of that stare like a spear
thrust in the back. He could not stop trembling, nor did he
dare to move. With the breath stopped in his throat, he held
his pose of submission.

The magician stepped closer. Velvet-shod feet stopped
bare inches from his face. Mingled with the dust and the
wee green scent of broken flowers, Arakasi could smell the
pungency of ozone.

'Did you know that man?' demanded the Great One.

Incapable of speech, Arakasi shook his head.

The second Black Robe moved up to join his companion.
'He could be lying. we must be sure,' he said, his voice a
thunder of doom in Arakasi's ears. He stepped nearer.

Arakasi sensed motion, as if the magician made a pass
with his hands.

'Who was that man?' came the deep voice of the mage.
'Answer!'

The honed edge of spellcraft cut through the Spy Master's
mind. Trapped by undeniable power, he felt his lungs expel
air, and his lips and tongue forced to speech. 'He was but
a scribe,' he heard himself say. 'His name was unknown
to me.'

Arakasi closed his eyes in fear. Sadness at never seeing
Kamlio again clashed against his most vivid memory of
that afternoon they had shared in physical love, her languid
smile and hard eyes trapping his heart forever. Across his
jumble of recollection, the voice of a Great One said, 'His
mind is chaos. He thinks we shall kill him and . .~. he longs
to see a woman.' Harsh laughter escaped the magician. 'The
fool dreams of a beautiful young courtesan he once knew.
His only thought is to see her once more before he dies.'

Arakasi felt the compulsion born of magic dispel from

his mind and body, even as the other Black Robe said, 'A
guilty man would be thinking of his master or escape.'
That Arakasi remained too stunned to move lent credibility
to Tapek's conclusion. 'No, he-is not our man. The
scribe's contact fled, no doubt. This witless old gardener
knows nothing.' His manner shifted toward irritation.
'You were correct to chide me. Still, we now know
someone seeks forbidden knowledge. We must return to
the Assembly.'

The pair stepped away.

His sweat-drenched body coated with clinging dust,
Arakasi lay still. His ears recorded the sharp buzzing
sound, and the inrush of air as the Great Ones departed.
But it was dusk before his strength returned. He rose shakily
to his feet and stood for a long time with his weight braced
against his wheelbarrow.

Outside the gates, in the street, Imperial whites were
directing slaves to clear away the remains of the scribe.
A drudge hovered to one side with a bucket and brush,
to scrub the charred mark from the cobblestones. Around
this tableau the fine, sequined litters of the nobles carved
a wide berth. The ragged street boys that gathered to stare
at anything unusual were tonight nowhere in evidence.

Arakasi sat on the edge of his wheelbarrow and listened to
the rasp of night insects, while the afterglow faded from the
sky. The moon spread copper light over the wilting heads of
shorn blossoms. He did not need to see the scrolls that the
scribe had died to bring him. The presence of the Great
Ones confirmed the truth behind his hunches concerning
the histories. Soon he would have to slip away and make
a report to Lady Mara.

Worse was the inward uncertainty born during the heat
of his peril. Even now he could not determine whether he
actually could have fulfilled his duty. Even now he did
not know if he would have followed through and thrown
the knife.

Mara, Arakasi thought to himself, Lady. I have become
a liability to your cause.

But in the cool night, no answer came. He could do no
more than his best, for his Lady had no one else who
could approach the measure of his skills. And as well
as he knew her, Arakasi believed that if his mistress
were to face him now, there would be no reproach in
her eyes.

She understood his conflicts. The gift of that, in a ruling
mistress, almost moved him to tears. As he shifted to his
feet and raised the dew-wet handles of the wheelbarrow,
Arakasi wondered whether his Lady's compassion would
be great enough to break through Kamlio's bitterness.
Almost he laughed at his thought, in terrible, edged
self-reproach. How very near the Assembly had come to
learning everything about his Lady's plot to thwart their
decree. Long before Kamlio might find herself, all of them
might be dead, charred and smoking like the corpse in the
street, and with as little warning.

~:


17

Advice

Mara sat quietly, her daughter a warm weight clasped
against her shoulder. Fat, baby hands tangled in her hair,
reaching for the carved bead earrings she wore. Kasuma
was enchanted by anything red, and if she could close her
hand around whatever object held her fancy, she would
determinedly try to stuff it into her mouth. The Lady of
the Acoma rescued her jewelry from the tiny Shinzawai heir
by sliding her downward and bouncing her on her knee.
The child's coo of delight mingled with Justin's shouts that
drifted in through the screen. The boy continued to study
a warrior's skills, and under Lujan's unforgiving tutelage
was swinging a practice sword at a pell. Impatient as his
barbarian father, the boy insistently cried to his teacher that
wooden posts were stupid, that he should be permitted to
strike at something that could move. Like the jigabirds he
had been punished for harassing yesterday, Mara thought
with a half-smile. The cooks would as soon be quit of
Justin's pranks.

The Lady savored the moment. Since her parting from
Hokanu, rare intervals like these brought the only happiness
she knew.

Kasuma gave her a wet smile. Mara touched the baby's
nose, intentionally slowing her movement to allow the little
hands that thrashed to catch her bracelets and make them
chime. Today, along with her everyday jade, she wore the
priceless copper wristband once given her by Chipino of
the Xacatecas, expressly to please her child. Kasuma's
glee warmed her. Is this how my mother would have
felt, wondered the Lady of the Acoma, looking down
into my face? How different the course of her life might
have been had her mother lived. Would she have stayed on
and vowed service in Lashima's temple, while Lady Oskiro
became Ruling Lady of the Acoma? Would her mother
have ruled as Isashani had, through gentle female wiles?
Or would desperation have driven her to try dangerous
innovations?

Mara sighed. This endless circling of supposition served
nothing. All that she knew of her mother was a painted
portrait Lord Sezu had commissioned before the Lady's
untimely death in childbirth.

From the yard outside, Lujan's voice called in reprimand,
and the whack of Justin's practice strokes resumed at a
steadier rhythm. Mara could not hear the clack of a
wooden sword without being reminded of Ayaki. While
Justin looked nothing like her departed firstborn, there
came the odd moment when a glance, a turn of the head,
or boyish laughter would call his older brother to mind.
Ayaki would have passed his manhood ceremony, Mara
realised. That many years had gone by. He would have
been fitted for battle armor, not the pretty ceremonial
regalia given to young boys - she twisted her thoughts
away from useless dreaming. Aware of Kasuma's fingers
picking at her bracelets, Mara had to force herself not to
brood upon the other child by Hokanu, the one taken before
birth by the Hamoi Tong.

In another hour, her two remaining children would be
gone, sent on the road with a trusted retinue to the Imperial
Household in Kentosani. They would be safer there until
Hokanu won free of his Shinzawai obligations and was
able to return home to the lakeside estate.

Mara shut her eyes. Tomorrow would see her off on her
own journey, one that would begin in known territory, but
that could lead her far beyond the familiar. She took this
last interval to savor her little daughter. The gods only
knew how long she might be away. The years of Ayaki's
growing that she had missed while away on war campaign
in Dustari hurt her the worst, in retrospect. Now that the
boy was gone, she resented the years that politics had forced
her from his side.

Worst, most poignantly, she did not want Kasuma
growing up with no memory of her mother beyond a
painted image.

A soft baby foot thumped her in the chin. Mara smiled,
opened her eyes, and sighed to see the wet nurse return to
collect her daughter. The day was passing too quickly. The
large woman bowed, brisk in the face of her duty. Plainly
she did not enjoy being witness to a mother's parting from
her child.

'It's all right,' Mara reassured her. 'I know there are
things to pack, and Kasuma should have a chance to
nap before she is bundled off in a litter with her brother.
Justin won't let her sleep, he'll be so busy brandishing
his stick sword at make-believe robbers through the litter
curtains.'

The nurse's sternness softened. 'My Lady, your little ones
will both be well and happy. You must not worry.'

'Don't let the Emperor spoil them.' Mara warned,
hugging Kasuma so tightly the baby wailed in protest.
'He's terrible with children, always giving them sweets, or
jewels that the babies only end up putting in their mouths.
He'll cause one of the poor things to choke one day, unless
one of his silly wives finds nerve enough to teach him what's
safe for an infant.'

'Don't worry,' the nurse admonished once again. Personally,
she thought it was greed that kept the imperial mothers
from restraining their consort's generosity. She held out
huge, warm hands and accepted Kasuma from her mother.
The child cried harder, reaching chubby fingers toward the
retreating clink of the bracelets.
'Shhh. There, little blossom,' crooned the nurse. 'Give
your mother a smile to take with her on the road.'

That moment, while Mara fought a sadness that pressed
her near to tears, a single chime cut the air. In the courtyard,
the clack of Justin's practice stopped abruptly. By his howl
of annoyance, Mara presumed Lujan had reached out and
caught the stick in mid-swing. Her eyes locked with those
of the nurse, sick with hidden fear. 'Go,' she said. 'Quickly.
Buy what you need on the road, if you must, but head
straight for the litter. Lujan will bring Justin, and assemble
an escort and bearers, if it is not already too late.'

The nurse gave a quick, scared bow, Kasuma's cries
muffled against her shoulder. Then she bolted for the
door As well as her mistress, she knew: the chime that
had sounded heralded the coming of a Great One.

Mara shook off paralysis. Heart pounding in apprehension,
she shoved away the wrenching grief that she had not
been able to say farewell to her son. Although logic insisted
that if the Great Ones chose to act against her, the boy would
be no better off on the road, a mother's instinct would not
be denied: to send the children away from pending trouble
as fast and as far as possible. She wrenched her eyes from
the empty doorway where the nurse had disappeared with
her daughter, and clapped for her runner slave. 'Summon
my adviser. Quickly.' She started to ask also for her maid,
to bring a fresh robe and a comb to repair the tangles left
by Kasuma, but stopped herself.

The rare metal she wore on her wrist was sufficient
to impress, and she doubted her nerves could withstand
even the minute of stillness required to have a maid tidy
her hair.
Barely able to master her dread, Mara left the comfort
of the garden outside her quarters. She hastened
down dim hallways, the waxed wooden floors sounding
strangely hollow under her tread, after the stone
she had grown accustomed to in the lakeside manor to
the north.

Every estate house had a room with a pattern inset into
the floor, which provided a place for the magicians of the
Assembly to arrive by arcane means. While the decor of such
chambers varied from plain to ostentatious, the summoning
symbol was unique to each. Mara stepped through the low
doorway into the five-sided room. She took her place just
outside the mosaic in green-and-white tile that depicted the
shatra bird that was her family symbol. A stiff nod was the
best she could manage to acknowledge the presence of Saric
and Chubariz, the hadonra appointed by Jican to manage
her ancestral estates. At the sound of the chime, both had ~
presented themselves, as was appropriate to a Great One's
appearance. A moment later, Lujan arrived, breathing hard,

his gaze fixed, and his grip taut on his sword.

A second chime sounded,- signaling the moment of arrival.
A crack of displaced air ruffled Mara's loose hair and
twisted the plumes of Lujan's formal helm. Mara clenched
her jaw and forced her eyes straight ahead.

In the center of the pattern stood a bearded man in brown
robes. He wore no ornaments. His garments were not of silk
but of woven wool, clasped at the waist with a leather belt
and a brass buckle of barbarian design. He wore boots, not sandals,
and in the close heat of the windowless chamber,
a flush touched his pale skin.

Saric and Lujan both hesitated, halfway into their bows.;
They had expected a man in black, a Great One of the
Assembly. No magician they had heard of wore other;
than the traditional jet robe, and certainly none sported
a beard.

Mara bent in obeisance, prolonging the motion to allow
for furious thought. The City of the Magicians might lie to
the north of Ontoset, but the climate was not cold enough
to freeze. Only one reason could account for the dress of
her caller: he was not Tsurani-born. Her impulsive note
sent across the rift the month before must have attracted an
answer. Before her stood the barbarian magician Milamber,
whose powers unleashed in wrath had once freed slaves and
devastated the Imperial Games.

Mara's fear did not lessen at her deduction. This
Midkemian's beliefs were unknown to her. She had witnessed
the violence of his acts, which had culminated in exile
from the Assembly that had given him his early training. His
loyalties and his volatile temperament might still be theirs;
his swift and direct arrival after her vague overture was
disconcerting, when Mara had anticipated no reply more
elaborate than a letter.

Although Milamber would not be here on direct business
of the Assembly, there was no guarantee he would not recta
in the interest of his Tsurani counterparts. Events between
the worlds since his disgrace had caused him to work in
league with them. Mara arose from her bow. 'Great One,'
she opened in the steadiest voice she could manage, 'you
honor my house.'

The dark eyes that met Mara's seemed to hold veiled
amusement. 'I am no Great One, Lady Mara. Just call
me Pug.'

Mara's brow creased. 'Did I mistake? Is your name not
Milamber?'

Busily studying the unfurnished, wood-paneled room,
Pug answered with an informality that typified most
Midkemians. 'It was. But I prefer to be known by the
name given me in my homeland.'

'Very well, Pug.' Mara introduced her First Adviser and
her Force Commander. Then, left at a loss as to how she
should behave, and unwilling to be first to broach deeper
matters, she said, 'May I offer you refreshments?'

Pug's attention swung back, disconcertingly intense. But
the hands that had raised such fearful powers of destruction
in Kentosani remained still at his sides. He did nothing more
than nod his head.

Mara led the way down the wooden stair, through the
dim inner corridors, to the great-hall. Saric, Lujan, and
her hadonra followed at a respectful distance, their eyes
alive with curiosity and awe. The Acoma First Adviser
had heard his cousin's account of the destruction at the
Imperial Games many times over hwaet beer. Lujan moved
on his toes with alertness, aware that he dared not so much
as think of handling his weapons before a man of such
power; Saric sized up the barbarian magician, wrinkling
his nose at the strange musq odors of birch smoke and
callow that clung to the man's clothing. Pug was a man of
normal height for a Tsurani, which made him short by the
standards of his homeland. He looked unassuming, except
for his eyes, which were deep in mystery and terrifying for
their pent power.

As the party entered through the wide doors leading to
the great hall, Pug said, 'A pity you are not at your usual
abode, my Lady Mara. I had heard of the Great Hall
of the Minwanabi when I lived within the Empire. The
descriptions of the architecture fascinated me.' In an almost
amiable tone, he elaborated, 'You know I also built my
estate upon the property of a fallen family. Near Ontoset,
the former home of the Tuscai.' Mara glanced at her guest.
There was nothing friendly about his eyes, which looked
deeply into hers. If he was indicating he knew something
of her household, her Force Commander, First Adviser, and
Spy Master all having served the Tuscai, he showed only a
pleasant facade. Always moving, Pug's glance roved over
the room where Mara's Acoma ancestors had held court.
Typical of most Tsurani halls, it was open on two sides,
screens leading to a shaded portico. The ceiling was vaulted
beam, roofed over with wood and tile, and the floors, waxed
parquet that showed the wear of generations.
'Impressive,' he added, in reference to the war stands
strung in rows from the rafters. 'Your family is among the
oldest in the Empire, I understand.' He smiled, and years
dropped away from his face. 'I assume you've changed the
~ decor since taking possession of your other abode? The
Lord Tasaio's tastes were said to be execrable.'
{'His bantering tone set Mara at ease. Though she
suspected that was his purpose, and was loath to put d
her guard, she was grateful to let taut nerves loosen. 'and
My late enemy liked his cushions in leather and fur,
his tables inlaid with bone. There were more swords and
shields decorating the walls than Jican inventoried in the
Minwanabi armory, and the only silk we found was in
battle screamers and war trappings. The guest rooms looked
like an officers' barracks. But how do you know so much of
my dead enemies?'

Pug laughed with such openness that it was impossible
not to share in his mirth. 'Hochopepa. The old g
officiated at Tasaio's ritual suicide, and if you recall,
quite portly. His letters to me held complaint that there was
no seat in Tasaio's household that was not hard, upholstered
with wooden tacks, and narrow across the cushions

made for a man in battle trim.' -~ ~

Mara smiled. 'Kevin of Zun often told me that the
subdued art here would be counted "garish" in your
One might argue that tastes are a function of perspe.
The Lady of the Acoma waved her guest toward the
of cushions that lined the dais where the ruler in residence
held court. 'So I have learned over the years, yet so'
it is easy to forget.'

Pug deferred to her, allowing Lujan to seat her
first. As a Great One, he would have been entitled
shown that honor. But up close, he was unassuming
commoner. Mara found it difficult to equate this;
man with the figure of towering pride and power
had single-handedly ruined a former Warlord. But it took
more than appearances to settle her adviser and her Force
Commander. Saric and Lujan waited until the magician had
made himself comfortable before they sat themselves. Her
more retiring hadonra looked as if he were on trial for a
capital crime.

Servants hurried in with trays, offering meat and cheeses
and fresh fruits. Others brought hot water and an assortment
of beverages. Pug helped himself to a plate with sliced
jomach, and before Mara's trained staff could offer, poured
himself what he must have presumed would be chocha. He
sipped, and the half-moons of his eyes visible over his cup
widened in surprise. 'Tea!'

Mara fussed in worry. 'Did you wish something else? My
cook can have chocha brewed shortly, if that is your wish,
Great One.'

Pug held up his hand. 'No, tea is fine. I'm startled to find
it here.' Then his eyes narrowed as he added, 'Though by
all reports, little to do with the Lady of the Acoma should
be surprising.'

Infused with sudden uneasiness, particularly that he
should be acquainted with her affairs across the rift, Mara
drew breath to demur. 'Great One-'

Pug interrupted. 'Please. I renounced that title when it
was offered, at the time the Assembly asked to reinstate me.'
At Saric's startled lift of brows, the Midkemian magician
nodded. 'Yes. They retracted my order of exile, after the
conflict with the Enemy that came to threaten both our
worlds. I am now also a Prince, by adoption into the royal
family. But I prefer Pug, magician of Stardock, to any other
title.' He helped himself to more tea, then loosened his wool
collar to ease himself in Kelewan's warmer climate. 'How is
Hokanu? I have not seen him since' - a frown knitted his
brows - 'since just after the battle of Sethanon.'

Mara sighed, hiding sadness as she nibbled a bit of
fruit from the tray. 'He is well, but contending with some
unpleasant rivalries among his cousins since he inherited
his father's title.'

Regret played across Pug's expression as he set down
his cup. The jomach lay untasted beneath his hands,
which were fine-skinned, the nails impeccably manicured.
'Kamatsu was one of the finest men this land has known.
He will be missed. In many ways, I owe him for what I
am today.' Then, as if uncomfortable with dark thoughts,
Pug grinned. 'Has Hokanu developed the same passion for
horses that consumes his brother?'

Mara shook her head. 'He enjoys them, but not nearly
so much as Kasumi did.' Quietly, sadly, she added, 'Or
Ayaki.'

Pug focused on the reference with the open, barbarian
sympathy that in Kevin had so often been disconcerting.
'The death of your son was a tragedy, Mara. I have a
boy close to his age. He is so bursting with life-' He
broke off, fingering his sleeves in discomfort. 'You have
been very brave, to endure such a loss without becoming
callous or uncaring.'

It was uncanny, how much this barbarian magician knew
of her affairs and her heart. Mara flashed a glance at Saric,
who looked on the verge of comment. She signaled her wish
to speak first, before courage forsook her entirely.

'Pug,' she opened, the familiar address coming awkwardly, '
I sent you that message out of desperation.'

Pug folded his hands in his cuffs and regarded her,

utterly still. 'Perhaps it would be wise to start from the
beginning.'

His eyes were old, as if he had beheld vistas wider than
the human mind should encompass, and griefs more terrible
than the loss of a single child. For an instant, Mara glimpsed
past his mystery, to the powers that coiled within this man
whose manner seemed easy as a daatty cousin's. She recalled
the black-robed figure that had single-handedly destroyed
the Imperial Arena, a gigantic stone edifice that had taken
decades to build. Hundreds had died, and thousands
had been injured in a fearful explosion of power, all
because Milamber, this magician, had objected to the
brutality of human combat as a display. Despite his
everyday appearance and warm manner, he was a mage
of unknowable dimension. Mara shivered sharply, feeling
like a girl before the awareness of leashed might that this
man seemed to hide so adroitly.

And yet it must equally be recognised that, alone, Pug
had flown in the face of tradition, and had earned himself
exile for deeds the Assembly could not countenance. If the
Acoma were to gain protection, he was a potential key to
knowledge. ~

Mara chose to risk all. She dismissed Lujan and her
advisers, and when she was alone with the barbarian
magician, she spoke freely. She began with the year the
death of her father and brother forced her to assume control
of her house, and recounted the triumphs and defeats that
had followed. She spoke without pause, neglecting her tea
and the food on the tray for a long time, finally ending
with her confrontation with the Anasati that had brought
intervention by the Assembly.

Pug interrupted with a question. From that point forward,
he asked often for clarification of a thought or
enumeration of a detail, or probed her to learn the motive
behind an action. Mara was impressed at the quality of
his memory, for he often asked for more information on
something mentioned more than a half hour prior. When
Mara mentioned Arakasi's latest findings concerning the
lapses of continuity in ancient documents in the Imperial
Archives, Pug's questions became yet more pointed.

'Why did you wish my help in these matters?' he asked
at last, his tone deceptively mild.
Mara knew nothing would suffice but total honesty.
'It has become apparent that the Assembly might oppose
me, not to keep peace, but to arrest change within the
Empire. Great Ones have been reining the nations back
from growth for more than a thousand years, if my
advisers and my Spy Master's assessments are correct.'
Although she might be judged and destroyed for the
boldness of her accusation, Mara shed her uncertainties.
If she backed away from this chance to gain knowledge,
the Acoma were lost anyway. She forced herself to frame in
clear words what had become a lifetime's dedication since
Ayaki's death. 'Your Midkemian ways have shown the
time-honored traditions we Tsurani most revere become
destructive when they result in stagnation. We have become
a cruel people, since the Golden Bridge. Merit has been
replaced by- elaborate codes of honor, and by a rigid
caste system. I would see change, and an end to merciless
politics for personal honor. I would see our Lords become
accountable for their actions, and our slaves set free. But
I suspect the Assembly would prevent even the Light of
Heaven enacting such shifts in policy.'

Mara looked up to find Pug staring into his empty
teacup. Late sunlight slashed the wooden floors, and the
cheeses had half melted on the food tray. Hours had passed,
all unnoticed. Ruefully Mara realised that the Midkemian
magician's questioning had not only caused her to reveal
more than she had planned, but also had crystallised her
thinking, ordered her mind and delineated exactly which
problems lay ahead of her. More in awe of the barbarian
magician than before, since she had not noticed his molding
of her thoughts, Mara clenched her hands together. In a
fever of anxiety, she awaited his terrible judgment, or the
gift of his understanding.

For a while nothing moved in the great hall but the war
banners stirred by the breeze. At last Pug broke his silence.
'Much in what you say puts me in mind of things I have
felt . . . things I have done.'

Nervously Mara said, 'I don't follow.'

Pug smiled. 'Let us simplify by saying that the Assembly
is filled with disagreement. From without, the society of
magicians might seem a monolithic entity, a body that
occasionally intervenes in the affairs of the Empire, but
habitually keeps itself separate.' He gestured widely as folk
from his culture were wont to do. 'That is far from the case.
Each Great One may act as he sees fit, upon any occasion,
for his training is predicated upon serving the Empire.'
Mara nodded.

Pug's gaze caught hers, dark with an irony that might
have been amusement had the topic been less grave.
'However, there are times when two magicians may have
radically different views of how best to serve. On rare
occasions, disagreements give rise to conflict.'

Mara dared a supposition. 'Then some of the Great Ones
may not sanction the intervention in my war against the
Anasati?'

'They would be the minority,' Pug allowed. Perhaps
his own memories of exile from the Assembly came to
mind, for he seemed to weigh Mara's eagerness. 'I am
also sure that others argued that your death would solve
the matter quickly.' Deliberately careful in his wording, he
neither confirmed nor denied her speculations concerning
the Assembly's hold over the Empire's development; in bald
fact, he had told her little that Fumita had not already hinted
to Hokanu at Kamatsu's death rites.

Mara restrained her frustration as Pug rose, plainly with
intent to end the interview. Desperate not to lose her hope
of aid, she blurted, 'I wrote you on the chance you might
know how I may defend myself against the Assembly if the
need arises.'

'I thought as much.' Suddenly hard as barbarian iron,
Pug laced his hands together under his wide sleeves and
regarded her as she, too, arose to her feet. 'Walk with me
to the pattern.'

Mara waved back the servants who closed in to collect
the food tray, and the two warriors who moved from their
positions by the outer door, to accompany her as escort.
Aware that Pug could depart from any place in her house,
she surmised that his request stemmed from a wish for
privacy. As she led from the great hall into the dimmer
inner corridor, Pug drew her to his side with a touch upon
her arm. 'Why should you have concern for your safety,
Mara of the Acoma?' Softly he added, 'If you were a good
child who ceased troubling your parents, you would have
nothing to fear by way of punishment.'

In better times, Mara might have smiled at the image.
'The last agent I sent into the Imperial Archives to research
significant financial discrepancies in certain historical periods
was destroyed outright by the Assembly.'

As if Pug had been born knowing the halls of a strange
house, he turned up the steps toward the pattern room.

'Knowledge can be a dangerous thing, Mara of the
Acoma.'
He did not ask which years her agent had inquired into,
or what findings he had unearthed; his silence on those
points only underscored Mara's fears. She stepped into
the pattern room at the magician's side. Pug turned and
closed the door. She did not see the pass he made with

his hands, but her flesh felt chilled as if a cold wind blew
across her, and she knew that a spell had been invoked. Pug
straightened, his expression grave. 'For a few minutes, no
one, not even the most gifted of my former brethren, can
hear what you say.'

Mara's face drained of color. 'Great Ones could listen to
what passed in my great hall?'

Pug smiled in quick reassurance. 'Most likely it never
occurred to any of them to try- it's considered a breach of
proper behavior. Though I can't guarantee that much for
Hochopepa if the matter is weighty enough. He's a bit of a
snoop.' The last was said with affection, and Mara realised
that the portly magician must have been one of Pug's friends
ant supporters, after the upheaval in the Imperial Arena. As
much as any Black Robe could be, this Hochopepa might
be sympathetic to the Acoma cause.

Pug's next question caught her back from speculative
thought. 'Mara, you realise that the changes you work for
will turn the Empire upon its collective ear?'

Tired to her bones from the strain, Mara leaned back
against the wood-paneled walls and regarded the shatra
bird symbol inset into the floor. 'Should we continue as we
have, and be ruled by men who murder children, and let
good people become beaten down and ruined by servitude
when their talents and efforts deserve better? Jiro of the
Anasati and the faction he leads would see petty power
struggles take precedence over all else. It is heresy for me
to say so, but I no longer can believe that the gods endorse
such waste.'

Pug made a deprecating gesture. 'Then why concern the
Assembly? Have an assassin dispose of Jiro. You certainly
have wealth enough to buy his death.'

The ordinary callousness of his statement at last disarmed
her. Mara forgot he was a magician, forgot his terrible
powers, forgot all but her own bitter anguish. 'Gods, don't
speak to me of assassins! I destroyed the Hamoi Tong
because they were too readily available as a weapon for
grasping Ruling Lords to further their own selfish causes.
The Acoma have never dealt with assassins! I will see my line
dead and lost to memory before I begin such practice. Seven
times have I been marked for death. Three times the lives of
my loved ones have been sent to Turakamu's halls by the
tong in my place. I have lost two sons and the mother of my
heart to its bloody hands.' Then, reawakened to awareness
of whom she addressed, she finished, 'There is more to this
than my hatred of assassins. Jiro's death might settle honor,
but that ends nothing, solves nothing. The Assembly would
still seek to ruin my house. Because Ichindar, and Hokanu,
and I myself as Servant of the Empire, all seek to replace
what is missing from our lives.'

'Missing?' Pug prompted as he folded his arms across
his chest.

'Within us. Within the Empire.'

'Go on.'

Mara looked deep into Pug's eyes. 'Do you know Kevin
of Zun?'

Pug nodded. 'Not well. I first met him here-'

'When?' Disrupted utterly from her train of thought,
Mara's eyes widened in disbelief. 'You never called upon
me. Surely I would have remembered such a momentous
event!'

Pug regarded her with bitter humor. 'I was of a somewhat
lower station at that time, being one of Master Hokanu's
slaves. Kevin and I exchanged only a few words. But I
have seen him once since his return to the Prince's court
in Krondor, in a reception for the border barons.'

Mara repressed a wild leap of the heart. In a tight whisper
she asked, 'Is he well?' Her eyes pleaded.

Pug nodded, aware of the deeper emotions behind that
simple question. In answer to a need her pride would never
acknowledge, he volunteered, 'Kevin has made a name for
himself in the service of Prince Arutha. Third sons of minor
nobles need to find their way by their wits. From what I have
heard and seen, he does well indeed. He serves in the north
of the Kingdom, with Baron Highcastle, and has advanced
in rank several times, I believe.'

Mara's voice fell and her eyes lowered as she softly said,
'Has he wed?'
'I do not know, I'm sorry to say. Stardock is far from
court, and detailed news does not always reach us.' When
Mara raised her gaze, Pug observed, 'Though I'm unsure
which answer would please you most, yes or no.'

Mara loosed a rueful laugh. 'I do not know either.'

Golden light seeped under the door as a servant lit lamps
in the hallway; dusk lent purple shadows to the closed
confines of the pattern room. Suddenly reawakened to the
passage of time, Pug said briskly, 'I must go.' He forestalled
Mara's second attempt to delay him, saying, 'I have no gift
for you of magic or wisdom, Lady. I am not of the Assembly,
but even still, the oaths I swore when I was admitted to its
brotherhood bind my mind, if not my heart. Even with my
powers, some training is difficult to disobey. I cannot aid
you in your struggle. But I can offer this. You are wise to
seek counsel outside the Empire, for you will find few allies
within.'

Mara's eyes narrowed as she realised that he knew of her
secret preparations to journey over the borders; but how he
had found out, or what made him able to read beyond what
she had taken pains to conceal as a pilgrimage, she could
not guess. 'So it's true the cho-ja may not aid me.'

Pug's face split into a grin. He moved away from her
side, almost boyish in his delight. 'You are further along in
unraveling the great mystery than I would have thought.'
His expression returned to a neutral mask as he finished,
'Those within the Empire who might wish to be your allies
are prevented. No, you must seek outside the Nations.'

'Where?' Mara pressed. 'The Kingdom of the Isles?' But
at once she knew the lead she suggested was a false hope.
Already, she spoke with the most powerful man from
beyond the rift.

Pug stretched his arms out, letting the sleeves of his
brown robe fall away. Obliquely he said, 'Did you know
my wife was Thuril? Interesting place, the highlands. You
should visit them sometime. Give my regards to your
husband.'

With no further word, he raised his hands above his
head and vanished. The inrush of air into the space he
had occupied filled the silence, while the chamber dimmed
into the darkness of coming night.

Mara sighed and opened the door. Blinking against the
sudden dazzle of lamplight, she saw Saric and Lujan awaiting
her. To her adviser and her officer she said, 'Nothing
has changed. We begin our pilgrimage tomorrow.'

Saric's eyes lit with excitement. After a glance to be sure
no servants lurked within earshot, he whispered, 'We go
beyond Lepala?'

Mara bit back an answering smile, careful not to show
more enthusiasm than a pious journey might warrant;
though she, too, was excited and curious at the prospect of
crossing the borders into unknown lands. 'By fastest ship.
But we must visit the temples before we travel east. If we
are to gain by our visit to Thuril, we must be circumspect
in our departure.'

The preparations left to be made before dawn demanded
attention, and Lujan and Saric took leave of their mistress
to attend them. As they departed, alike in their movements
as only blood kin could be, Mara looked after them and
sighed. The house seemed empty and quiet without the
children. Regretting she had lost her chance to bid them
a proper farewell, she moved in the direction of the stair,
and her study, where the servants would be bringing her
evening meal. First light would not come soon enough to

soothe her unsettled nerves. Now that her path was clear,
she was anxious to be away.

She could not surmise what lay in store for her across
the border in the lands of a people who had been enemies
of the Empire through years of wars and skirmishes. The
treaty that bound the current peace was an uneasy one; the
highlanders of the confederation were quick to offend and
belligerent by nature. But the most powerful magician of
two worlds had circumspectly encouraged her exploration.
If nothing else, Mara sensed that he, alone of any, fully
understood the stakes. More, he knew the terrible scope
of the perils she needed to surmount.

As she moved past bowing servants, toward the comfort
of her quarters, she wondered what Pug's appraisal of her
chances at success might have been. Then she had second
thoughts, and decided she was wise not to have asked. If the
barbarian magician had answered at all, his words would
surely have taken the heart from her.

The priest shouted. Echoes reverberated off the massive
vaults of the temple ceiling, which towered above carved
wooden pillars and buttresses. The assembled circle of
red-robed acolytes answered in ritual chant, and a rare
metal chime sounded to signal the ending of the morning
ceremony. Mara waited quietly in shadow at the rear of
the chamber, her honor guard surrounding her, and her
First Adviser at her side. Saric looked absorbed in thoughts
far removed from religion. His fingers tapped a tattoo on
the corcara-shell bosses on his belt, and his hair looked
rumpled, as if he had raked his fingers through his bangs
in impatience. While none of her warriors disclosed any
sign of discomfort, their stiff postures indicated that they
were less able to turn their minds to other matters while in
the Red God's sacred precinct. Most of them offered inward
prayers to the Deities of luck and fortune that their final
meeting with the Death God would be long in coming.

And in truth, Mara thought, the Temple of Turakamu
was not a place designed for comfort. An ancient altar,
once the site of human sacrifice - and still such, rumor
ran - squatted on the raised platform at the chamber's
center. Stone benches surrounded the site, worn by the feet
of many worshippers, and grooved with drains that led to
recessed basins at the feet of statues that were centuries
old, their surfaces smoothed and stained by the touch of
generations of hands. The walls behind their niches were

painted with human skeletons, demons, and demigods with

multiple legs and arms. The figures writhed or danced in
postures of ecstasy; despite their grotesque aspect, they
reminded Mara of other icons and paintings that adorned
the House of Fruitfulness, one of the many shrines of
Lashima, visited by women who prayed for conception.
Yet while Turakamu's temple depicted no sexual overtones,
there was a sybaritic quality to the murals, as if those hideous
intertwined figures were celebrating, not suffering.

Awaiting her audience, Mara considered that while the
Red God's priests were frightening, in conversation they
insisted that as all people meet their end at the feet of
Turakamu, death was a kite, not to avoid, but rather to
be accepted with understanding.

The circle of acolytes reformed into a double column,
wreathed in the twining smokes of incense. Mara saw
the caped figure at the head of the procession pause to
address a supplicant who begged the god's mercy for one
recently departed. A writ crusted with seals changed hands;
most likely a draft from the family offering a generous
contribution to the temple if its bequest was answered.
As the paintings furthest from the sacrificial altar showed,
humans with beatific expressions bowed before the Red
God's throne to hear divine decision concerning rebirth
into life, their next station on the Wheel designated by the
balance of their debts against honor. The recently departed,
it was believed, could be enhanced in the eyes of the Red
God through prayer, and while the poor came on foot to
make obeisance and light cheap clay lamps, the rich came
in litters bearing lavish sums for private temple rites.

Mara wondered whether such practices influenced
Turakamu, or were the encouragement of earthly priests
who desired rubies for their mantles, and comforts for
their refectories and sleeping cells. Certainly the massive
gold tripods that supported the lamps by the altar
amounted to the wealth of a kingdom. Although each
temple of the Twenty god's had costly trappings, few were
as sumptuously appointed as the smallest ones dedicated to
Turakamu.

A voice roused Mara from reverie. 'Good Servant, you
honor us.' The procession of acolytes had reached the rear
door, and was filing slowly out, but the High Priest in
attendance had stepped out of the column and approached
the Acoma retinue. Under his paint and his feathered cape,
he was a man of medium stature, aging, but bright of eye.
Up close, it was apparent that he was taken aback, and his
nervous hands moved up and down the bone wand with
its skull bosses that he had flourished during the rites. 'I
knew you were going on pilgrimage, Lady Mara, but I had
presumed you would visit the great shrine in the Holy City,
not our humbler abode in Sulan-Qu. Certainly I did not
prepare for the honor of a personal visit.'

Mara bowed slightly to the High Priest of Turakamu.
'I've no wish to stand upon ceremony. And in truth, my
trip here is for reasons other than plain devotion. Rather,
I have need of your counsel.'

The High Priest's brows rose in surprise and disappeared
under the chin of the skull mask he wore, perched on the
crown of his head now that the ceremony was ended. He
was not stripped nude and stained in red body paint, as
was customary for rites performed outside sacred ground.
But his hair was braided with relics that looked like bits of
dismembered birds, and the accoutrements visible beneath
his cape of scarlet feathers seemed even less inviting. As if
aware that his formal dress was not conducive to interviews,
he passed his wand to the boy acolyte who waited in his
shadow, and doffed his robe. The cross-belts on which
his relics hung were of ancient design, and two other
attendants rushed forward and removed them from his
shoulders with reverent care. They bore the regalia off,
chanting, to its place in locked closets hidden away in a
warren of passageways.

Left in a simple loincloth, his eyes still striped with paint
from the ceremony, the priest seemed suddenly younger.
'Come,' he invited Mara. 'Let us retire to more comfortable
surroundings. Your honor guard may come along, or they
may await your pleasure in the garden inside the gates. It
is shady there, and a water boy will answer their needs for
refreshment.'

Mara waved Lujan and Saric to her side, and indicated
that the rest of her retinue might retire. None of the
warriors looked relieved, but their steps were animated
as they wheeled in formation and headed for the doorway
to the outer garden. Men in martial professions were never
comfortable with Turakamu's followers. Superstition held
that a soldier who spent too much time in devotion to the
Red God risked attracting that deity's favor; and those
whom Turakamu came to love, would be taken in their
youth from the battlefield. ~

The High Priest led the way through a small side doorway
into a dim corridor. 'When not in formal guise, I am called
Father Jadaha, Good Servant.'

Half smiling at his formality, the Lady replied, 'Mara will
do, Father.'

She was ushered into austere quarters with walls of
unadorned paneling, and unpainted screens. The prayer
mats were dyed red, for the glory of the god, but those used
for sitting were woven of natural fiber. Mara was shown to
the plumpest of a poor lot of cushions, threadbare with use,
but clean. She allowed Lujan to seat her, and offered a hasty
inward prayer for Turakamu's forgiveness. Her thoughts
had been wrong; plainly, in the temple the Sulan-Qu priests
used the moneys given by petitioning families only to adorn
those chambers dedicated to their god. Once Lujan and
Saric had placed themselves at their mistress's side, the
High Priest sent his servant for refreshments. A body
servant with a bad scar and one eye saw to the removal
of his ceremonial paint, and brought him a white robe with
red borders. Then, over a tray of chocha and small cakes,
the High Priest addressed his visitor. 'Mare, what service

may the Temple of Turakamu offer you?' I

'I am not certain, Father Jadaha.' Mara helped herself to
a square of sweet cake out of politeness. While Saric poured .
her chocha, she added, 'I seek knowledge.'

The priest returned a gesture of blessing. 'What poor
resources we have are yours.'

Mara let her surprise show, for his quick acceptance was
unexpected. 'You are very generous, Father. But I humbly
submit, you might wish to hear of my needs before you
make sweeping promises.'

The High Priest smiled. His one-eyed servant retired with
evident respect, and given a view of a face cleansed of paint,
Mara saw that the chief devotee of the Death God was
a pleasant older man. Slender and fit, he had a scribe's
beautiful hands, and his eyes sparkled with intelligence.
'What should I fear in making promises, Lady Mara?
You have shown your mettle in your great service to
the Empire. I much doubt your motives now are selfish
at heart; not after the behavior you demonstrated after
the demise of House Minwanabi. More than generous,
your actions were .. . unprecedented. Not only did you
observe correct forms in removing the prayer gate Desio
erected in dedication to your death, you selflessly made
sure that no dishonor was implied to the temple in asking
the prayer gate to be relocated off your lands. It is we
priests who are in your debt, for your part in ending the
tiranny of the High Council. Once again, our guidance is
allowed proper influence over the course of daily life.' The
priest gestured ruefully and helped himself to a huge slice
of cake. 'Changes in the power structure happen slowly.
Those Ruling Lords who resist our influence are close-knit
in their opposition. Still, we are making progress.'

Mara now recalled the words of the delegate from
Turakamu's temple who had officiated at the relocation
of Desio's prayer gate. At the time, overwhelming emotions
had caused her to dismiss the priest's remarks as ingratiating
flattery. Only years later, did she appreciate his sincerity.
The discovery of support in a place she had not expected
bolstered her courage. 'I need to inquire about the nature
of magic.'

The High Priest froze with his cup of chocha halfway
to his lips. He blinked once, his thoughts distant. Then, as if
the Lady's request had been commonplace, he resumed
sipping his drink. He allowed the beverage to linger on his
palate before he swallowed, perhaps because he wished to
buy time for consideration, or, as Saric's wicked insight
might infer, to forestall an unseemly fit of choking.

Whatever his priestly motive, his manner was calm when
he set down his cup. 'What would you know of magic?'

Doggedly Mara pursued the topic, though it was dangerous. '
Why are such powers considered the sole province
of the Assembly? For I have seen priests who could
wield them.'

The High Priest regarded the small, determined woman
who was acknowledged to be the second most influential
figure in the Empire after the Light of Heaven. His eyes

held unfathomable shadows, and a coldness not there the
moment before. 'The sanctions imposed by the Assembly
upon your dispute with Jiro of the Anasati are well known,
Mara. If you are seeking to arm yourself against the Black
Robes, you embark on a ruinous course.' He did not use
the honorific 'Great Ones' and that nuance was not lost ~]
upon Mara and her advisers. As with the cho-ja, was it
possible the temple hierarchies felt less than enamored ofœ
the magicians?

'Why should you assume that I plot against the Assembly?'
Mara asked with impolitic bluntness.

Father Jadaha seemed unperturbed by her directness.~
'My Lady, service to Turakamu leads my kind to know
the darker side of human nature. Men long in power do
not care to be shown their vulnerabilities. Few demonstrate
wisdom when confronted by change and self-recogn~
Sadly, many react in defense of positions that have lost
their meaning, simply because they fear to see their security'
undermined, even for growth, even for the betterment of(
their lives. They resist change simply because it is outside
the comfort they know. You represent luck and hope and
good fortune to the folk of these nations. You have:
been their champion, unwittingly or not, because you
opposed tyranny and cruelty when you brought about the'
abolishment of the Warlord's office. You have successfully
questioned the long-standing power structure that rules this.
land. That must be interpreted as challenge, whether you
will such or not. You have grown to great heights, and those"
who see you as their rival have felt your shadow fall across
them. Two powers such as the Assembly and the Servant
of the Empire cannot exist without conflict. Thousands of
years in the past, the Black Robes perhaps earned their place
outside the law. But now they interpret their omnipotence as
their gods-given right, their sacred honor, if you will. You:
represent change; and they, the very fabric of tradition
They must defeat you to maintain their ascendance. This
is the nature of Tsurani life.' ~

Father Jadaha glanced through the screen, cracked open
to admit the outside air. The snap of a carter's whip drifted
in from the street, overlaid by the cry of a fish monger selling;
that morning's catch. As if the intrusive sounds of ordinary
life set mortal bounds to his thinking, the priest sighed.
~Once we who swore service to the gods held influence
and great reach, Mara of the Acoma. Once we were able
to encourage our rulers for the betterment of all men, or
at least use our influence to curb excessive greed and evil.'
He fell silent, his lips thinned with what may have been
bitterness. Then he said, 'There is nothing I can offer that
will help you against the Assembly. But I have a small gift
for your journey.'

Mara repressed apprehension. 'Journey?' Had her subterfuge
been so transparent, that even this High Priest in
Sulan-Qu saw through the purpose of her pilgrimage?
Stiff-faced, silent, and reminded by a touch from Saric
that she must not tip her hand through an assumption,
Mara watched- the priest arise and cross to an ancient
wooden chest.

'To find what you seek you must travel far, Mara of
the Acoma.' He unlocked the catch and raised the lid. 'I
believe you already know that.' His incongruously graceful
hands rummaged through the contents of the chest. Mara
caught a glimpse of parchments, and the ribboned edges of
seals, through a puff of disturbed dust. The priest muffled
a sneeze in his sleeve. 'Your pardon.' He flapped an ancient
treatise to clear the air, then resumed his train of thought.
'The gossip mongers on the streets say you carry enough
baggage to return to the sandy wastes of the Lost Lands.
Anyone with a shell centi can buy that fact from them.'

Mara smiled. She found it difficult to reconcile the

priest who had officiated at the morning rites to the
most feared god on Kelewan with a man who might
buy gossip on the street. Ruefully she said, 'I had hoped
to imply that we carried great tribute to offer the temples
where I will pause to pay my respects to the Twenty
Gods. In truth, though, you are right. My pilgrimage
will lead me to board ship and travel downriver to
Jamar.'

The High Priest straightened from the chest, a smear of
dust on his nose and a twinkle in his eyes. He held an
ancient parchment, cracked and flocked with age. 'I would
be a poor counselor for the afflicted if I could not read
through subterfuge. But we priests do not see through the
eyes of rulers. It is our business to interpret with an eye to
understanding.' He offered the document to Mara. 'Read
this. It might yield you some insights.'

Sensitive to the finality in his tone, Mara handed the
parchment to Saric to store in his satchel. She pushed aside
her cake plate and rose. 'Thank you, Father.'

The priest held her eyes as Lujan and Saric moved in
response to her intention to depart. 'Do you seek answers -'
in the Lost Land, Mara?'

Wise enough to know when not to be circumspect, Mara
said, 'No. We leave from Jamar for Lepala.' ;

As if the topic she addressed held nothing more momentous
than small talk, the priest waved away a small insect:
that alit upon the rim of the cake plate; then his hands
folded comfortably in his sleeves. 'This is good, daughter
of my god. The shamans of the desert are . . . unreliable.
Many of them treat with dark powers.' ,,?,

Saric could not restrain a small exclamation at this. The
priest responded with a chuckle. 'Your First Adviser seems
surprised.'

Mara nodded her permission, and Saric made hasty
apology. 'Excuse my apparent disrespect, Father, but most
would consider . . . your master a . . . dark power.'

The High Priest's face crinkled with silent laughter.~
'Believe me, that misapprehension often has its advantages! ,,!
But death is just another side of the mystery of the Wheb
of Life. Without its portal into Turakamu's halls, where
all spirit finds renewal, our current existence would be a
mindless endeavor lacking soul.' The High Priest moved
to usher Mara's party from his quarters, but he continued
speaking. 'Our magic, as you would call it, is no unnatural
power.' He pointed his finger at the insect that circled over
the cake platter. A sharp, almost subliminal shadow seemed
to cross the air and the creature plummeted to the floor. 'We
use this aspect of nature sparingly, to ease the suffering of
those who are near their end, yet unable to release their
own hold upon flesh. The spirit of life is strong, sometimes
mindlessly so.'

'Such could be a powerful weapon,' observed Lujan in a
voice deeper than usual. Mara realised that, though he hid
it well, he was as apprehensive of Turakamu's servants as
any one of his warriors.

The priest shrugged. 'Never that.' With no more ado,
he pointed his finger at Lujan's breast. The Acoma Force
Commander made a visible effort to keep from flinching,
and sweat sprang along the band of his plumed helm.
Nothing happened.

Even Mara realised her heart had raced in fear as the
priest added quietly, 'It was not your time to meet the Red
God, Force Commander. Mine are the powers of my god.
I could not send you to his halls on my own authority.'

Saric, to whom all of life was a puzzle to be solved, was
first to overcome his apprehension. 'But the insect . . . ?'

'This was its time.' The priest almost sounded weary. 'To
make a point, I expect.'

Sobered, Mara bade the priest thanks for his advice and
good wishes. She and her party were shown from the temple
by the one-eyed servant. At the base of the marble stair,
they were rejoined by her honor guard. Mara stepped
into her litter, lost in thought. She did not at once give
the command to her bearers to rise, and in that interval,
a ragged street urchin raced from a side alley and crashed
squarely into Lujan.
The Force Commander swore under his breath. He
righted the youngster, crinkled his nose at the smell of
unwashed clothes, then abruptly became expressionless.

Mara stifled her amusement. Under the noise of another
street hawker, this one peddling cheap silk scarves and perfumes
suitable for weman of the Reed Life, she whispered,
'Another of Arakasi's messengers?'

Saric pricked up, while Lujan stuffed the note he had
palmed into his belt, under pretence of wiping his hand
'Vermin,' he said loudly after the fleeing child. Dropping
his voice so only Mara and Saric could hear, he added,
'Where does the man find such filthy creatures to do his
bidding?'

Mara was unwilling to disclose that her Spy Master had
once been such a luckless boy, and that his use of them
as his message bearers might be twofold: they would not
be marked by other men's spies because they were of
little account, and they could not read. Since Arakasi
had encountered Kamlio, Mara additionally suspected that
pity entered in, since her Spy Master might wish to justify
spending the centis to allow those less fortunate youngsters
a chance to buy themselves a meal they need not steal. In a
noncommittal voice she said, 'Did he find one?'

Saric gave her a stern look. Aware that she referred to
a magician of the lesser path, which Arakasi had set out
to find since the misfortune that had ended his search
through the archives, the First Adviser snapped Mara's
curtains closed. He said in his most infuriating tone of
familiarity, 'The sooner we move out to find a tavern for
your nap, the quicker you will find out.'
'We will call on the man after dark,' Mara whispered
through the cloth.

Saric and Lujan exchanged glances of fond exasperation.,
Their mistress seemed giddy as a girl. Plainly, she found
the challenge of her pending inquiries into the forbidden
exhilarating after long months of frustration. As the
bearers raised the litter, Saric and the Acoma Force
Commander fell into step together.

'Was she like this when you left for the campaign in the
desert?' the First Adviser murmured to the officer who was
his cousin.

'Not then.' Lujan pushed back his helm with a smile. 'But
Keyoke told me about the wild march cross-country into the
territory of the Inrodaka to win the alliance of the cho-ja
Queen. By his account, then she was worse.'

'Gods save us,' Saric said, making a sign to avert misfortune.
But his eyes were laughing, and his stride,
like his cousin's, was springy with excitement.

'Your curiosity will kill us all one day,' Lujan murmured.
'It's a damned lucky thing for my recruits that you gave up
your warrior's sword for the mantle of an adviser.'

Then the honor guard and litter bearers set off for the
tavern where Mara would reside while in Sulan-Qu.

.~

18

.

Evasion

The door flap stirred.

Jamd, the lesser-path magician, seareed at the sound,
his sweaty hand gripped tighte to the knife he heldd to his
breast. He had only seconds to act, he knew. His body
would take a while to relinquish life after he fell upon his
blade. Apprehension for the agony he would suffer made
the little man hesitate. He shifted his wee fingers, biting
his lower lip. He must summon courage! The Black Robes
had spells to œcommand the wal to remain enfleshed. If he
was not before the Red God's divine judgment by the time
the magicians arrived, his torments at their hands would
be worse than painful death.

For he had defied them, blatantly, in speaking with Lady
Mara of the Acoma. The magicians had been direct in their
orders concerning the Good Servant. She was not to be told
anything of magic, even should she come with bribes in
hand to inquire.

Feeling the pouch of metal centis against his skin, Jamd
repressed a sour laugh. He would never have the chance to
spend them! Much as: he might wish for the time to give
them into the hands of the street girl down the way who
was his friend, fate would not allow him even the grace of
generosity. He had chosen his path. Too late, now, to wish
words unsaid and resolves undone.

One last time, Jamd ran his gaze around the cluttered
hovel that had been his home. Here he had made many
marvels to delight the children of the rich; but how much
different his life might have been if his powers had not
been confined to the fashioning of toys! Hungry for the
knowledge he had been denied, thirsty for the testing of
limits that he had never been permitted to attempt, Jamd
loosed a bitter sigh.

'Gods go with you, Lady Servant,' he said fearfully. 'And
may the curse of Zurgauli, God of ill Luck, permanently
visit the Assembly.' So saying, he threw himself down onto
the floor before the cushions where Lady Mara's officer
had sat.

The knife against his heart bit deep, and his agony, at
the end, was brief.

Blood soaked into the dry earth of the floor; the ragged
edges of torn cushions showed seeping crescents of scarlet
where the warm, wet flow had been dammed, then
absorbed, by the fabric. Jamel's quivering, clenched fingers
fell lax, and his opened eyes shone motionless in the glow of
the brazier's coals. The next instant, a stir of air swept the
chamber, fanning the curled ash of the parchment that had
contained notes to Mara before it burned. The galley-bird
feathers in the urn by the clothes chest streamed in the
disturbance, and the bells of an unsold child's toy chimed
their priceless song into the stillness. Outside, in the dark
of the night, the mongrel dog still howled.

Then over the rush of air came a faint buzzing, and the
hovel of a sudden was not empty. Next to the cooling corpse
of Jamd appeared two black-robed figures, both of them
thin as misers, though one was old, and one young.

Shimone pushed back his hood, his jutting nose outlined
in red by the dying coals of the brazier. He glanced around
the hovel, taking swift inventory of every deem amid the

clutter; he paused, ant sniffed thoughtfully. His slippers
were damp, and the puddle he stood in was warm. The
corpse might have been just another deem of bric-a-brac
for all the reaction he gave. His deep eyes flashed as he
glanced to his companion. 'Too late,' he said.
Tapek shoved Jamel's body with his toe, and his thin
lips turned down in disdain. 'By only seconds.' He spat
the words like a curse. 'If the wretch had not found his
nerve for just a minute longer . . .'

Shimone shrugged. His thinning silver hair caught light
like a cock's comb as he roved the width of the hovel,
tracking sticky footprints as he examined the shelves, d~
bins of faded scrolls, and the battered chests with more
care. 'She was here. That is enough.' He reached out one
finger and jingled the doll with her priceless headdress of
metal bells. 'And anyway, the wretch is dead. He saved us
the bother, really.' ~

Tapek's heavy, cinnamon-colored brows gathered into
a frown. 'Is it enough?' He stepped over the unfortunate
Jamel and blocked his companion's restless pacing. 'What
did the dead man tell her? That's the issue! We know Jamd
broke his obedience. He could have said anything before he
drove that knife through his heart!'

The slight hiss of the coals was now the only sound in
the night. The dog had stopped barking. Even the far off
rumble from the dockside ceased. The commonplace noises
of Sulan-Qu had quieted for an instant, as if the city held
its breath.

Shimone reached out a finger like a twig and touched
Tapek on the breast. He moved his hand. No spell arose,
but as if it had, the younger magician stood aside. As
Shimone moved past to continue his examination of Jamd'.
belongings, he said, 'You want to know what she asked}
See, then. But I think we waste our time. She knows
now, what she knows. That cannot be changed, but only
acted upon.' ~

Tapek rolled his shoulders, clearing his wrists from his
sleeves. His eyes, pale as oil, threw back the hot light
like a fanatic's. 'Indeed we will act. But it is proof
Mara's defiance of our edicts that will move the lil
of Hochopepa off his enormous arse. We need consensus
within the Assembly, and he and his faction work to
prevent that.'

'Hocho is not a procrastinator,' Shimone defended, his
voice made faint by the fact that he had stooped to peer
into the dusty cranny under a shelf.

'Well,' Tapek said hastily, for he was not deaf to such
chastisement, 'what lesser-path mage would not speak to
Mara? She is revered by commoners. They would give her
anything she asked, just to win grace in the eyes of the gods.
If she corrupted Jamel, what more proof would Hochopepa
and you need to condemn her to death?'

Shimone straightened, absently dusting blood and dirt
from his sleeve cuffs. 'Jamel was hardly such a fool. You
will see.'

'I will see!' Insistently Tapek raised his hands. He flashed
a last glare at his colleague, whose behavior had been
difficult, if not obstructive. While a long-time friend of
Hochopepa's, Shimone had always seemed reasonable.
'You will see,' Tapek added. Then he began to murmur
the incantation to summon back in spectral form the actions
of the immediate past.

Cold seemed to weave through the close atmosphere of
the hovel, though the air itself remained still.Shimone
stopped his inquisitive poking through the objects on the
shelves. He thoughtfully bent and closed the eyes of the
corpse. Then, bright in movement as a bird, he stood back
against the wall with folded arms to observe the result of

Tapek's spell.

The younger magician's incantation drew to a sibilant
close. His raised hands held steady as if to focus his will
and powers. Light glowed beyond the brazier that was not
cast by fire or coal. It brightened to an ig silver-blue, then
spread into a hazy translucence that slowly sharpened in
outline to show the form of Jamel seated, his face turned
expectantly toward the door flap. Moments later, visitors
entered: Mara and her two officers. Conversation began
between the parties, eerily soundless. Shimone seemed as
attentive to the noises outside, in the poor quarter, as to
the unfolding of Tapek's truth spell.

Lipreading showed the contents of the discussion to be
petty: Mara's concern centered on the estrangement of her
husband, which had begun months back at the birth of her
daughter. An innocent enough tableau; except that Jamd
began, most irritatingly for the magicians assigned to this
inquiry, to fuss and toy with a length of silk. Conveniently
often, it seemed, the cloth obscured sight of his mouth. By
the ripple of the silk caused by his breath, it was evident
that he hid speech. But no spell of past recall could recover
the sound of his words. The imprint of light striking objects
in the room could be summoned back into coherent form,
to be read for many days after, but sound was too fragile
to endure more than seconds.

Tapek swore. Fixed as a relli, he watched as Jamel arose
and conducted Mara toward the wall. There they turned
their backs to the room, and to appearances, the lesser-path
mage proceeded in all seriousness to instruct the
Lady in just the sort of fakery - passes in the air with
his hands, motions that meant nothing but were intended
to impress the ignorant folk who came calling to buy this
or that change in their miserable lives - that demeaned
the reputation of magicians as a whole, and that Tapek
scorned. His hands shook with anger as he maintained the;
forces that drove his spell, and he said acidly, 'The Lady
seems remarkably stupid, all of a sudden. Is this the fourth
repetition of this rubbish, or the fifth?'

To his fury, Shimone appeared to be laughing - not
outright, that was never his way, but his deep eyes seemed
dancing with light. 'I warned you, Tapek. Jamel was not
an idiot. And the Lady is certainly not stupid.'
The veiled disapproval in his colleague's tone renewed
Tapek's frustration. Still, out of determination and pique
he endured the specters' charades, until Jamel finished
tracing meaningless symbols and resorted to scribbling on
a parchment, hunched over it to conceal the writing. Since
the spell only recalled the imprint of past events as if the
observer were standing in the room, no matter where Tapek
moved, Jamel's writing could not be read. Tapek glared at
the brazier, only to realise that Shimone had spied the ashes
of the burned parchment already, probably soon after their
entry into Jamel's abode.

'Indeed,' observed the older magician in answer to
Tapek's thought, 'the words were lost before we ever
arrived.'

Tapek released his spell the instant that Mara received the
carefully folded parchment and took her leave. Unmindful
of blood-wet earth or sodden cushions, Tapek stamped in
leashed temper around the brazier, every inch of him tense.
'Gods, but if only I could stand where that wall is, and
recast my truth spell, I'd learn much, for you could see by
their stances that the Lady and our dead man spoke openly
when facing the shelves!'

Shimone, ever the realist, shrugged. 'We're wasting
time.' ~ ~

Tapek rounded on his colleague, who stood now like an
elderly Lord impatiently suffering the slowness of an inept
servant. 'Mara!' Tapek exclaimed. 'We shall ask her!'

As if released from thought into action, Shimone stalked
toward the door. He twitched aside the flap of hide and
stepped through into the hardly less cloying stink of
the alley, saying, 'I wondered when you'd finally think
of that.'

Leaving the corpse of Jamel where it lay, Tapek barged
through on the heels of his companion. His red brows jutted
in a thunderous frown. If he had dared to speak freely upon
the subject, he would have accused Shimone of obstructing
him. The old mage was a companion of Hochopepa, and
the two of them often championed strange causes. Together,
had they not defended Milamber after that disastrous scene
at the Imperial Games? It mattered little to Tapek that
Milamber had later proven his worth to the Empire by
warning the Emperor and the Assembly of the danger
the Enemy presented. His feelings regarding Elgahar, the
magician who had imprisoned Hochopepa and tortured
Milamber, were mixed; Elgahar had been mad, of course,
but he had done as he had thought best for the Empire.
But Milamber had destroyed him, and along with his other
outrages, had demonstrated the risks brought by radical
departures from tradition. Tapek was convinced Mara's
recent actions were, if not proof, then a strong indication
she plotted to defy the Assembly. And that was an affront
to tradition that made the pale magician tremble with ire.

Deep in outraged speculation, Tapek all but ran into
Shimone, who had stopped in the street, and to all
appearances was listening to the wind.

'Which way are you going to look?' Shimone inquired.

Tapek's scowl deepened. It demeaned him to act the part
of underling, but if he did not summon another spell to
recall the past, and left that bit of business to Shimone,
plainly the old fellow would meander through the process
and contrive to waste half of the night!

There followed several frustrating hours, while Tapek,
worn by the effort of sustaining the spell, conjured the
phantom image of Mara and her two officers. These, her
First Adviser and another wearing the plumes of Acoma
Force Commander, escorted their Lady on a meandering
ramble through the back streets of the poor quarter. Their
path circled, even doubled back! Tapek fumed. Dogged as
the possessed, he followed. And was forced to wait, while
the Lady paid a business call upon a cloth merchant. Money
changed hands. A package, sealed and wrapped, was passed
to her adviser. Then the parade began afresh. At last the
Lady returned to the square where her attendants and
escort awaited. She got in her litter. To his annoyance,
Tapek realised that the town watch called out the hour of
three o'clock! Even fat old Hochopepa, he decided, would
have wasted less time than the confounded Servant of the
Empire.

The spectral image of Lujan paused, reached up to adjust
his helm. The set of the feathers seemed not to suit him,
and he twisted them this way and that, his wrist obscuring
his face while he gave elaborate instructions to the Strike
Leader in command of his mistress's honor guard. Then,
at long last, the ghostly, ice-pale replica of the litter rose in
the grip of its spectral bearers. The cortege floated on across
the darkened streets of Sulan-Qu, with Lujan and the First
Adviser taking the wrapped package upon an unspecified
errand, their lips moving in a crossfire exchange of doggerel
whose content was obscene.

Shimone, in his maddening, obtuse way, was chuckling
over the humor, which was straight from the gutter. He
almost seemed reluctant to pursue Mara's litter, which,
thought Tapek, steaming, was what they had been sent
from the City to do in the first place! ~

several times Tapek had to refocus his Concentration, as
he pursued the phantom image. On the wide boulevards,
the surrounding buildings and the busy streets gave back
muddled images overlaid with hundreds of others. It took
great energy of the mind to track the chosen party. Only
because the few people still about in the early hours before
dawn immediately gave way to the Black Robes, could
Tapek keep the illusion of Mara's litter in sight. And she
was taking the most damnable rambling course. Tapek was

nearly exhausted when the spell led at last to the steps of
the Temple of Turakamu. There, the phantom figures and
the litter they carried merged outlines as past converged
with present and Mara's slaves lowered their burden to
the ground. Tapek waved his hands and dispersed his spell
The blue glow faded, showing Mara's litter parked on the
pavement, empty. He blinked, to dispel the fatigue that
slowed the adjustment of his vision. Mara's guard and
servants were gone, presumably to take their ease in some
tavern while their mistress attended business within. The
stars overhead had begun to pale with false dawn, and
Tapek was in a sore mood from stubbing his toes on the
cobbles. He scared the wits out of the slave who was
sweeping the Red God's front stair, and sent the wretch
scurrying for the High Priest. A Great One was free to
move as he chose, but even magicians observed tradition.
By custom, no one entered a temple without permission.

Shimone was silent throughout.

Thankfully, the wait was brief. The High Priest of the
Death God was robed, still, from his visit with Mara. 'How may
I serve you, Great Ones ?' His bow was formal, precise

in degree of deference for one of his exalted rank.

Tapek reined back his annoyance. 'We seek the Lady
Mara for questioning.'

The priest straightened up with an expression of consternation. '
That is regrettable, Great One. The Lady arrived
here not long ago, troubled in spirit over personal matters.
She took counsel from me, but was not consoled. By her
wish, she retired into the inner sanctum of Turakamu's
temple. She has gone into seclusion, Great Ones, for
meditation and peace. It is to be hoped that my god will
inspire her to overcome her difficulties.'

Tapek felt enraged enough to yank out his hair, but settled
for tossing his hood back from his head. 'How long will she
be? We shall wait.'

The priest trembled, perhaps with apprehension, though
his eyes seemed supremely untroubled as he replied. 'I am
sorry. I much doubt Lady Mara will be coming out this
night, nor any night in the near future. She left instructions
with her bearers to remove her litter to her Sulan-Qu estate
in the morning, for she would stay in seclusion for some
time. Weeks at the least, perhaps months.'

'Months!' Tapek shifted from foot to foot, then directed
a glare at the priest. 'Months!' he exclaimed again, his voice
echoing down the empty square. The Black Robe continued
his tirade with venom. 'I hardly believe that so contrary a
woman as Lady Mara would be concerned for her spiritual
state at this advanced hour!'

The priest tugged his robes around himself as if gathering
his divinely bestowed dignity. 'Great One, a mortal may be
concerned for the state of her soul at any time,' he corrected
gently, then folded his hands in a beatific attitude.

Tapek surged forward as though he would storm up the
stair and violate the peace of the temple precinct. But
Shimone shot out a hand and restrained him.

'Think,' said the older magician, his tone snapping. 'The
sanctity of the temples extends back thousands of years.
Why break such a time-honored tradition as sanctuary,
Tapek? Mara must come out sometime. And if she does
not, our ends are met, not so?' .'

The fire-haired magician looked as if he had bitten into
sour fruit. 'You and Hochopepa and Fumita are fools to
seek to protect her!' he said in a furious whisper that only
his colleague might hear. 'She is dangerous!'

'As dangerous as a public confrontation between the
Assembly and the temples?' asked Shimone, his voice
menacing.

Tapek seemed to cool slightly. 'You are right. She is not
worth making into a public issue.'

Shimone nodded, silent, but satisfied. A faint buzzing
had begun upon the air, and by the time the priest realised
the confrontation was over, the two Black Robes had

466 Mistress of the Empire

vanished in an inrush of brffle and the lingering echo of
Tapek's anger.

The clack of the capstan on the decks of the trader ship
Coalteca slowed and stopped with a jar against wood as
the heavy, leacher-wrapped stone anchor thudded home
against the cathead. The captain bellowed orders for the
sailors in the rigging to loose the brails. The squeal of
halyards followed, as yardarms lifted, and brighdy painted
canvas bellied to the sea wind. Confined belowdecks, Mara
paced across the tiny stern cabin. Against her every wish
and instinct, to be in the open as the vessel set sail, her
concealment was necessary. Still, after weeks denied fresh
air and sunlight, Mara chafed. She flashed a glance at her
Force Commander, whose normally weathered face also:
had grown pale during their journey through the cho-ja
tunnels from the city of Sulan-Qu to the remote, peninsular
port of Kolth.

Mara had never journeyed through the southernmost
reaches of Hokani Province. But she had heard secondhand
descriptions from Jican, and balked curiosity left her
irritable. How she would have loved to have stolen
aboveground, even in the dead of night, to view the
City of the Plains! The great rift that led to Midkemia
was located there, where Kevin had been sent back to his
homeland, as well as the mansion-like stone guild halls that
were the hub of southern imperial commerce.

But the Assembly's anger was not to be risked for
frivolous whims. Luck and Lujan's ingenuity had left a
false trail that ended with the Lady of the Acoma in
apparent seclusion in Turakamu's temple in Sulan-Qu.
If the Black Robes were even to suspect they had been
deceived, if one lowly beggar on the street chanced to
recognise her as Servant of the Empire, her life and the
lives of her family could immediately become forfeit. And

Evasion

467

so Mara had done the unthinkable, by the mores of Tsurani
aristocracy: she had donned the robes of a slave woman,
and left Sulan-Qu in the company of Lujan and Saric, both
wearing the unmarked armor of mercenaries. The farmers
and merchants who were abroad before dawn had assumed
she was a battle prize. They had not thought to question
her slave's grey, but stared openly at her slim figure and
lustrous hair. A few had called ribald comments, to which
Lujan, with strength of imagination, had responded in
kind. His shocking coarseness had hidden that Saric at
first had been unable to shed tradition for an act, and
had stiffened at the insults to her person.

A message left with an agent of Arakasi's network had
brought quick action. When Mara and her two officers had
reached the cho-ja hive on her estates, she was joined by ten
hand-picked warriors in armor without house markings,
and another, a dock worker she had never seen before, who
spoke Thuril as his birth tongue. With them came Kamlio,
clad again in the rags in which Arakasi had delivered her,
and made sullen by the prospect of traveling underground
with the insectoids, who terrified her.
The journey south had been trying. Weary from nerves
and confinement, and the alien experience of being stared at
as chattel, Mara threw herself down in the cushioned alcove
she had once shared with Kevin on a long-past journey to
Tsubar. In these familiar quarters, the loss of him stung
deep, as if their parting had happened yesterday. Almost
she regretted her long ago purchase of the Coalteca; why
had she not had the sense to let go of sentiment and buy
some other blue-water trader?

Yet the Coalteca had been available; she had acted
without consulting Jican. The ship was lucky, she felt;
her triumph with Lord Xacatecas in Dustari still held the
admiration of the Nations, and now that she had such dire
forces as Jiro and the Assembly arrayed against her, she
needed every reassurance to bolster her, even those rooted
in superstition.

Kevin might have laughed at her irrationality. Impatient
with herself for dwelling in the past when all the future lej
in jeopardy, Mara turned from memories of her barbarian
lover, only to find herself worrying for Hokanu.

Her husband did not know where she was, and must not,
for safety's sake, receive even clandestine word until she was
deep into Thuril territory. Sharply Mara regretted that she
had had small opportunity to speak with him since their unhappy
meeting after Kasuma's birth. Now, more than
anything, she longed to confide in Hokanu, to receive his
steady understanding and his apt insights. She worried for
him, as he dealt with relations who sought to move up
in the family hierarchy. Contentions inevitably arose after
the deaths of "strong Ruling Lords, when others who saw:
themselves as rivals to the heir emerged to assuage their
ambitions. Mara sighed. She hoped, if Hokanu chose to
accept the staff of office offered him by Ichindar, that he
would visit their children in the Imperial Court. Kasuma
should not grow older without knowing the love of a
father, and Justin certainly was more of a handful than
any of the imperial servants had backbone enough to
handle. Again Mara sighed, wondering if she would return
from Thuril with aid against the fearsome might of magic
only to be bested by two little ones who had turned into;
spoiled brats.

'You're thinking that maybe this whole voyage was
a mistaken endeavor?' observed a quiet voice by the
companionway.
Mara looked up, surprised to find Saric standing in the
doorway to her cabin. The creaking sounds of the working
ship had masked her adviser's approach, and the plain robe
he wore made him blend into shadow.

Mara smiled wanly. 'I'm thinking we could have done
without Kamlio's sullenness,' she said, not wishing to
divulge her true thoughts.
Saric returned the mercurial, triangular grin that showed
when his mood was mischievous. 'Certainly, from that one's
complaints over sleeping arrangements, one would have
thought she was the great Lady and you the browbeaten
servant.'

Mara laughed. 'Have I been so dour?'

Her adviser folded himself onto a sea chest with neat
grace. 'Have you felt so dour?' he asked.

'Yes.' Suddenly aware that her heart had lifted with the
motion of the ship's sailing, Mara raked the pins out of her
hair and let it unfold down her back. She gestured around
the dim cabin, with its brightly woven cushions and its
beaded curtains, bought from a desert trader, that clacked
and rattled with each heel of the ship. 'I am tired of close
walls and secrecy.' She did not add that she was nervous. To
go into a foreign land, bearing none of the grand trappings
of her rank, and with only ten soldiers and a guide who
had been born a beast herd! This was not at all the same
as her past trip into Dustari, when she had moved in the
company of her own loyal army, with her command tent,
and all of her accustomed comforts at hand.

Saric gave her a wry look. 'You are wishing you had given
in to risk, and bought another litter in Kolth.' The sparkle
in his eye indicated he had more to say. Mara withheld
comment, until her First Adviser raked back his straight-cut
bangs and added, 'Lujan did try the markets, you know. He

found a used litter, an immense black lacquered affair all
set with river stones and fringes.'

A storyteller's pause developed.

'Go on,' Mara prompted, skillfully distracted from ill
temper. 'Why did our brave Force Commander not buy
the monstrosity?'

Saric's smile widened with devilry. 'No bearers in the
slave market had enough meat on their bones to lift the
damned thing, and we'd not have enough hands free for
swords if your honor guard was left to take the burden.
Besides, Lujan said, if you and Arakasi's courtesan were
mewed up in that thing together for more than an hour,
you'd wind up fighting like tseeshas.'

Mara's jaw dropped at his allusion to the catlike creature
known for combativeness between females. 'Lujan said
that?'~

Saric said nothing, which gave her an inkling. 'Lujan
said no such thing!' she cried back in indignation. 'Are
you trying to brew up mischief again, and see your cousin
disgraced?'

Saric had the honesty to look sheepish.

'Out!' his mistress cried. 'Leave me, and send in Kamlio.
If she doesn't want a bath, I most certainly do, before we've
passed so far beyond shore that the seas become too rough
for a basin.'

'As my Lady wishes,' Saric said, smoothly arising from
his bow. As he stepped out, not at all shamefaced, his
Lady realised that he had accomplished his objective; her
downcast mood had lightened. She might have missed the
Gq of the Plains, and the excitement of embarkation from
Kolth; but she was headed for territory no Acoma in her
memory had ever trodden.

All of the mountains of Thuril lay before her, and her
heart leaped in anticipation of unknown adventure.

Later, bathed and scented, if plainly clothed, Mara stood
in the bow of the Coalteca, watching the splash and
tumble of foam and the leaping play of the iridescent
jalor fish. She laughed in delight at the flash of their
scales in the sunset, oblivious to the piercing regard of
Kamlio.

'What do you see that is amusing in these desolate
waters?' the onetime courtesan asked sourly. Deliberately,
it seemed, she omitted the honorific of 'Lady', as if daring
Mara to take umbrage.

'I see beauty,' Mara replied, as if the question had not
stemmed from bitterness. 'I see life. Our moments of peace
between contentions are to be cherished. This I have learned
since I came to be Ruling Lady.'

Lujan approached from amidships, his plumeless helm
taking on a cobalt gleam from the deepening sky overhead.
He bowed to Mara and said, 'We make good speed,
mistress.'

Mara raised her eyebrows. 'Have you become a sailor,
Force Commander?'

Lujan smiled, his expression less devious than Saric's,
but every bit as jaunty. Mara was struck afresh that this
was a moment to be treasured. 'No,' her officer admitted,
'but the captain said as much.' Removing his helm with
a grimace, for it did not fit as well as the more elaborate
one he had left behind in Sulan-Qu, he raked his fingers
through damp hair and breathed deeply of the sea air.

Disregarding Kamlio's uninterested presence at her side,

Mara observed, 'This voyage brings back memories.'
Lujan peered up the height of the foremast, to the gaudy
spread of canvas that netted the last golden sunlight. 'I miss
the barbarian, too, mistress. Even if he did spend half the
last voyage with his face buried in a basin.'

Mara couldn't resist laughing. 'Hard-hearted soldier,'
she accused. 'One day a storm will get the better of your
stomach, and then you will stop thinking sea sickness
is funny.'

'Gods,' Lujan said with bitter pungency, 'don't wish such
a fate upon me with my cousin aboard. He would cook me
soup with fish scales in it as a remedy, and then tell all of my
favorite reed girls what I looked like with green skin.' As
Kamlio stiffened in silent antagonism, Lujan turned toward
her the charming grin that lured half the prostitutes in the
province to lean dangerously far over their gallery railings
to call to him. 'No offense, lovely flower, but my girls all
adore their jobs. They don't begrudge me their favors, and
I don't treat them as property. I am not the merchant who
bought and molded you for bed sport, and neither am I
one of the masters who used you. Hear wisdom, and stop
looking for those others in the face of every man you chance
to meet.'

Kamlio looked as though she might spit venom. Then
she shook back her pale gold hair, gathered her tawdry,
patchwork robe, and swept away in stiff-backed silence.
She did not turn her head at the whispered comments
and admiring looks of the sailors, but hustled down the
companionway into the mate's cabin she had been given
for her quarters.

'Don't say it,' Mara murmured quickly, as she sensed the
epithet her Force Commander was about to utter under his
breath. 'You would certainly antagonise her less if you
ceased calling her "lovely flower."'

Lujan looked pained. 'But she is one. If she were to tear
her face and become scarred, her body would still make a
man itch and sweat.' Then he reddened at his frankness
of speech, as if only then recalling that the person he so
addressed was female, and his mistress.

Mara touched his arm in reassurance. 'I am not offended
that you speak intimately with me, Lujan. You have become
like the brother I have lost, since the hour you took service
in that distant glen.'

Lujan jammed his helm back over untidy hair. 'I know
you, Lady, as I know my own heart. But that Kamlio
confounds me. I don't know what Arakasi sees in her.'

'He sees himself,' the Lady replied. 'He sees things he
recalls from his past, and wishes to spare her the pain he
once suffered. That is a powerful attraction.' She stared off
into the gloom, wondering if that was also the reason she
ached so sorely from her strained relations with Hokanu.
Silently she pondered whether Lujan, as another man, might
understand the reason for her husband's cold reaction to
the birth of his daughter. Were Lujan a brother, and not
her Force Commander, she might have asked him. But
here, in public on a ship's deck, traditions and appearance
prevented her.

The falling dark spread around them like a curtain of
privacy. Mara studied her Force Commander's face in the
gathering twilight. He had new lines, and the beginnings
of white at his temples, since she had taken him from his
life as a grey warrior. Without her noticing until now, she
saw that his face had begun to weather with the hours he
spent drilling troops. More and more, his complexion was
growing as leathery as Keyoke's. We are growing older,
Mara thought sadly. And what have we to show for our
days and our labors? Her children were no more secure
than she had been from their enemies; and if Hokanu had
been less skilled at command, he might have had to shed his
own family's blood to keep his pack of cousins at bay.

Mara sighed, knowing that if her brother had survived
to inherit, instead of she, the Minwanabi would very likely

have succeeded to the Warlordship, and the precarious
changes won by the shift in power to the Emperor would
never have happened at all. Sometimes Lujan's teasing
humor recalled Lanokota. But her brother had been barely
into his manhood, just testing himself against the challenges
of life, when she lost him. This man at her side was fully
come into his power and maturity as a warrior. The
hardness ingrained through his outlaw years had never
entirely left Lujan, despite the fervor of his loyalty, and
the affection he had won from his predecessor, Keyoke.
Struck that such a fine man should have sons, Mara said
impulsively, 'You ought to marry, you know.'

Lujan set his back to the rail and grinned at her. 'I have
thought, recently, that it might be time to have a son or
daughter.' ~,

Made sensitive by what had happened between Arakasi
and Kamlio, Mara wondered suddenly if he did have a love,
but perhaps one that was not freely his to ask. 'Have you a
woman in mind?'

Laughing, regarding her fondly, Lujan said, 'I am down
to fewer than a dozen.'

Aware that she had been mildly baited, Mara said, 'You
will always be a rogue! Find an understanding woman, else
she will take you to task for your flirting ways, Lujan.'
'She would scold me anyway,' the Force Commander
admitted. 'I have this terrible habit, you see, of wearing
my weapons while in bed.'

He was only halfway joking; events through the years
since she had come to power as Ruling Lady had caused
all her warriors to take on a battle-ready alertness. There:
had simply been too many attacks, from too many unseen
sources. Now, worst of all, no sword in the Nations could
save her. Mara lost her inclination toward humor. She stared
ahead, toward the horizon, and wondered if she would find
what she desperately needed to ensure Acoma survival on that
distant, unseen shore.

The lookout cried from the crosstree, 'Land ahead!'

Mara rushed to the rail, her cheeks flushed in the
morning breeze. Even Kamlio, who moved nowhere with
enthusiasm, followed. Off Coalteca's eastern forequarter
lay the faintest hump of indigo, the first shoreline anyone
on board had glimpsed through the days of a brisk but
uneventful passage.

~Honshoni,' said Lujan. 'They say the red-bee honey from
those hills is sweeter than any in the Empire.'

Lepala also was famous for silks and exotic dyes, and the
beautifully patterned weaving such luxuries encouraged.
Mara sighed, longing with girlish curiosity to pause and
explore the wharf markets of the south. Xula, Lepala, and
Rujije were places of enchanting tales of spired buildings
and scarlet-railed galleries. Lords of Lepala were said to
keep rare fish in pools, and harems numbering in the
hundreds. Homes there had pierced shutters to shade from
the sun and break the force of the sea winds, and gardens
with huge, hot-climate flowers which bloomed only at dusk,
but which filled the evening air with exotic fragrances until
night's chill caused them to close up again. The streets were
paved in a stone that shone like gold when damp. The
sailors' gossip made the vendors' stalls and bordellos seem
exotic. They spoke of drinks of prodigious potency inns
filled with colorful caged birds, and eating establishments
where customers were cooled by pretty girls and boys with
large feather fans. But Coalteca would not make port in any
of these busy cities of commerce until Mara's party had been
safely seen ashore in a secluded, uninhabited cove far inside
the bay between Honshoni and Sweto. Only a few fishing
villages dotted the north and south shores.

The Thuril Confederacy claimed the eastern edge of the
bay, its only access to deep water; and since the magicians
of the Assembly were apt to appear and disappear at
whim anywhere within imperial borders, Mara had agreed
with her advisers that she must not risk any unnecessary
landfall. Coalteca's legitimate cargo would be offloaded
on her return trip north, and if the Black Robes or any
lurking Anasati spy should come to suspect the deviation

in her normal sailing course, the Lady would already be
away, deep into foreign territory and, if the gods were kind,
beyond reach.

The landing, when it happened a few days later, was in
as bleak a site as anything Mara might have dreamed in
nightmare. The beachhead where the longboat delivered her
was deserted, a grey-blue crescent of flinty, sea-smoothed
shale alive with the scything forms of birds. As Lujan lifted:;
her over the thwart and carried her ashore, white and indigo
shorebirds circled overhead. Their cries echoed mournfully
above the wind and the crash of breakers. Dust blew across
the rugged hills beyond, scrub-covered and forlorn, and
high above these, turning grey-blue with distance, rose
the tables of the highlands, bordered at the horizon by
mountains whose peaks were lost in brooding masses of cloud.
The slate-backed spine of the range had proven a:
fortress impregnable for the Tsurani who had attempted to
make war upon Thuril. Time and again the Empire forces
had invaded these inhospitable lands, only to be harried
back through the foothills by the fierce, naked swordsmen
with their dyed skins and their barbarous war cries.

Short, softspoken, and wrinkled like the skin of a dried-fruit,
the guide paused before her and said in his stilted
accent, 'Lady, it were best you command your people to
stand out of plain sight.'

'I will need to give them a reason,' Mara responded.
'They are honorable warriors, and would take it ill if they:
were told they must sneak about like thieves, particularly
where there is not so much as a dwelling, even a fisherman's
shack.'

The guide licked the gap where two of his front teeth
were missing.-He shifted from foot to foot, obviously
uncomfortable, then bobbed in a quick bow. 'Lady, the
peace between the Empire and Thuril is uneasy. Only
formal envoys and licensed traders cross the border, and
only at designated checkpoints. Were your people to be
seen within two days' walk of these shores, or anywhere
near the imperial border, you would be taken as spies.'Whatever
the Thuril did to punish spies, by his tautness
of expression it was not pleasant.

Knowing that her own people took captured Thuril for
the games in the Imperial Arena, Mara no longer argued
the need for secrecy. She beckoned Lujan over to her and
murmured in his ear, 'Force Commander, we will sorely
need the knowledge you gained as a grey warrior to keep
our presence here secret until we have made our way far
inland.'

Beneath the straggle of hair that escaped the brim of his
helm, Lujan gave her a wild smile. 'Ah, Lady, the last of
my guileful ways will be known to you! when you learn
how well honorable warriors can be made to skulk, will
you ever trust them again to guard your valuables?'

'They may have my valuables with all my blessing, if
the purpose of our mission is successfully accomplished,'
Mara replied, too grim for humor, and recognising the
first taste of the hardships to come on these strange
shores.

There followed several days that put Mara in mind of
her race across-country before her first marriage, to win
the alliance of the cho-ja Queen. Then as now, she
had slept with minimal shelter on hard ground, amid
a small retinue of warriors. Parts of that trip she had
travelled on foot, the trail being too rough for her litter.
Then, too, there had been urgency, as her party
crossed the estates of enemy Lords in the deeps of the
night.

But in Kelewan there had been dense forest, almost
jungle, to hide in. Low-lying mists had concealed her party
at dawn and dusk, and provisions had been carried by her
bearers.

In Thuril the stony soil grew only sparse bushes and
grass, providing scant cover. At times she had to hike
in gullies, chilled by the winds of these higher altitudes,
her thin sandals soaked from standing amid peaty clumps
of moss. Her ankles became scratched from the sharp

stemmed sedges, and her hands calloused from using a
walking stick to keep her balance. Once they passed a
village, skulking through pastures on their bellies under
the moon. Dogs barked at them, but sleeping herd boys
did not rouse.

Mara grew accustomed to the taste of tough game
brought down by the bows of her warriors. She developed
aches in muscles she never knew she possessed, from
long hours and miles on her feet. In a strange way, she
revelled in the freedom, and in the deep, cloud-scattered
bowl of the sky. But her warmest pleasure was watching
Kamlio.

The girl let her long hair twist and tangle, uncared for by
maids for the first time in her life. She stopped tightening
her lips and looking white when the warriors spoke to
her; the few who approached her had been rebuffed,
and unlike other men she had known until Arakasi,
they left her alone as she asked. She went by herself
to wash in the icy streams, and shyly began to offer t o
help at the fireside, where it became plain that she had
a knack for cooking. She also asked Lujan to teach her
self-defence with a knife. These lessons commenced in
the half-dark, each night, where Kamlio's dulcet tones
sharpened in a fish-wife's cursing as she missed her throw
and tried again.

Lujan took her shrewish mood in stride. 'Really,' he said,
one evening when she seemed to be having a particularly
difficult time, 'you should ask Arakasi to show you knife
work. He is a master, and knows the best way to use
the wrist.'

Kamlio spun in such fury that the Force Commander
grabbed her hand just behind the bare blade of her weapon,
unsure she would not sink her knife in him.

'Gods!' Kamlio cried, venomously offended. 'It was that
one I sought to defend myself from!'

She tore away and flounced off into the dark. Lujan
watched her go, clicking his tongue in reproof. 'Woman,
against our Spy Master, nobody wins at knives.' As she
vanished, he added softly, 'You need nothing of defense
against him. If you chose to carve out Arakasi's heart, I
believe he would stand still and let you.'

Much later, in the depths of that moonless night, Mara
awoke to hear the girl sobbing. Softly she said, 'You need
never see Arakasi again, Kamlio, and that is the problem,
is it not?'

The former courtesan said nothing, but her sobs eventually
wore themselves out in sleep.

The next morning dawned cloudy and chill. Kamlio
returned red-cheeked from gathering wood, her eyes redrimmed
as well. 'He killed my sister!' she spat at the Lady
of the Acoma, as if in continuation of the words shared in
the night.

'He killed the Obajan of the Hamoi Tong, on my
orders,' Mara corrected. 'The Obajan's own darts killed
your sister.'

Kamlio threw down her armload of wood onto Lujan's
fledgling fire, sending up a cloud of sparks and smoke.

The herder who was their guide cursed in Thuril. 'Foolish
girl! Your pique could cost us our lives!'

Lujan reacted first, ripping off the cloak he wore over his
armor. he cast it over the tiny fire, then leaped and grabbed
the water bucket nearby, dousing the cloth before it could
flare up. Dull wisps of steam seeped from the folds, amid
the stink of burned querdidra wool. 'Up,' he snapped to

his subofficer. 'Break camp. No breakfast, and we march
at once. That smoke could have been seen, and for our
Lady's sake we must take no chances.'

The little herdsman threw the Acoma Force Commander
a grateful glance for his good sense, and within minutes,
Mara's party was back on the trail, hugging gullies and
what cover the meager landscape could offer.

Four days later, the guide deemed it safe to travel more
openly. He accepted coin from Mara, and dared descend
into a narrow, smoke-filled vale to buy supplies from a

village market. The imperial centis were suspect, but they
had value, and the country folk in their simple needs did
not care to question the origin of the currency or those who
spent it. Mara suspected she was not the first Tsurani the
guide had brought this way. Smuggling between the Empire
and Thuril was risky, but highly profitable. It seemed a
reasonable vocation for a man of mixed heritage who could
pass in both cultures. ~

The herdsman returned with two hide bags of provisions,~
jerked meat, and a cloak of hill weave to replace the one Lujan
had damaged in the campfire. The burdens came
back into camp lashed to the back of a small grey beast, ~,
horselike in shape, but with long ears, and a tail like a
paintbrush.

'Donkey,' the herdsman guide replied, in answer to
Mara's curious question. His burred accent accepted
the word awkwardly, but Mara recognised its origin as
Midkemian. The presence of an animal that could only
have come from the other side of the rift, through the
Empire, made it clear smuggling was a major trade of
this region. 'Less ornery than querdidra, Lady, and sturdy

enough for you to ride.'   ;

At this Mara raised her eyebrows. 'Me? Ride that? But
it's barely as big as a newborn needra calf!'

'Walk, then,' the herdsman said, in less than respectful
tones. 'But the shale in the heights could twist your ankles,
and your warriors would quickly tire if they had to carry
you.' For Kamlio he had bought boots with stout soles,
laced up the front, and topped with fur. Mara eyed the ugly
footwear with distaste, and the donkey with trepidation. ~
Then, with a sigh, she surrendered. 'I'll ride,' she said. ~
'Show Lujan how to help me mount.'

~_
The herdsman bobbed another of his fast bows that Mara
swore were his way of hiding amusement.

'Don't feel apprehensive.' Lujan teased as he arrived at
her elbow to help her astride. 'Think how I felt on that
day in the desert when I had to mount a cho-ja. They're
slipperier, for one thing, and I was panicked I would fall
off and land on my own sword.'

'That was Kevin's idea, not mine,' Mara said in her own
defence, then steeled herself as her Force Commander lifted
her strongly and set her down like a feather in the dyed
leather hill saddle strapped to the beast's back.

The animal was small, Mara tried to reassure herself, and
the ground no more than a cloth yard away. If she fell, the
worst she could get would be bruises, small price to pay
if she could find protection from the Black Robes in these
strange, barren hills. And in fact, the gait of the donkey was
not so hard, it being short of stride and its feet marvelously
sure as it plodded along.

Mara found her perch upon the creature's back less
than comfortable, but she hid her soreness with Tsurani
implacability as her party wound ever higher into the
forbidding hills. In the afternoon, when she dismounted
and the beast was led off to water, she confided to Lujan
that had she known what sort of creatures donkeys were,
she would never have permitted their importation. 'Small
horse indeed,' she had snorted as she settled stiffly on the
ground to share a meal of hard bread and sour cheese.

Lujan only grinned. 'They are most reliable, I am told.
Already the man who sells them across the borders in
Honshoni is seeking another herd, for they far outshine
the querdidra as beasts of burden.'

With this Mara was forced to agree, despite her aching
posterior. She had endured the company of the foulsmelling,
evil-tempered querdidra as she had traversed
the mountains of Tsubar on campaign against the raiders
of the desert. But as the donkey raised its stringy tail to
dump manure, she kept her opinion silent. If it was a
superior creature to the temperamental, six-legged native
pack beast, it certainly was no cleaner in its habits.

Suddenly the herdsman who was their guide spun around,
his crust of bread forgotten in his hand. Facing the wind, his
eyes narrowed, he scanned the bleak, scrub-covered hills as
if he could read their rock and vegetation like a scroll page.
'We are being watched,' he said in a low voice to Lujan. 'I
suspected as much since we left that village.'

The Force Commander pointedly kept chewing his food.
As if there were no immediate peril, he asked, 'Should we
arm ourselves?'

The herdsman faced around in shock. 'Not if you wish
to live. No. Keep on. Act as if nothing were wrong. And if
anyone approaches, make no threatening move, no matter
what is said or done to provoke you. Ensure no hothead
among your men speaks or draws his sword.'
Lujan gave back an even smile that only Mara could read
as a false show of humor. 'Have some cheese,' he invited the
herdsman.

But no one had any stomach for eating, and within a
short time the company regrouped and started to move
on. They had gone barely a dozen paces when a shout rent
the air. A man with black braids and a great, billowing
cloak of the same dull green-grey as the soil leaped directly
above the lead guard onto a large rock that overlooked the
narrow trail.

Lujan held up his hand as Mara's guards tensed. But
none of his warriors forgot their orders not to draw
weapons, despite their surprise. The Thuril highlander
had appeared as if from nowhere. Dressed in his native
kilt and double cross-belts hung with two swords and
several knives, he called out, 'Why do you invade the
land of Thuril, Tsurani?' His thick accent made his demand
nearly unintelligible, and his tone was unmistakably belligerent.


Mara kicked the little donkey, to overcome its reluctance
to move forward again. Before it could stride out, the little
herdsman sprang to its bridle to restrain it. He replied to the
challenge, prompted by the custom of the land. 'I am layapa,
warrior,' he said in the Thuril tongue. 'I speak for the Lady
of the Acoma, who has come on a mission of peace.'

The man leaped down from the rock, his cloak billowing
and his kilt flipping up to bare an expanse of muscled thigh.
The cross-garters of his sandals were tasseled below the
knee, and his weapon harness chinked with stone talismans.
Up close, it could be seen that his head was shaved, save
for a round patch at the crown, where his braids had
been allowed to grow since childhood. They tumbled as
long as his waist as he landed, their ends also tied with
talismans.

Into his mistress's ear, Lujan said softly, 'He is not dressed
for war, Lady.'

Mara nodded. She had read that the Thuril shed their
clothing when fighting, going nude but for their battle
harness, feathered helms, shields, and weapons, for they
took pride that their manhood was not shriveled by fear
and ensured their enemies knew this.

The man swaggered toward Mara, who was now slightly
ahead of the others, as the donkey sidled nervously. Mara
sawed at the reins, frantically and silently reminding herself
to act as if nothing were wrong.

The highlander said something in his coarse dialect and
grabbed the donkey's bridle. He breathed into its nose,
and for some strange reason the creature quieted. The
man then rattled his knuckles through his talismans, and
stepped around the donkey's head. Coming face to face with
Mara, he leaned forward until his nose missed touching hers
by a hair's width.
layapa called, 'Good Servant, make no move. He tests
your mettle.'

Mara held her breath and forced herself not to close her
eyes. Peripherally, she was aware of her uneasy men, their
hands itching to draw weapons; and of Kamlio, who had
forgotten her distaste for men and had crowded close to the
nearest warrior in fear. But the Acoma discipline held. Her
warriors kept still, and when Mara refused to lower her gaze
or pull away, the highlander released a great, garlic-scented
breath and withdrew. He grunted, allowing that her courage
was sufficient. 'Who speaks for you, woman?'

Before layapa could stop her, Mara spoke. 'I lead here.'

The man bared white, even teeth in an expression that
was no smile. Browned by strong sun, his face wrinkled
in contempt^You have sand, woman! I'll allow you that,
but lead these men? You are female.' To Lujan, who was
nearest, the highlander rephrased his question. 'You! I do
not answer a woman's tongue, and I would know: what
brings you to come with warriors into our lands? Do you
seek war?' This last seemed to be a joke, for he burst out
in raucous laughter.

Mara waved Lujan to silence, and as though the brawny
man did not stand at her donkey's shoulder, addressed her
herdsman guide. 'This highlander seems amused. Does he
think our presence funny, or does he intend slight to our
honor?'

But whether he followed his own advice, or was simply
cowed to silence, layapa said nothing.

Mara frowned, forced to rely upon her own judgment.
By Tsurani accounts, the Thuril were bloodthirsty warriors,
quick to attack, savage in fighting. But the opinions of an
invading army were suspect, Mara felt. The only other
Thuril she had observed had been captives sent into the
arena. These men had proven themselves to be assertive,
independent and courageous. They had suffered beating
by Tsurani overseers rather than fight as a spectacle for
their captors' amusement.

Mara addressed the man again. 'I seek your chieftain.'

Much as if an insect had spoken aloud, the highlander
looked surprised, 'You seek our chieftain?' He stroked his
chin as if thinking. 'What cause have you to disturb him?
He already has a woman to warm his nights!'
Mara bridled, but held back her temper in time. She
gestured to stay Lujan, who was poised to rush forward
to answer the insult. Mara forced herself to calm study of
this brash highlander. In truth, he appeared young, barely
more than twenty-five years of age. By Tsurani custom, he
was just old enough to inherit. And like those of a boy given
first responsibility, perhaps his manners were all swagger,
to make himself seem important in a larger world. 'I do not
speak to boys. Take me to your chieftain now, or I will ask
that you be punished for your rudeness when I seek him
out myself.'

The man stepped away, in a mock show of intimidation.
'My Lady! But of course.'

He spun on his heel in a swirl of cloak and kilt, and set
two fingers to his lips. His whistle pierced the air, causing
Mara's warriors to start. ~

'Draw no swords,' she commanded in a low voice
to Lujan.

Her Force Commander gave a hard look to his men,
willing them to hold fast, even as, in a scrabble of rocks

and gravel, more than a score of men sprang into view
around their position. All were heavily armed, from bows,
spears, and swords to bristling rows of throwing knives;
not a few of the fiercest and largest carried double-headed
axes. Mara's small guard was outnumbered three to one,
and if it came to a fight, the trail where they stood would
become a slaughter ground.

Prepared for death, Lujan murmured, 'They may not
have been looking for trouble, but they are ready should:
it find them.'

The highlander on the trail glanced to his circle of
supporters. He grinned wickedly. 'You heard the female,
She thinks to command our chieftain to have me beaten for
rudeness!' Rough laughter greeted this statement, punctuated
by the hiss of swords being drawn.

Mara swallowed hard. Aware that she must either fight or
stand down, before her men were killed out of hand and she
and Kamlio were taken for gods only knew what fate, she
forced her dry tongue to shape speech. 'I said we "were on
a mission of peace! To prove this, my men will disarm.'

At Lujan's incredulous glance, she added, 'Do so!'

Obedient to a man, her Tsurani guard loosened their
sword belts..,The clatter of weapon sheaths striking hard
stone seemed pathetically swallowed by the wide expanse
of sky.
The young warrior's grin became predatory. He reached
up, jerked off the hide tie that secured his braid, and
snapped it taut between his hands. 'Bind them,' he rapped
out. He looked at Lujan as he added, 'You are Tsurani!
Enemies of my people. We shall see whom my chief shall
order beaten!'

Mara closed her eyes as the ring of the Thuril rushed
in upon her defenceless party, but she did not react soon
enough to miss the lecherous looks the nearer men shot
toward Kamlio. Her ears still heard their comments, in a
strange language, but derisive in tone. Gods protect us, she
thought, what fate have I commanded for my people? For by
every tenet of honor, and every belief of the religion she was
born to, she should have seen all her warriors dead to a man,
and herself killed, before she consented to surrender. ;

'You did right, great Lady,' layapa said urgently. But as
rough hands dragged Mara from her perch on the donkey,
and greasy leather thongs creased her wrists, she was not
reassured. More than Acoma shame was at stake here, she
reminded herself as her warriors endured in silence as they,
too, were trussed hand and foot. Honor, pride, even peace,
would mean nothing if the Assembly was not challenged in
its omnipotence.

But as she and her people were pushed and prodded and
jeered at like slaves, she was not sure she would not rather
be dead.

,., ~
19

Captive

Mara fell.

The highlander who had shoved her into the line of
march laughed as she landed on her knees on rough stones.
He caught her arm, jerked her painfully back to her feet,
and pushed her ahead again. She stumbled into Saric, who
stood firm to support her, his horrified outrage barely kept
under control.

'My mistress should at least be permitted to ride on
the donkey,' he protested,-knowing by his Lady's grim
expression that she would not speak out of pride. He bit
off each word as if it were a curse.

'Be silent, Tsurani dog! The beast will be put to better
use!' The highlander who appeared to be in charge
beckoned and gave instructions to an underling.

Mara held her chin high, trying not to look at Lujan's
bleeding face. He had refused to raise his wrists to be
bound, and although he had not fought, it had taken
coarse handling to force his hands behind his back to
lash them. His eyes were dark with rage as he saw to
what 'better use'- their small beast of burden would be put:
Kamlio had caught the fancy of these barbarous Thuril. Her
beauty was considered a prize, and it was she, not Mara,
who was to ride.

When Saric again dared to protest, he was struck in the
face and shouted at in broken Tsurani. 'The dark-haired
woman is nearer the end of her childbearing years. She is
of little value.'

Mara endured this additional shame, her cheeks burning.
But as her kilted captors organised her party for the march,
she ad ed inside with uncertainty. She had no clue what
these Thuril might do with her and her men. But after what
she knew of Tsurani treatment of highlander captives, she
expected her fate would hardly be pleasant.

The Thuril hurried their prisoners upward into the
highlands. Mara slipped and stumbled on the slick shale and
splashed through knee-deep becks that tumbled out of the
heights. Her wet sandal straps stretched, and her soles wore
to blisters. She bit her lip, holding back tears of discomfort.
If she flagged, one of the highlanders would shove her on
with an elbow, or the flat of his sword or ax. Her back
bore unaccustomed bruises. Was this misery what Kevin
and others of his countrymen might have felt while being
driven in cofffles to the Tsurani slave market? Mara had
thought she understood when she had decided that slavery
was a wrong against humanity. Now she gained firsthand
insight into the suffering and the fear such unfortunate
folk must feel, subject to the whim of others. And while
her plight was perilous, she was still a free woman and
would be again, if she survived, but what must it be to
know that there is never a hope of escape? Kevin's deeply
personal anger on the subject no longer mystified her.

Kamlio sat on the donkey. The former courtesan's face
was pale but her expression was impassive,a proper
Tsurani's. But as the girl glanced her way more than once,
Mara saw terror and concern behind her mask. Something
in Kamlio had begun to awaken if she felt concern for the
mistress who tripped and pressed forward on foot by the
donkey's tail.

The lowland hills became craggy as the day wore on, and
the Thuril pressed their captives ever higher into the plateau
country. Through the discomforts of sweat and exhaustion,
Mara reminded herself of the higher purposes that had
caused her unconditional surrender. But moral abstractions
seemed to take on less importance as thirst dried her throat
and her legs began to tremble with the exertion of a forced
march. Again she tried to stiffen flagging resolve: she must
discover the secret behind what the cho-ja and the lesser
magician had named 'the forbidden.' A puzzle lay-before
her in this hostile land, all the more maddening in that the
solution lay outside Tsurani experience. Mara had no hint
of what to expect when and if she should gain the ear of
someone in authority. She did not even know the Thuril
language, far less what questions to ask. How arrogant she
had been when she had boarded the Coalteca in the belief
that she might journey to these alien shores and, through
talk and force of personality, make a sufficient impression
to be heard in courtesy by her people's enemies! Born to
power, never in her life deprived of the privileges of her
rank, Mara perceived how foolish her presumptions had
been. As exalted Servant of the Empire, revered by her
people, she had never once considered that foreigners might
act differently. The lessons she had learned from Kevin of
Zun should have warned of the differences between peoples.
Would the gods ever forgive her stupidity?

Fear preyed increasingly on her mind as her captors drove
her without rest through a high pass in the hills. The donkey
plodded ahead, oblivious to human concerns and content
to be what the gods had made it, a beast of burden. No
less a burden do I carry, thought Mara, tripping again and
feeling the wrench in her tied wrists as she fought to keep
her balance. Lost in miserable thought, she did not note
Saric's and Lujan's tortured looks of worry. The fate of
more than her family rested upon her strength. Captivity
taught her a painful lesson: no man or woman should live at
the whim of another. But that was the only way to describe
the wretched lives of Tsurani common folk. Their fate, and
that of the lowest slaves, depended upon her as much as
the fate of nobles. But reform in Tsuranuanni could not be
begun, until the Assembly's omnipotence was broken.
Bitter possibilities surfaced to harry Mara's brave resolve:
that Kasuma might be her last child, that separation from
Hokanu might last for the rest of her life, that she must
leave unsettled his reluctance to name a daughter as his heir.
Kevin's contrary nature had well taught her that loving a
man did not guarantee peace with him; no time in her life
had been more sorrowful for her, and few more regretted,
than the moment the imperial decree had forced her to send
the barbarian away. She feared that Hokanu might lose her
in as abrupt a manner, leaving unsaid all that meant the
most between them. Mara swallowed, fighting despair. If
she could not reason with these Thuril, if they traded or
sold her into bondage, then if Hokanu was to have a
son, another woman must bear his child for him. That
thought caused worse pain than any physical discomfort.
Mara fought tears.

Only belatedly did Mara realise that their march had
slowed. Her captors paused in a vale between hills purpled
with the shadows of late afternoon. Down the slopes ran a
company of younger Thuril warriors. In a swirl of cloaks
they brandished weapons and laughed boisterously. A
jubilant rendezvous engulfed the party who shepherded
the smaller band of prisoners. The newcomers viewed
Kamlio with raised brows and hoots of appreciation. They

fingered Mara's plain robe, loudly talking, until the Lady
grew annoyed at being stared at.

'What do they say?' she demanded sharply of Layapa,
who stood with his head hanging. He shrank still further
at Mara's imperious address.

'Lady,' admitted the herdsman, 'these are rough men.'
Derisive shouts arose at his deferential manner, and someone
said in gruff and broken Tsurani, 'We should call that
one Answers-to-Women, eh?'

Whoops and laughter arose, nearly drowning Mara's
furious inquiries and Iayapa's desperate appeal: 'Lady, do
not ask me to translate.' Behind her, one of the young men
was gripping his crotch and rolling his eyes as if in pleasure.
His companions found the remarks he uttered hilarious, for
they clapped each other's shoulders and chuckled.

Iayapa said over their din, 'You would be offended,
great Lady.'

'Tell me!' Mara demanded as Saric and Lujan shuffled
closer and took their accustomed positions at her sides to
shield her from the taunts of the foreigners.

'Lady, I mean no disrespect.' Had his hands been free,
layapa would have prostrated himself. Bound helpless, he
could only look strained. 'You order me. The first one, the
fellow with the green cloak, he asked our guide if he had
taken you yet.'

Mara said nothing, but nodded.

Iayapa sweated, despite the cool highland air. 'The one
who guides us says he is waiting for us to reach the village,
for you are bony and he needs many cushions and furs.'
Almost blushing, he blurted the rest. 'The third one who
grabbed himself says that a man has answered to you. That
might mean you are a witch. Does the one who guides us not
take a risk, should he attempt to touch you, that you might
rip off his . . . manhood and feed it to him. The others think
this is very funny indeed.'

Mara wrenched in annoyance at the thongs that tied
her wrists. How could she answer such lewdness with
dignity, bound as she was like livestock? She considered
for a moment, glancing at Lujan and Saric. Both men
looked fit to murder, but they were as helpless as she.
Yet nothing under heaven would cause her to endure such
abuse from strangers without even token resistance! Left
only her tongue, Mara raised the most scathing shout she could
muster. These crude barbarians might not understand
Tsurani, but by Turakamu, they could comprehend her
intent by her tone.
'You!' she snapped out, jerking her head in the direction
of the highlander leader who had taken them. 'What is
your name!'

The aag-nosed man at the head of the troop stiffened,
and, almost before thought, turned toward her. The younger
man beside him left off clutching his crotch and stared at
his elder in astonishment. He said something, to which
his leader made a gesture of incomprehension. Instead,
he addressed Iayapa in his own language, and the others
laughed.

Mara did not wait for translation. 'This swaggering fool
with no more brains than the beast who carries my serving
girl now claims he cannot understand me.' Her consonants
sharpened with malice. 'Even after he exchanged words in
Tsurani down the trail from here?'

Several of the highlanders turned at this, some revealing
surprise. So! Mara thought. There are others who can speak
our tongue, albeit badly. She must make the most of this.

Mara played along with the embarrassed highlander's
charade and addressed Iayapa alone. 'Tell this buffoon,
who forgets words as well as his mother forgot the name
of his father, exactly what I say.' Mara paused, then added
into shocked silence, 'Tell him he is a rude little boy. When
we reach his village I shall ask that his chieftain beat him
for inexcusable manners toward a guest. Inform him further
that should I seek company for my bed, it would be with
a man, not a child still longing for his mother's shriveled
breast, and more, that should he touch me, I will laugh when
his manhood fails to rise. He is as ignorant as a needra, and
smells worse. He is uglier than my most disreputable dog

and worth less - for my dog can hunt and has less vermin.
Tell him his very existence brings shame upon his already
honorless ancestors.'

Suddenly inexplicably gleeful, Iayapa translated. Before
he had finished the first sentence, the eyes of every Thuril
warrior fixed upon the Lady of the Acoma. By the time the
translation of her tirade was completed, their stony stillness
frightened her. Her heart banged in her chest. They might
easily kill her. Any Tsurani Lord so addressed by a captive
would have had her strung up by her neck and kicking.
But kite could hardly hold worse than to be dragged into
slavery, Mara felt. Whether or not these men would hang
her in total dishonor, she showed them nothing but the face
of haughty contempt.

Then the mood broke. All but the target of Mara's insults
exploded into knee-slapping peals of mirth. 'The shrew
has a tongue for words, did you hear?' someone cried
to the insulted man in accented Tsurani. This confirmed
that he spoke the language well enough to realise what
had been said of him before Iayapa's translation. Several
of his companions were laughing so hard they had to
sit down, lest their knees buckle. The warrior Mara had
berated studied her, then, as color rose into his cheeks, he
nodded once.

Lujan pressed closer to Mara's side as another of the
Thuril warriors shouted, waving his bow at Mara in
salutation. Made aware by the man's grin that she was
not going to be summarily executed, Mara said, 'What did
he say?'

Iayapa shrugged. 'That you know how to insult like a
man. It is something of an art among the Thuril, mistress.
As I learned well at my mother's knee, they can be a most
irritating people.'

In time the pandemonium subsided. The younger troop
banded together and took their leave to resume duty, some
still chuckling as they took the outbound trail. Mara's
captors, including their red-faced leader, hustled their
Tsurani charges around the next bend toward home.
Late sunlight slashed across a meadow. Beyond the open
ground lay a wooden walled town of steeply peaked roofs.
Curls of smoke rose from stone chimneys, and the spears
of sentries could be seen on the wall walks. The town's
position guarded another trail that wound into the hills.

The highlander warriors quickened the pace, in a hurry
to bring in their captive prizes.

'Strange,' murmured Saric, his indefatigable curiosity still
evident despite the rigor of their march and the uncertain
fate awaiting him. Unlike any Tsurani, these Thuril seemed
indifferent to chatter between their prisoners. 'While this
grass offers good grazing for livestock, it is not eaten
short, but only cut across by the paths of the flocks and
herders.'

At this comment, the Thuril leader glanced over his shoulder,
his lip half curled in contempt. In blatant contradiction
of his earlier claim of ignorance of the Tsurani
tongue, he said in a mangled accent, 'You should be glad to
have an escort through this meadow, Tsurani dog. Without
us to show you which path to tread, you would be lost.
For this ground is still trapped from the last visit your kind
made to our hills!'

Lujan answered thoughtfully, 'You mean your folk still
maintain fortifications from the last war?'

'But the fighting ceased more than a decade ago,'
Saric objected. Lujan confided softly to his cousin, 'Long
memories.' Behind his insouciant tones lay foreboding.
That the Thuril kept their village guarded with lethal
deadfalls after so much time revealed a resentment that

would complicate any overtures toward negotiation; as
soldier, Lujan had heard the tales told by veterans of the
ill-conceived invasion into Thuril. A man was better dead
than taken prisoner, to be turned over alive to the vengeful
treatment of highlander women.

But he concealed his fears from Mara as they were herded
past the deadly meadow, and on, over a wooden bridge that
spanned a moat, fed by a swift-running river. The water
rushed over rock snags and whirled in black eddies through
pools too swift for a swimmer to cross. As Lujan's eyes
measured the possibility of escape across the current, the
leader of the highlanders noticed.

He waved a leather-gauntleted arm at the rock pools.
'Many Tsurani warriors drowned there, sword captain!
More broke their necks on the stone, trying in vain to
build a rope bridge.' He shrugged, and his grin returned.
'Your commanders are not stupid men, just stubborn. In
time, they threw platforms across there'- his cloak fringes
danced as he pointed to a ledge by the lowered bridge -'and
there.' He indicated another outcrop farther down. Then,
as if warriors from the past still screamed battle cries into
the dusk-grey air, he glanced up at the looming wall of the
palisade. 'It was a near thing.'

Mara had pushed through her fatigue to follow the
conversation. 'You must have been a very small boy in
those times. How do you remember?'

Distracted by vivid recall, the highlander leader forgot
that he answered a woman. 'I was up on the battlement,
bringing water to my father and uncles. I helped carry the
dead and wounded.' His face twisted into long-nurtured
bitterness. 'I remember.'

He jabbed Lujan forward with a blow and led across the
bridge. The looming shadow of the gateway cut off all view
of sky and fortifications. The leader answered to a challenge
from an unseen sentry then hustled the Tsurani captives
through. Lujan took note of the log battlements, faced on
the outside with smooth boards, but left unfinished inside,
with bark and stubs of branches still left on the trunks, as
if the defense works had been erected in haste. 'It must have
been a fierce battle.'

The leader laughed. 'Not that fierce, Tsurani. We were
up in the hills by the time the third attack came and your
soldiers seized the palisades. Our leaders aren't stupid,
either. If your people wanted the village so much, we would
let you have it. Taking a place is one thing; holding it is
another.' with a sneer of contempt, he added, 'We wouldn't
let you have the hills, Tsurani.' He waved broadly toward
the peaks that notched the sky above the wall. 'There is
our true home. In these valleys, we might build halls and
houses to meet, and trade, and celebrate, but our families
are raised in the high country. That is where your soldiers
died, Tsurani, as we attacked your foragers and patrols.
Hundreds perished in our raids, until your kind tired of
the highlands and went home.'

By now past the fortifications, and into the avenue of
commerce, the party of prisoners attracted notice. Women
beating their laundry clean with stones in a wide public
basin paused in their work to point and stare. Urchins
in colored plaids screamed and ran to look, or stared
wide-eyed from behind mothers who carried cloth-wrapped
loaves of bread from the baker's. Some of the dirtier, wilder
children capered about the bound strangers, shouting;
afraid some might fling stones, Lujan jerked his head at
his warriors, who jostled closely around their mistress to

give what protection they could.

But no hostilities were offered, beyond glares from
middle-aged women, who perhaps had lost sons or husbands
to imperial warriors in battle. The donkey bearing
Kamlio caused the most furor, as children swooped close
with excited chatter. The highlanders fended them off with
mock gruffness. Still the little ones shouted. 'It has only
four legs!'

'Why doesn't it fall down?' cried another about the age
of Ayaki before he died.

The soldier who led the beast took the din in good
stride, giving the children outrageous answers that made
them squeal and scream with laughter.

After a studied silence, Mara observed, 'If these noisy
barbarians intended to kill us, surely the mothers would
not let their little ones mingle, but would be hustling them
away home.'

Lujan crowded nearer to his mistress. 'Gods grant you are
right, my Lady.' But his thoughts remained apprehensive.
He could see the covetous glances Kamlio attracted from
the men who passed on the street. The women who bundled
up their washing looked sharp-faced and unfriendly, and a
groom carrying a water pannikin spat in their direction in
contempt. The Thuril were a fierce race, the veterans who
had returned alive from fighting in these hills had insisted.
Their young were toughened at the knees of mothers who
were awarded as battle prizes, or carried off by force
in raids.

As the highlanders brought their captives to a halt in the
square, it could be seen that the entire village consisted
of a ring of buildings built against the wall, leaving an
open air market at the center, with portable tent stalls for
traders, and palings of thorny stakes to enclose livestock.
Mara's party was driven into the largest of these pens,
while onlookers laughed and called out in derision. Iayapa
refused to answer Saric's requests for translation, and Mara
herself was too weary to care. She longed only for a patch
of clean ground to sit down; the dirt she trod was thick
with droppings left from its animal occupants. She envied
Kamlio her seat on the donkey, until she looked over at
the younger girl and realised by her pinched pallor that she
probably had sores from sitting so long in the saddle. The
men did not let her down, but tied her mount to a pole by
the gate, then leaned on folded arms against the posts, and
murmured in appreciation of her loose golden hair and her
beauty.

Furious that so little care had been taken for even their
most basic human needs, Mara shouldered past her officers.
At the gate, where the highlanders clustered, she demanded
in a loud voice, 'What are you going to do with my people?'
Trembling with anger that was fueled the more by fear, she
tossed her head to shake tangled hair from her eyes. 'My
warriors require food and water, and a decent place to rest!

Is this the hospitality you show to strangers who come on

a mission of peace? A slave's bonds, and a livestock pen?

!Shame to you, carriers of vermin who were spawned in the
dirt like pigs!' Here she borrowed the Midkemian word for

a beast whose habits were considered reprehensible.

The foreign word seemed to upset the Thuril, who
scowled as their leader stamped forward. Red with anger,
or maybe embarrassment, he shouted to Lujan, 'Silence the
woman, if you wish her to live.'

The Acoma Force Commander glowered back. He said
in a voice that could easily be heard on a battlefield, 'She is
my mistress. I take my orders from her. If you have the wits
not to make water in your bedding at night, you would do
the same.'

The leader of the highlanders roared in fury at this
insult. He might have drawn his sword and charged
forward, but one of his companions caught him back.
Words were exchanged in Thuril. Lujan could only stand
in dumb but dignified incomprehension as the irate leader
allowed himself to be placated. The highlander muttered
something short and guttural to the spokesman who had
restrained him. At length, he loosed a huge guffaw that cut
off as the men around him snapped into attentiveness.

'That must be their chieftain,' Saric murmured. He had
moved up to Mara's shoulder, unnoticed until he had
spoken. Mara noted that their escort all looked toward
a cloaked man who had emerged down the wooden stair
of the most imposing building that edged the square. Street
children scattered from his path as he crossed the open
expanse, and the women carrying their loads of damp wash
homeward averted their faces in deference.
The newcomer was old and hunched, but he moved with
a sureness that could still negotiate the roughest trail. Mara
estimated his age to be about sixty years. Tokens of corcara
carved by Tsurani hands were woven into his braid, no
doubt worn as battle trophies. Mara repressed shiver as the
elder neared enough for her to make out that the buttons
on his cloak front were fashioned of polished bone. The
tales were true, then, that Thuril believed that an artifact
taken from a dead foe would lend them strength in life.
Her finger bones could as easily wind up as an ornament
in some warrior's attire.

The highlander chief paused to share words with the
squad captain who had charge of the prisoners. He pointed
to the golden-haired courtesan and the donkey, said something
else, and smiled. The squad leader saluted, plainly
excused from duty. By his look of self-satisfaction, he would
now be going home to his wife.

Mara seemed worn and disheartened, and driven by
sympathy for her, Saric shouted, 'Aren't you going to
introduce us?'

The highlander officer froze between strides. His men
and his chieftain looked on in bright-eyed interest, as the
man considered whether he should reply to the hail of a
prisoner. Then, in burred accent, he called back, 'Introduce
yourself, Tsurani! Your woman seems capable enough with
her tongue!'

Another of the highlander warriors offered with malicious
amusement, 'Our captain is Antaha, guideman of
the Loso. I give you his name so that when you appeal
to our chieftain to have him beaten, he will know whom
to seek out.'

This interruption was greeted by uproarious laughter,
shared by the old chief, and even the street children and
the women by the washing well. Irked past restraint by these
strange, annoying people, Mara again pressed to the fore.
To the chieftain, who chuckled and slapped his knees, she
called imperiously, 'I am Mara, Ruling Lady of the Acoma,
and I have come to the Thuril Confederacy on a mission
of peace.'

The chief lost his mirth as if slapped. Shocked to silent
anger, he regrouped. 'A woman standing in querdidra
droppings comes claiming to be someone of rank and an
emissary of peace?'
Mara looked whitely furious. Aware that she neared her
breaking point, and that to insult this chieftain in public
would earn her certain reprisal, Lujan turned desperately
to Saric. 'We must act, even if only to distract her.'

But the young First Adviser stepped forward without
seeming to hear. As Mara opened her mouth to speak,
Saric broke protocol and shouted down her voice with his
own. 'Chief among the Thuril,' he cried, 'you are a fool,
who offers our Lady of the Acoma no better hospitality
than a livestock pen! You speak of Mara, Servant of the
Empire, and a member of the Emperor Ichindar's royal
family!'

The chieftain jerked up his square chin. 'She?' If his word
seemed filled with contempt, Saric's statement was not
entirely wasted. The elderly man did not add any derogatory
comment, but summarily waved Antaha back to duty. This
time, the chief's words were rapid and commanding, and
layapa, under pressure from Saric, translated.

'He says that if Antaha should bring animals into camp,
then he must look after them: feed them, water them, and
give them bedding. Not too much, though, for straw is
scarce, and the gods do not love waste. The girl on the

donkey is to be sheltered in a hut. Her beauty is great,
and should be treasured for the man who will win rights
to claim her to wife.' layapa looked troubled, for at this,
Mara's eyes seemed to bore into him with the hardness
of flint.

502 Mistress of the Empire

But her command held no personal resentment as she
said, 'Finish.'

layapa nodded and bleakly licked his lips. 'The chief of
this village says also that he has heard of the Servant of the
Empire, who is family to the Tsurani Emperor. He adds
that Ichindar is ruled by women, and that he, a born
highlander, will not deign to speak with a woman of any
claim to royal lineage on the open street. But because of the
existing treaty between Tsuranuanni and the Confederacy,
neither is he free to authorise his village men to claim Mara
as spoils.'

Hoots of disappointment ran through the squad of
highlanders who had escorted the Lady's party in. Two
of the more impudent ones made obscene gestures.

Then the chieftain turned toward the captives in the pen
and addressed Mara's Force Commander in Tsurani that
was accentless, learned during former wars. 'If you have
a need that is not met, Antaha is charged responsible.
Tomorrow he will gather an escort of twenty warriors,
and take you and your females on to the high chief at
Darabaldi. Judgment, if such is called for, will be dealt by
the council there.'

Saric looked thunderous, but he listened when Iayapa
touched his arm in entreaty. 'First Adviser, do not provoke
these men or their chieftain any further. They are not a
people in love with arguments over points of etiquette.
They mete out deaths very swiftly, and do not regret.
Morning could have found all of us lying here with cut
throats, or worse. To be sent to Darabaldi rather than
parceled out among those who captured us is, in fact, a
great concession.'

Saric regarded the dung that crusted his sandals, and
exchanged a disgusted glance with Lujan, whose fingers
seemed lost without sword to hand in his scabbard.
'Cousin,' the Acoma adviser said gravely, 'if this is a

':

great concession, dare we even speculate what a small
one might have been?'

The strain told, but could not entirely vanquish the spirit

of Mara's Force Commander. He broke his Tsurani facade
of impassivity and stifled a deep chuckle. 'Gods, man, you'll
be speculating on points of philosophy in the smoke of
your funeral pyre, I know it.' Then, as one, he and the

First Adviser turned to tend their mistress, who to their
experienced eyes looked small and disheartened and alone,
though her back was straight, and her face as imperious as
always.

She was watching an enterprising group of highlanders
taking charge of Kamlio and the donkey. 'Do you think
they will harm her?' she demanded of layapa, and to the
ears of those closest to her, anxiety colored her tone.

The onetime herdsman shook his head. 'There are never
enough women of childbearing age in this harsh land, and
Kamlio is beautiful, which makes her doubly valuable. But
the chieftain of this tribe must grant his approval before any
man could bargain for her as a wife. Lacking his consent,
she may be admired, but not bedded. All the unmarried
warriors know that to trouble her now would forfeit any
chance to ask for her as a mate. Since many single men
in the highlands die without ever winning wives, even so
small a chance to claim a woman is not to be risked.'

Mara swallowed. 'Do they have no courtesans in this
land?'

layapa looked offended. 'Only a few, in Darabaldi. Not
many women choose that life, with no honor to their tribe.
The young men may go to them once or twice a year, but
that gives no comfort during long winter nights.'

Over the little herdsman's head, Lujan and Saric exchanged
glances. 'Funny place, this,' Saric muttered, again
glancing sourly at the dung-littered ground upon which, it
appeared, they must all wait out the night. These Thuril

Captive

503

504

Mistress of the Empire

thought nothing of stealing a girl or a woman from her
home in a bloody raid. Even the most repressed Tsurani
wife had the right to be heard in public by her Lord.
'Barbaric indeed!' Saric muttered. Then he shivered as a
cold wind cut down off the heights. He glanced at his
diminutive Lady, and admired the grit that enabled her to
keep her dignity. That she should be bound, and handled,
and treated no better than a slave by total strangers, made
him furious enough to kill.

As if she read his thoughts, she turned to him that sweet
smile which never failed to inspire loyalty and pride. 'I will
manage, Saric. Just keep that warrior cousin of yours from
losing his temper over things that do not matter. For this she
raised her hands, still tied with rawhide strips- 'and
this' - she scuffed her foot at the soiled ground - 'are
unimportant. The Assembly of Magicians would do worse.
If I can speak to the Thuril High Chief at Darabaldi, that is
all that must concern us.'

Then, as the gloom deepened, and tallow candles shed an
orange glow behind the oiled-hide windows that fronted the
square, she bent her head and appeared to be meditating as
the priestesses of Lashima's temple had taught her during a
girlhood that now seemed far in the past.

Warmed by Saric and Lujan, pressed close, and protected
from the cold and filthy ground by the cloak her Force
Commander had insisted upon lending her, Mara awakened
to a touch on her shoulder. The sleep of total exhaustion
left her slowly. She blinked, stirred, and opened her eyes to
darkness broken by a thin glow cast from the few windows
still lighted across the square.

'What is it?' Her body was stiff, and aching with every
bruise and sore she had gotten in the day's long march.

'One comes,' Saric whispered, and then she, too, saw the
cresses that weaved across the square.
~_

Captive

505

The cloaked figure who carried it was a woman. She
bobbed her head, but did not speak, to the sentry who
guarded the pen. A token changed hands, a flash of carved
shell reflected briefly by flame light.

Then, with a rich laugh, the sentry admitted her. She
stepped into the livestock compound, her lantern held high
over her hooded head. She scanned the rows of Mara's
warriors, roused from their rest, and banded together in
wary defensiveness.

'Lady of the Acoma?' Her voice was gruff and rich, not
that of a young woman, but one that had seen many years
of life and laughter. 'My Lord has relented, and says you
may shelter for the night with your servant, in the hut with
the unmarried women.'

'Dare you trust her?' Saric said in his Lady's ear. 'This
could be a ploy to separate you.'

'Well I know it,' Mara whispered back. Then, loudly
enough to be heard, she said, 'If your intentions are honest,
cut my bonds.'

The Thuril woman stepped closer with the torch, lighting
a path for herself between Mara's warriors. 'But of course,
Lady Mara.' She reached inside her cloak with her free hand
and removed a dagger.

Mara felt Lujan flinch taut against her at the sight of the
bared blade. But with his hands tied, he could do little to
defend her.

He watched in sick anxiety as the highland woman

reached down and deftly cut the rawhide that bound the
Lady's hands.

Mara rubbed her wrists, forcing her face not to reflea
her discomfort as the circulation returned to her cramped
fingers. 'Free my officers and my men also,' she demanded
imperiously.

The woman stepped back, sheathing the knife at her belt.
'I may not, Lady Mara.'

506

Mistress of the Empire
- 'Then I do not come,' the Lady of the Acoma said icily Y.:
in return.

The cloaked woman shrugged, indifferent. 'Stay out here,
then. But your servant girl has need of you. She will not stop
shaking.

Fury flowed through Mara. 'Has Kamlio been hurt?'

Pride held the highland woman silent; and from the dark
outside the ring of torchlight, layapa said, 'Good Servant,
you offer insult. This is the chieftain's wife come to offer
yon better hospitality, and to imply harm to your serving
girl is to give affront to all in this tribe. Her gesture of
kindness is genuine, and I advise you to accept.'

Mara drew in an icy breath. It was all very well to allow
these barbarians their own honor - but what of her own!
To leave her warriors here in this dung pit shamed her as
their Lady. ~

Saric felt her uncertainty through the contact of her
body with his. 'Lady,' he said in a low voice, 'I think you
must trust her. We gave up our option to fight already. As
prisoners, what can we do but chance the consequences of
that earlier decision?'

At heart, Mara knew her adviser was correct. But the part
of her that was born and raised Tsurani refused to yield so
easily to such honorless practicality.

Lujan elbowed her gently in the ribs. 'My Lady, do not
worry for your-warriors. They will sleep in this querdidra
pen as an honor in your service, and if any complain of it,
I will see him whipped as a man in need of toughening! I
have brought my best soldiers as your guard into this land.
Each of them had to prove himself to be here, and I expect
them all to die on command if need be.' He paused, and
added wryly, 'To lie in a little dung is a lot less painful than
a trip at a sword's point to Turakamu's halls.'

'True,' Mara agreed, too sore and heartsick to raise a
laugh at his attempted humor. To the torch-bearing woman

Captive

~.,

507

she said, 'I will come.' Stifffly she clawed her way to her feet.
Her blistered soles stung as she stepped forward, and with
an exclamation of sympathy, the chieftain's wife reached
and steadied her. Slowly Mara limped across the pen toward
the gate that the sentries held open.
One of them commented in Thuril as she and the chief's
wife passed. The highland woman did not turn at his noise,
but instead said something back in contempt. 'Men!' she
confided to Mara in fluent Tsurani. 'A pity it is that their
brains are not as quick as their organs to rise when the
occasion warrants cleverness.'

Surprised enough to have smiled, had she felt less miserable,
Mara gave in to curiosity. 'Is it true your people
take their women to wife by stealing them from their
families in a raid?'

The cloaked figure by her side turned her head, and Mara
received the impression of a visage lined by hardship and
amusement. 'But of course,' said the Thuril chief's wife.
Her tone was half laughter, and half blistering scorn. 'Would
you lie with a man who had not proven himself a skillful
warrior, a man to make his enemies afraid, and a handy
provider?'

Mara's eyebrows arose. Tsurani girls, after all, sought the
same qualities in a husband, even if they held different rites
of courtship. The Lady of the Acoma had never thought to
view a custom she had presumed barbarous in such a light.

But in an alien way, this woman's words made sense.

'Call me Ukata,' the chief's wife said warmly. 'And if I
am sorry for anything, it is that it took me this long to drum
sense into my silly husband's head, to allow you reprieve
from the cold!'

'I have much to learn of your Thuril ways,' Mara
admitted. 'By the talk of your warriors and your chief,
I would have thought that women held little influence in
this land.'
Ukata grunted as she assisted Mara up the low wooden
steps of the centermost house in the square, a long, beamed
hall with a thatched roof. The smoke from the chimney
smelled of aromatic bark, and strange fertility symbols
were scratched into the doorposts. 'What men claim and
what they actually are make different tales, as you must
know at your age!'

Mara held her silence. She had been blessed with a
husband who heard her as an equal, and a barbarian lover
who had shown her the meaning of her womanhood; but
she was not unfamiliar with the lot of others whose men
held dominance over them. The most unfortunate were
like Kamlio, helpless to gain influence over decisions that
affected them; the best were formidable manipulators, like
Lady Isashani of the Xacatecas. Men regarded her as the
supreme example of the Tsurani wife, and yet neither Lord
nor ally nor enemy had ever gotten the better of her.
Ukata raised the wooden latch and pushed open the door
with a creak of hinges. Gold light washed out into the night,
along with sweet smoke from the bark that burned in the
stone fireplace. Mara followed the chief's wife inside.

'Here,' said a kindly female voice, 'take off those soiled
sandals.'

Mara was stiff and slow to bend; hands pressed her
into a wooden chair. There, accustomed as she was to
cushions, she perched awkwardly while a girl with russet
braids removed her footwear. The soft, woven carpet on
the floor felt luxurious to her chilled toes. Weary enough
to fall asleep where she sat, Mara fought to stay alert.
She could learn a great deal about the Thuril people if
these women were interested in talk. But listening to the
burred accents, and seeing shy smiles among the unmarried
maidens whose home she would share, Mara realised she
lacked Isashani's finesse when it came to gatherings among
women. More at home with the politics of a clan meeting

Captive

509

and the seat of rulership, the Lady of the Acoma rubbed
one blistered ankle and strove for the inspiration to cope.

She needed a translator. The unmarried girls at a glance
all appeared to be under sixteen years of age, too young to
have lived at the time of the last war and to have learned any
Tsurani. Mara looked through the lamplit ring of faces until
she located Ukata's grey head; as she suspected, the chief's
wife seemed to be extricating herself for departure.

'Wait, Lady Ukata,' Mara called, giving the address her
own people would award a woman of noble rank. 'I have
not properly thanked you for my rescue from the livestock
pen, nor have I had the chance to tell your people why I
am here.'

'Thanks are not necessary, Lady Mara,' Ukata replied,
turning back. The youngest girl of the company gave way
to allow their elder a clear path, until she stood before
Mara's chair. 'Our people are not the barbarians that you
Tsurani suppose. As a woman who has borne children and
seen them die in battle, I understand why our men still hold
your kind in hatred. As to why you are here, you may tell
that to our high chief at Darabaldi.'

'If I am allowed to be heard,' Mara responded with a
snap of acerbity. 'Your men, you must admit, have short
attention spans.'

Ukata laughed. 'You will be heard.' She patted the
Tsurani Lady's hand, her touch calloused but gentle. 'I
know the high chief's wife. She is Mirana, and we were
raised in the same village, before the raid in which she
was taken to wife. She is tough as old rock, and garrulous
enough to break the will of any man, even that meat-brains
who is her husband. She will see that you are heard, or insult

his manhood before his warriors until his sex parts wither
from shame.'

Mara listened with startled surprise. 'You seem very calm
when you speak of the raids that take you from home and
family,' she observed. 'And do your husbands not bcae you
for saying uncomplimentary things of them?'

A flurry of questions from the young girls, and many
cries of 'Da? Da?' followed Mara's statement. Ukata gave
in and translated. This raised a round of giggles, which
quieted as the chief's wife spoke again. 'Raids to win wives
are ... formal ... a custom in these lands, Lady Mara.
They stem from a time when women were even more
scarce than now, and a husband established his standing
by the age when he successfully stole a wife. Nowadays
women are carried off without bloodshed. There is much
shouting and pursuit with terrible oaths and threats of
retribution, but it is all for show. Once that was not so the
raids in past times were-bloody and men died. Now a
husband earn his accolades by how far afield he goes to
bring home a mate, and how vigorously she was defended
by her village. This house for unmarried girls lies deepest
inside our defences. But also, you will note, only girls of an
age and an inclination to have a mate come to live here.'

Mara regarded the ring of young faces, smooth and
unmarked yet by life. 'You mean that all of you here want
to be taken by strangers?'

At their look of blank incomprehension Ukata answered
in their stead. 'These youngsters watch the lads who visit
the village, who spy in turn on the girls.' With a smile she
said, 'If they deem a boy is lacking in grace, the girl will
scream with conviction, instead of the mock shouts of fear,
and the suitor so rejected will be chased away by the fathers
of the village. But few young girls would wish to be left
when the warriors come naked to raid. To be overlooked is
to be considered ugly or blemished. If a girl is not stolen by
a raider, the only way she may win a husband is to wait until
two suitors come for the same girl, then throw herself on
the back of the one who failed, and ride him home without
being pushed off!'
Mara shook her head, mystified by such a strange custom.
She had much to learn if she was to gain understanding
enough to negotiate for help from these foreigners. Ukata
added, 'It is late, and you will be starting out early in the
morning. I suggest you allow the girls to show you to a
sleeping mat, and that you rest through the night.'
'I thank you, Lady Ukata.' Mara inclined her head in
respect and permitted herself to be led into a small,
curtained cubicle that served as sleeping quarters for Thuril
girls. The floor was lined with furs, and the small oil lamp
left burning showed a drift of yellow hair scattered amid
the bedding. Kamlio lay there already, curled motionless
on her side. Her fair skin showed no bruises. Relieved
that Arakasi's pretty courtesan had taken no harm, Mara
gestured to the Thuril girl who lingered that her needs were
met. Then, she gratefully slipped off her soiled robe. Clad
in her thin silk underrobe, she crawled under the furs, and
reached up to extinguish the lamp.

'Lady?' Kamlio's eyes were open, watching. She had not
been asleep at all, but only shamming. 'Lady Mara, what
will happen to us?'

Leaving the lamp alight, Mara snuggled the furs around
her chin and studied the girl who regarded her with eyes like
luminous jewels. No wonder Arakasi had been overtaken
by desire! Kamlio was appealing enough to bewitch any
man, with her creamy skin and fine, fair coloring. As badly

as the Lady of the Acoma wished to offer reassurance,
she knew better than to lie. If her Spy Master had been
thawed into discovery of emotion by the allure of this
courtesan, what might the Thuril with their tradition of
taking women by raiding do to keep her? 'I don't know,
Kamlio.' Mara's uncertainty showed through despite her
best efforts.

The ex-courtesan's delicate fingers tightened over the bed
furs. 'I don't want to stay among these people.' For the first
time when dealing with her personal wishes, her gaze did
not shy away when she spoke.

'What would you do, then?' Mara seized upon the
vulnerability that their straits as prisoners had created.
~You are too intelligent to remain in my service as a
maid, Kamlio, and too uneducated to assume a post of
more responsibility. What would you like to do?'

Kamlio's green eyes flashed. 'I can learn. Others have
risen to rank in your service who were not born to it.' She
bit her full lip and after a moment, some of the tension
seemed to leave her, as if she let down some inner barrier by
expressing ambition. 'Arakasi,' she said uncertainly. 'Why
did he insist upon asking you to buy my freedom? Why did
you grant his request, if not to leave me to him?'

Mara briefly shut her eyes. She was too tired for this! One
wrong word, one insufficient answer, and she risked all that
her Spy Master hoped for happiness. Honesty was her best
course, but how to choose the best phrases? Beaten down
by a headache and by pain in every muscle - stiff from the
day?s forced march - the Lady of the Acoma found that in
fact Isashani's tact was beyond her. The bluntness she had
learned from Kevin of Zun must sufffice. 'You remind him
of his family, who also were born to a life that did not suit
them, and who also never learned how to love.'

Kamlio's gaze widened. 'What family? He told me that
you were all of his family and all of his honor.'

Mara accepted the burden of that statement. 'I may
have become so. But Arakasi was born masterless to
a woman of the Reed Life. He never knew the name
of his father, and he saw his only sister killed by a
lustful man.'

The courtesan absorbed this news in silence. Watching?
fearful that she might have said too much, but unable to
stop short, Mara added, 'He wants your freedom from the
past, Kamlio. I know him well enough to vow to you this:
he would ask you for nothing more than you would give
him freely.'

'You love your husband that way,' Kamlio said, in her
words a cutting edge of accusation, as if she distrusted the
existence of such relations between a man and a woman.

'I do.' Mara waited, wishing she could lay her head down
and close her eyes, to lose this and all other problems in the
oblivion of sleep.

But Kamlio's need prevented that. She picked nervously
at the furs, and in an abrupt change of subject, said, 'Lady,
do not leave me here among these Thuril! I beg you. If I were
forced to become the wife of such a foreigner, I would never
find out who I am, what sort of life would please me. I think
I would never understand the meaning of the freedom you
have given me.'

'Have no fear, Kamlio,' Mara said, losing her battle
against her overwhelming exhaustion. 'If I leave this land
at all, I will bring all of my people out with me.'

As if she could trust this reassurance with her life,
Kamlio reached out and snuffed the light. After that,
Mara could only suppose that the girl shared no more
words in confidence, for the Lady of the Acoma slept
without dreams in the close, herb-scented cubicle.

When morning came, Lady Mara and her servant woman
found themselves well treated to a warm bath in the
women's quarters, followed by a breakfast of fresh breads
and querdidra cheese. Kamlio appeared pale but composed.
Yet Mara noted a fragility to her manner that she believed
stemmed from worry rather than bitterness. Outside the
hut, a great commotion of shouting and laughter issued

from the vicinity of the village square, but Mara could not
make out the cause through the blurry, translucent windows
of oiled hide. When she inquired, the young women who
were her hostesses gave her blank stares. Without Ukata
present to translate, lime else could be done but endure
through the simple meal in politeness until an escort of
highlander warriors arrived at the door and demanded that
the two Tsurani women come out.

Kamlio whitened. Mara touched her hand in reassurance,
then raised her chin high and stepped outside.

A wagon waited by the low stair beyond the door. It
had high sides woven of withe, and was drawn by two
querdidra and the recalcitrant donkey. Its scrawny grey
hide was flecked with spittle from the six-legged beasts'
spite, and in vain it tried to kick at the traces to retaliate. The
querdidra blinked their absurdly long lashes and wrinkled
their lips as if laughing.

Tied to the wagon were Mara's warriors. They did not
smell of the dung that had been their last night's camp, but
were clean, if drenched. Lujan, as he saw his Lady descend
the stair, looked flushed with some inward satisfaction,
and Saric was stifling a smile. Startled by her warriors'
neat appearance, Mara looked further and realised that
the Thuril highlanders who swaggered about on guard
detail were eyeing her captive retinue with what- seemed
a newfound respect.

Suspect though she might that somehow the pandemonium
she had heard through the walls of the house might
be connected, she had no chance to inquire. The Thuril
warriors dosed around, and she and Kamlio were bundled
up over the wagon's crude backboard into a bed lined with
straw. The withe rose up on either side, too tightly woven
for Mara to see out. The warriors lashed the tailgate firmly
dosed. Captives still, the women felt the jolt as the drover
leaped up and gathered the reins, and then the creak of
withe and wheels as he slapped his team with his goad
and hastened them forward.

The donkey and the querdidra pulled badly together. The
wagon swayed and jolted over ruts, and the straw smelled
of livestock, taken, as it was, from some goodman's byre.
Kamlio looked so sick with fear that Mara bade her lie down
in the straw. She offered the girl her overrobe, for the wind
cut down off the heights in chilly gusts. 'I will not see you
abandoned, Kamlio,' she assured. 'You did not come here
to become some rough Thuril's wife.'

Then, too restless to sit still, Mara leaned against the
withe on the side nearest to Lujan and demanded to know
how her warriors had gotten their soaking.

As before, the Thuril guard set over them did not care
whether their captives talked. Lujan was permitted to step
close to the painted spokes of the wheel and answer his
mistress all he liked.

'We complained that we did not care to march into their
capital smelling of dung,' the Acoma Force Commander
said, his voice deep with choked-back amusement. 'So they
allowed us to go under guard to bathe in the river.' Now
a chuckle escaped Lujan's control. 'Of course, our armor
and clothing were soiled, so we stripped to clean that also.
This caused a great commotion among the highlanders.
Iayapa said it was because they do not go naked except
to battle. There was much pointing and shouting. Then
someone called out in bad Tsurani that we were no sport
for insults, being unable to understand the rasping grunts
these folk call a language.' Here Lujan paused. i

Mara leaned her cheek against the creaking withe.

'Go on.'

Lujan cleared his throat. Plainly, he was still having
difficulty suppressing amusement. 'Saric took up that
challenge, shouting to Iayapa to translate everything,
no matter how ugly the words were, or how obscene.'
The wagon jolted over a particularly bad rut, and Lujan
broke off his narrative, presumably to jump across. 'Well,
the words got very personal indeed. We were told by these
Thuril how we got all of our battle scars. If they are to
be believed, the women of the Reed Life in our land are
practiced at putting our best soldiers to rout with their]
fingernails. Or our sisters all lie with dogs and jigabirds`
and we scratched each other with our nails all vying to have

the best view.'

Here Lujan broke off again, this time grimly. Mare
gripped the withe tightly enough to whiten her knuckles.
The insults Lujan had mentioned were shame enough to a
man's honor to require vengeance, and the Lady doubted
her Force Commander had repeated the worst slander.
Hoarsely, for she was sorrowful and angry that she had
brought such brave warriors to such a disgraceful pass, she
said, 'This must have been terrible to endure.' ~

'Not so terrible.' A toughness like barbarian iron entered
Lujan's voice. 'I and the others, we took example from
Papewaio, lady.'

Mara closed her eyes in remembered pain for brave
Pape - who had saved her life many times over, and come
as a consequence to wear the black rag of a condemned
man for her sake, and then equally for her sake, to forgo the
death by his own blade that he had earned, and to live on,
his dark headcloth symbolic of a triumph that only his Lady
and those who knew him might understand. Lastly, he had
died to save her life, in an attack by a Minwanabi enemy.
Mara bit her lip, jostled from her remembrance by the sway
and jolt of the wagon. She hoped that these warriors, the
finest and best of her honor guard, would not suffer the
same untimely end. Old Keyoke, her Adviser for War, had
taught her well that death in battle on strange soil was not,
as old custom held, the best end a warrior could earn.

'Go on,' she said, hiding the tears in her voice from
Lujan.

Almost, she could imagine her Force Commanders
shrug. 'Lady, there is nothing more to tell. Your warriors
agreed not to take umbrage at empty words from the Thuril.
And the highlanders seemed surprised by this. They called

Mistress of the Empire

down and asked why we did not bother to defend our honor.
And Vanamani called right back that we were your honor,
Lady. We would hear no word that was not spoken from
your lips, or the lips of an enemy. At that point Saric broke in
and added that the Thuril were not enemies, but foreigners,
and that the words of such were empty as the howl of
wind over stones.' Lujan delivered his last sentence in wry
amusement. 'You know, the highlanders stopped clanging
us then. Our loyalty impressed them, I think, that we would
not be baited, even when under command of a woman who
was out of sight and a captive as we were. Iayapa said that
many Tsurani in the times of the wars were taunted to take
foolish charges, and so were killed off by highlanders hidden
in the rocks.'

'Lujan,' Mara said, her voice tremulous with gratitude
despite her wish to seem impassive, 'all of your men are to
be commended for their valor. Tell them I said so, as you
can.' For each and every one of them had stood firm beyond
the call of duty, beyond the tenets of Tsurani culture that
held honor above even life. Each of these men had given
over their personal honor into her hands. Mara studied her
palms, red-marked from her grip on the withe. She prayed
to her gods that she would prove worthy of such trust, and
not get them all sold into slavery that would be the nadir
of dishonor.


20

Council

The hours dragged.

Confined to the wicker wagon, exposed to buffeting
winds and the sun that appeared and disappeared between
the clouds that brooded over the highlands, Mara strove to
keep her patience. But the uncertainty, and the boisterous'
shouts of the Thuril escort warriors, wore at her nerves
To pass the time, she asked Iayapa to describe the lance
they were crossing. He had little to tell. There were no
villages, only a few isolated hamlets clinging to rocky
hillsides, surrounded by scrub grazed thin by the herds.
Over the purple hills at the horizon larger mountains
loomed, rock-crowned where they were not covered by
cloud. Darabaldi, the city of the high council of chieftains,
was said to lie in the foothills of the great range. When
Mara asked Iayapa to inquire on the length of their
journey, she received in return only laughter and ribald
comments. Driven at last to useless exasperation, she turned
to teaching Kamlio the calming techniques of meditation
she had learned as a temple novice.

Gods knew, the poor girl might need all the solace
she could learn to give herself, before their fates were
determined at the hands of these people, Mara thought. ji

The highlanders paused only to eat sausage, sour querdidra
cheese, and bread, washed down with a light, sour
beer that was surprisingly refreshing with the meal. These
breaks were enlivened by loud boasts and sometimes
wagers, when warriors would contest at arm wrestling.

Darkness fell, and fog settled in cold layers over the land.
The donkey grew too tired to kick at the querdidra that
shared its traces, even if the six-legged beasts still curled
their lips at it and spat. Mara curled dose to Kamlio for
warmth. Perhaps for a while she slept.

The stars formed a brilliance of pinpoint patterns overhead
when she roused to the barking of many dogs. Herd
dogs, Iayapa identified, not the larger, heavier breed of
hound used for hunting. By the smoke on the air, and
the pungent smell of confined livestock, rotting garbage,
and curing hides, Mara presumed their party approached
a village or larger habitation.

'Darabaldi,' she received in gruff-voiced reply when she
inquired. But when she pressed for information concerning
when she might speak with the council of chieftains, her
escort returned only coarse comment. 'What does it matter,
woman, or are you eager to learn what man will buy you?
Maybe you worry that he will be old and have no manhood
left in him to rise?'

To this outrageous statement, Saric ventured a rough
term in the Thuril's own language, perhaps learned by
the bathing pool that morning. The highlanders were not
offended in the least, but laughed back and, grudgingly,
appeared to allow her First Adviser some respect.

Torchlight spilled across the wagon. Mara looked up at
a tall gatehouse topped by fat-soaked cressets,that gave
off greasy smoke. From battlements of stone and log,
Thuril warriors in drab plaids called down challenge to
the approaching party.

Antaha shouted back, then launched into rapid-fire
speech accompanied by gesticulations, some of which were
crude. From the evident amusement of the sentries, and
their glances in her direction, Mara presumed their captor

gave account of her capture. The bathing scene by the river
was apparently not omitted, for the sentries elbowed one
another in the ribs and hooted at Lujan and Saric.

Then the guards and their Tsurani captives were waved

t` ~:l

520 Mistre# of the Empire :3

on through, and the wagon jerked forward with a bray from
the donkey and shrill squeals from the querdidra. 'Well,'
Mara commented to Kamlio, 'everyone in town will know
we are here, by the fanfare of our draft beasts.'

More than ever she wished that the withes were low
enough to allow her a view, but changed her mind a
moment later at a pattering sound that might have been
thrown stones, or dried dung, striking the sides of the cart.
Shouts in Thuril blended with the screech of children caught at
mischief, and the barrage stopped. Looming over the top
of the withes, Mara saw two-storied stone buildings, ant
signboards painted in dull colors swinging in the wind.
The galleries and sills of the windows all had carved totem
posts, and peaked gable roofs that looked strange
to Tsurani eyes. The eaves were also carved in what looked
like runes or writing, beneath roofs of weathered thatch.
Windows seemed to be shuttered and barred, except for
ones stuffed with plump-checked women who called out
and made obscene gestures of welcome. :<

'whores,' Kamlio judged in edged bitterness. Mara could :
see her unspoken fear that such a garret might become her
future home.

Mara bit her lip. She knew that Kamlio was far more
likely to become the woman of a chieftain's son, but she
could not stop herself from wondering: if her Spy Master
were to find himself masterless again, would he swear
service to the Shinzawai, as Hokanu must surely request, or
would he remain a free agent, and come to these hostile hills,
searching a succession of Thuril towns for the girl who hat
stolen his heart? Given a wager, Mara would have guessed
he would come searching for Kamlio.

The wagon jounced over what might have been a stretch
of cobbles or stone paving, then lurched to a halt. The withe
tailgate was opened by a blond highlander who grinned to
show missing teeth, and Mara and Kamlio were beckoned
e

to step down. Beyond the Thuril guard and onlookers who
clustered around, a long house backed up to the village

~wall; to Mara's quick glance, it seemed a small fortress.
The bossed wood doors of the structure stood open, but the

entrance was hung with cloths woven of animal wool into
patterns of squares and lines. Before Mara could observe
more, a Thuril warrior shoved her toward the blanket
flap. Kamlio, Saric, Lujan, and Iayapa were singled out
to follow.

As she reached the threshold, Mara marveled at the
softness of the fabric she brushed past. Then, the others
clustered at her heels, she was inside, blinking at the sting
of smoky air in a windowless room.

The gloom was pierced by the reddish gleam of banked
embers, kept more for cooking than for warmth in dose
air that was pungent with wool, boiled stew, and pent
humanity. Upon an upraised settle before that immense
stone hearth, an old woman sat cleaning querdidra wool
on a card of bone nails. Little more than a silhouette on
the floor below, an older man crouched cross-legged on a
woven withe stool. As Mara's eyes adjusted, she saw he
had grey hair. His mouth was deep-cut and sullen, framed
by a long mustache that hung down his pouched jaw. The
ends flashed with colored beads that rattled as he lifted
his chin.

Iayapa spoke quickly in a hushed voice to Saric, who in
turn murmured, 'This one wears the face hair of a chieftain.
By the talismans of rank dangling from it, he could be the
high chief himself.'

Mara smothered her surprise. She had expected a great
personage, not an ordinary-seeming fellow in an unadorned
green kilt. The bowl he ate from was crude wood, his

spoon a battered implement of corcara shell. Taken aback
by his lack of ceremonial trappings, the Lady of the Acoma
almost missed noticing the other men, seated as they were in
shadow, in a semicircle, their conversation fallen to a hush
at the entrance of her party.

For an interval, the incoming Thuril and their captives
regarded those seated, who stared back silently, unmindful
of the meal they had been eating scarcely a moment
before.

Astonishingly, it was the old woman who stopped her
carding and broke the silence first. 'You might ask them
what they want.'
The man with the chief's mustache spun in his seat,
jabbing in her direction with his spoon. Gravy flew in
spatters from the bowl and struck with a hiss into the
coals. 'Shut up, old hag! I don't need you telling me
what to do!'

As Mara again raised her brows, startled by both the lack
of propriety or any sort of formal ceremony, the chief of
the Thuril spun back. His beads and his mustache whipped
outward with a clatter as he jerked his chin at Saric, who
was closest. 'What do you want, Tsurani?'

When Saric wished, he could be masterful at misleading
expressions. The half-light thrown off by the coals showed
him stone-still, as if the Tsurani high chief had addressed
the empty air.

Mara took her adviser's cue and stepped forward. Into
silence, she said crisply, 'I have come to your land seeking
information.'

The Thuril chief stiffened as if slapped. His eyes jerked
to the Lady who stood before him, then flinched away. He
seemed to stare over her head, and so could not miss the
wide grins of Antaha and the other warrior escorts.

'You stand there and allow a woman captive to speak
out of turn,' he roared in a battlefield bellow

not the least nonplussed, although his ears stung from
~Saric pushed forward. Despite his bound hands,
able bow. 'Antaha does so, worthy chief,

Council

523

because the Lady is Mara of the Acoma, Servant of the
Empire, and family to the Emperor of all Tsuranuanni.'

The chief stroked his mustache, twirling the beads at the
ends. 'Is she so?' His pause extended through a clatter of
wooden plates and spoons as his cronies all set down their
meals. 'If this woman is indeed the Good Servant, where are
her banners? Her army? Her great and illustrious command
tent?' A sneer developed in the chief's deep baritone. 'I
have seen how Tsurani nobles travel in foreign territory!
They carry half their possessions along with them, like
merchants! I say you lie, outlander. Or why is she' - he
made a derogatory gesture toward Mara - 'attended by so
few guards? We are enemy countries, after all.'

At this, the old woman by the settle tossed down her
carding, her face crinkled in disgust. 'Why don't you ask
her yourself ? She said she came seeking information. It must
be very important to her.'

'Shut your great cave of a mouth, old woman!' Explosive
in his indignation, the chief jabbed a hand that still clutched
a crust of bread at Mara's party, not at all willing to address
the Lady directly. 'We are not the barbarians you Tsurani
suppose, you know.'

Mara's composure snapped. 'Are you not?' How she
wished she could speak the Thuril language..As it was,
her own must suffice. 'And do you call bedding my honor
guard down in a livestock pen civilised' In my land, not
even slaves live so meanly!'

Taken aback, and embarrassed by stifled chuckles from

Antaha and his warriors, the chief cleared his throat.
'You were asking me about information ...' His eyes
narrowed. 'Enemy, by what right do you come here making
demands?'

But before Mara could answer this, Iayapa thrust between
her and Saric, bristling with purpose. 'But Lady Mara did
not come here as our enemy. Her warriors disarmed at her

524

Mistress of the Empire

command, and not once did they call back in insult, though
the villagers and the guards at the Loso did their best to
revile them.'

'He speaks truth,' Mara cut in, unwilling to accede to
the silly Thuril custom that a man should not acknowledge
public speech from a female. As if in admiration of
her spunk, the old woman by the settle smiled. Mara
continued, 'Now as to the information I seek ... ?' She
left her question hanging.

While the chieftain looked uncertain, the old woman
thumped him from behind with her toe. 'She is waiting
for you to tell her who you are, you wool-brained fool.'

Turning to glare at the woman, who could only be his
wife to escape punishment for such liberties, the chieftain
shouted, 'I know that, woman!' He twisted back to Mara,
sucking himself up straight in self-importance. 'Yes, it must
be important information-'

'Your name,' the old woman prodded calmly.

Still unmindful of his morsel of bread, the chieftain shook
his fists. 'Shut up, woman! How many times must I tell you
to keep silent in the lodge hall? Plague me again, and I'll
beat your fat backside with a thorn switch!' The woman
ignored the threat and took up her neglected carding.

The chieftain puffed up his chest, which only displayed
to plain view the gravy stains of varied ages on his vest.
'My name is Hotaba. I am chieftain of the Five Tribes of the
Malapia, and' for this season, high chief of the council here
in Darabaldi.' Pointing at the man sitting farthest from him,
also wearing a warrior's scalp lock and mustache, he said,
'This is Brazado, chieftain of the Four Tribes of the Suwaka.'
Then pointing at the last man, who wore no mustache, he
said, 'This is Hidoka, his son.' His eyes shifted past Mara's
shoulder to fix upon Saric, as he finished, 'My own son,
Antaha -'

Acerbically Mara cut in, 'We've met.'

Council

525

Now the high chief crashed his fists to his knees in anger.
Crumbs flew as his crust broke to bits under the blow, and
his brows lowered into a fearsome frown. Mara resisted a
shaky urge to step backward; she had gone too far, in her
boldness, and this time these Thuril would retaliate for her
interruption.

But the old woman on the hearth cleared her throat
loudly.

Hotaba's glare shifted in her direction, then vanished as
he shrugged in resignation. 'That loud-mouthed interfering
female is Mirana, my wife.' As if in afterthought, he added,
'If she were not so good at cooking and sweeping, I'd have
had her cut up for dog meat years ago.'

Antaha said, 'The chief at Loso thought it best to send
these captives directly to you rather than await the next
trading caravan, Father.'

The chieftain tapped his mustache, to a clink of beads.
'Little need for guards these days, eh ? What with the Tsurani
being meek like little gachagas.' Mara recognised the term
and knew it was unflattering even before the worried glance
Iayapa shot toward Lujan and Saric. But after what they
had endured at the river pool that morning, both showed
indifference to being compared to grain-stealing rodents.

While the high chief was still waiting for reaction to his
derogatory comment, Mirana interjected, 'You still haven't
asked Lady Mara what she wishes to know.'

Hotaba sprang to his feet, looking for all the world as

if he were about to commit murder. 'Will you shut up,
woman! You continue to speak in council! I should have
you stewed and thrown to the carrion birds, and raid for
myself a young, obedient, silent wife!'

The other Thuril men in the long hut seemed as
unconcerned by the threat as Mirana did. Her hands never
broke rhythm in their work, and only her foot tapped as
if in pent-back impatience. As if Hotaba saw her quiet as

526

Mistress of the Empire

a warning, he took a breath, and through clenched teeth
said to Mara, 'What do you wish to know, Tsurani?'

Mara glanced at Lujan and Saric, both of whom impassively
observed the exchanges. Her adviser gave back a
slight shrug. He could hardly guide her through this
negotiation. By Tsurani standards, the Thuril were rude
and unruly, given to theatrical displays of emotion, and
utterly uncouth. The past day and a half in their presence
had only further mystified them about what constituted
an unforgivable outrage. No slight of language seemed to
faze these folk; the worst insults seemed but jokes to them.
Honest courtesy was the safest approach, Mara determined.
'Hotaba, I need to speak with one of your magicians.'

Hotaba's puffed cheeks went flat. His ruddy color
subsided, and he seemed to notice the mashed mess of
crumbs in his fist for the first time. 'A magician?'

As plainly as Mara could read a foreigner's expression, he
seemed flabbergasted. She pressed ahead. 'There are things
I need to know that only a magician who is not part of the
Assembly within our Empire can tell me. I have come to the
Thuril Confederation because I was given to understand
that answers may be found in your nation.'

Hotaba's expression of surprise dissolved and fumed
shrewd. He was not anxious to attend to the subject she
had broached, Mara saw, as his bright eyes darted back and
forth, studying her companions. She edged sideways, trying
to shield the girl who cowered behind her, but Kamlio's
windblown drift of pale hair was conspicuous even in
shadow. Worse, Antaha saw the direction of his father's
gaze, and snatched the opening to gain favor. He pushed
forward, dragging Kamlio ahead by her arm until she stood
at the fore.

'Father, behold. We have a prize of these Tsurani.'

Mara stifled white-hot outrage, both for Kamlio's shrinking
discomfort, and for the brusque sweeping aside of the

.~
l

Council

527

subject she had risked all to broach. Yet from the lust that
flashed in the old chieftain's eyes, she saw that she dared
not take umbrage lest she force a display of male pride.

Low-pitched whistles of admiration erupted from the
other council members. All stared at the courtesan with
hungry, appreciative eyes, and not even Mirana's sour glare
could dim the interest of her husband. Hotaba let his gaze
wander over Kamlio's ripe curves like a man about to be
served a delicacy. He licked his lips. 'Nice,' he murmured
to Antaha. 'Exceptionally so.' He inclined his head to his
son. 'Remove her robe. Let us see what delectable fruit
it hides.'

Mara stiffened. 'Hotaba, you may tell your son that
neither I nor my serving woman Kamlio are to be considered
his prizes. We are not your property, Thuril chief!
Kamlio's flesh is her own, as her service is mine, to do with
as I bid. And I do not bed her with strangers.'

Hotaba started as if slapped from a dream. He looked at
Mara, assessing. Then his sour, loose mouth tightened into
a smile of malice. 'You are in no position to make demands,
woman.'

Mara disregarded the statement. As if her officers did not
stand bound like slaves at her shoulder, and as if she did not
stand disheveled and entirely without the ceremonial state

due a great Tsurani Lady, she let the fury of the moment
stiffen her spine.

Her composure made an impression, if not the best.
Hotaba's smile widened. Even Mirana stopped her carding,
as a charged and dangerous stillness gripped the airless
room. 'Lady,' the high chief announced in edged sarcasm,
'I will offer you a bargain: the information you seek, against
the person of your yellow-haired maid. A more than fair
trade, I deem. The woman is of inestimable value, as rare in
her beauty as practitioners of honest magic are among your
kind. Surely the knowledge you came to find is worth the

S28 Mistress of the Empire

flesh of one servant, when upon your estates in the Empire
you command many thousands of souls?'

Mara closed her eyes against sickness, and her teeth
against a sharp desire to shout useless imprecations. Her
mouth felt dry as ashes. Who was she, to barter Kamlio's
life and happiness away, even for the good of her family?
Though, as Ruling Lady, Mara held that right within Empire
law, still, she had to force speech.

'No.' She at least sounded decisive, if her mind seethed
with doubts. Gods, what honorless being had she become,
to set the life of one difficult servant before the well-being
and survival of her house, her husband, and her children!
What was one wretched courtesan before all of her honor,
all of her loved ones, and, ultimately, the power base
of Ichindar himself? Yet where once she would have
commanded a servant or slave to do as these Thuril bid,
today, when all depended upon her one word, she could
not demand that sacrifice.

Into that charged stillness, while the men were too
stunned to react, and Saric fought back an expression
of outright astonishment and dismay, Mirana spoke. As
if matters of household were of more account than lives
and fates, she announced, 'I'm done with my carding.'

But her hands were shaking as she set wool and tools back
in the basket by her knee, Mara saw. Hotaba merely turned
and nodded once to his wife. The old woman rose, furled
her shoulders in layers of fringed shawls, and motioned for
Mara to follow her.

The Lady of the Acoma hesitated. She thought to insist
that she should stay with her officers and people to oversee
their disposition, as their ruler. But Mirana gave a slight
shake of her head, as if she could guess Mara's thoughts.

Saric received hasty words of counsel from layapa, and
he bent with whispered advice. 'Go, my Lady. This culture
is not as ours, and your point has been made. You will

,

I

;~

i

:.

l

perhaps hurt the cause you came for if you stay to argue
your point. Iayapa agrees that Mirana knows her husband
well. Follow her lead, he thinks, and I concur.'

i Mara flashed a last, haughty glance at Hotaba, making
I him aware that she acted for her own reasons, and not those
of any Thuril. Then, stiff-backed, she joined Mirana on her
way to the door.

I When Lujan stirred to follow, Mara gave back a gesture

to keep him in place. None of them were safe here,
among these barbarians: and, weaponless, there was very
little that any warrior could do to protect his mistress
before the highlanders overpowered him. Mirana seemed
to understand this, for she raised her voice one last time.

'Stay here with my husband and lie about how fierce
you are in battle and bed, soldier. I shall not keep your
mistress long.'

To Mara she added, 'Your serving girl will not be
touched, rest assured, until this matter is settled.' Then,
with surprising strength, Mirana clamped down on Mara's
arm and hustled her outside.

The colder air hit the women's faces with a sharpness that

reddened the skin. Mirana moved at a brisk pace, forcing
Mara away from the long hut with no chance for change of
mind. She ducked down an alleyway where bakers finished
their day's work, by the smell, and a small dog devoured
crusts from the hand of a girl with plaited hair. Reminded
of her own daughter, who might never grow old enough
to own a pet, Mara stumbled.

Mirana jerked her forward. 'None of that,' she said in
sharply accented Tsurani. 'You were strong enough to leave
your homeland, to challenge the Assembly, and come here.
Do not kill victim to self-pity now.'

Mara's chin snapped up. Startled, she said, 'What is my
fate to you?'

'Very little,' Mirana said matter-of-factly. Her dark eyes

Cou~scil

529

530

Mistress of the Empire

fixed on the Lady of the Acoma, watching for some sort of
reaction. Mara gave none. After a moment, the chieftain's
wife added, 'Very little, if you were like other Tsurani we
had known. But you are not. Hotaba ascertained as much,
when he offered you the bargain for your servant girl.'

Mara's chin went up another notch. 'She is not mine to N:
offer, even for the chance of rescue from the perils that
threaten my family. I gave her a choice, and she remains
with me of her free will. She is not a slave . . .'

Mirana gave a shrug, which set her fringes swinging and
tangling in the cold, sharp breeze. 'Indeed, by our laws also,
she is not yours to bargain. But the Lords in your land do as
they will with the lives of their servants, slaves, and children,
daily, and chink the gods gave them the right.'

'They believe so,' Mara said carefully.

'And you?' Mirana's question came sharp as the stroke
of a querdidra quirt.

'I do not know what I believe,' Mara admitted, frowning.
'Except that as Servant of the Empire I once set my
nationhood above my own blood. Now I can no longer
count my own blood above that of any other man. Kamlio
is with me because of a pledge I gave to another to shield her
as he would. My honor is no less than that of the man who
entrusted her safety to me. There is honor that is mindless
obedience to tradition, and there is honor that is . . . more.'

Mirana's regard grew piercing. 'You are different,' she
mused as much to herself as to Mara. 'Pray to your gods
that such difference will be enough to win your freedom.
You will have my support. But never forget that in Thuril,
the men will talk more freely, and give more favors, when
women are not present. Ours is a harsh land, and the man
who shows himself as too soft will not keep the wife he has
raided.'

'Another man would steal his woman away?' Mare asked
in surprise.
Mirana's withered lips cracked into an unabashed grin.
'Perhaps. Or worse, his woman would leave his house and

hearth, and stuff his blankets with snow for his folly.'

In spite of her worries, Mara laughed. 'You do that
here?'

'Oh, yes.' Mirana observed that her guest was chilled.
She slipped off one of her shawls and wrapped it around
the Acoma Lady's shoulders; it smelled of woodsmoke and,
more faintly, of unbleached greased fleece. 'Let us visit my
favourite bread shop, where the sweet rolls will be hot and
fresh-baked at this hour. I will tell you what else we do here,
besides pretending to take the jigabird crowing of our men
very seriously.'

Where the atmosphere in the council house had been

stifling, the air in the bread shop held the sharp, dry warmth
of the ovens, comforting in the damper climate of the
highlands. Mara sat down awkwardly on the hand-hewn
wooden chair. The stone floors in these chillier hills did
not make Tsurani cushions practical. Shifting from one
seat bone to the other to try to find a position of comfort,
Mara resigned herself to another evening filled with light
social that. Like the chieftain's wife in Loso, Mirana seemed
content to hold conversation to light matters,r while the
council of the town's elders went on without her. 'Men
can be such children, don't you think?'

Mara forced a polite smile. 'Your husband seems an angry
child, then.'

Mirana laughed, settling on the chair opposite a wooden
table whose surface was grooved where shop patrons had
sliced into fresh loaves over a that with friends. Shedding
several layers of shawls, and revealing white hair tied with
braided cords of wool, Mirana sighed her indulgence.
'Hotaba? He's a windbag, but I love him. He's been
threatening to beat me to silence for forty-two years,

S32

Mistress of tl~e Empire

almost since the day he hoisted me onto his shoulder
and raced over the hills to escape my father and brothers.
He hasn't laid a hand on me in anger yet. We are a people
for great threats and insults, Mara. Boasting is an art here,
and a well-fashioned insult will earn the slighted man's
admiration rather than scorn.'

Here she paused, while a young boy in a spun wool
smock paused by the table with a tray. Mirana switched
languages to order hot sweet bread and mulled cider. Then,
after a glance at Mara's dark-circled eyes, she asked also
for wine. The boy accepted three pierced wooden tokens
from Mirana's hand, and scurried off, head turned over
his shoulder when he thought the chief's wife might not
be looking, so he could stare at Mara's outland clothing.

Mirana filled the interval with small talk, while the boy
came back with food and drink, and Mara made a pretence
of eating. Nerves kept her from hunger, though the coarse
brown bread smelled wonderful, and the drink was not
the sour vintage that Tsurani veterans of the Thuril wars
claimed these hillfolk produced.

Outside the streets deepened into darkness as a cortege of
young girls passed by chattering, overseen by young men,
servants or maybe brothers, who carried smoking torches to
light their way. Behind the shop's crude tables, the baker's
boy scraped out the ovens, and the coals beneath greyed
over with films of ash.

Warmed by the wine, but with her hands in a cold sweat
with worry, Mara chafed. While she exchanged inane social
that, where was Kamlio? What would happen to Saric,
Lujan, and her warriors? Worse, did Hokanu even have
a clue where she had gone, since the day she had left
the Acoma estates for a visit to Turakamu's temple? Her
departure then seemed a dream, so far removed did affairs
of the Empire seem from this place with its loud-voiced,
boastful men, and cloudy uplands.

Council

S33

'Why did you come here looking for practitioners of
magic?' Mirana demanded with a sudden, disconcerting
directness.

Mara started, almost dropping the crockery mug that
held the dregs of her drink. The small talk, she suddenly
sensed, had been but an excuse to bide time. She had no
reason left to withhold the truth. 'I have reamed over the
years that the Assembly of Magicians keeps a stranglehold
over the Empire's culture. Our traditions maintain injustices
that I would see changed. Although the magicians have set
restraint over House Acoma because of a feud with House
Anasati, the sanctions are not held fairly over both sides.
Anasati has been allowed to set assassins on allies of my
people; sadly, my husband's father has been killed. The
Great One's edict against Acoma vengeance is proven now
to be pretence, an excuse to obscure the true issue. I will
bring change, against the Assembly's wishes, and for that,
I find myself and my children endangered.'

'So these lofty aims are really simply the needs of
survival?'

Mara looked hard at the old woman, realising that here
was as sharp a mind as Lady Isashani's. 'Perhaps. I like
to think that I would have pursued the proper course for
my people's best interests even if my own house and loved
ones were not at risk-'

'You fumed outside your lands to Thuril,' Mirana broke
in. 'Why?'

Mara fumed the near-empty mug between nervous
fingers. 'The cho-ja gave me riddles that pointed to the
East. A lesser-path magician who had a bitter heart toward
the Assembly pleaded that I search here for answers. I came

to Thuril because my line will die if I do not find answers,
and because I have seen too much misery in the name of
politics and the Game of the Council - many I have loved
are in the Red God's halls because of our lust for power.

534
Mistress of t/'e Empire

Injustice and murder in the name of honor will not cease
if the Assembly is allowed to overrule the Emperor and
reinstate the Warlord's office.'

Mirana seemed to ponder this, her eyes on the crumb-littered
table and her hands quietly folded. At length she
reached some inner decision. 'You shall be heard.'

Mara was given no time to puzzle over how Mirana might
influence the men's council. Neither did she see any sign
exchanged, or sent, but the next minute the flap door to the
bread shop swept open, admitting a gust of icy air. Three
of the oil lamps that lit the empty bread shop extinguished
in the blast.

An ancient highlander in a heavy cloak entered. Backlit
by the remaining lamp, the newcomer's features were
only faintly discernible by the rose glow of the oven's
dying embers. Multiple layers of woollen robes smelled of
querdidra, and the ears just visible beneath the hood were
hung with disks of corcara shell that twisted and flashed
at each step. Of the face, Mara could see little but wizened
skin under the hood's enveloping shadow.

~Stand,' Mirana whispered urgently. 'Show respect, for
come to hear you is the Kaliane.'

Mara raised eyebrows at the unknown foreign word.

'Kaliane is the traditional name for the strongest among
those versed in the mysteries,' Mirana explained to ease her
confusion.

The cloaked figure stepped closer, and a sparkle and
flash showed the mage's mantle to be bordered in costly,
rare sequins of silver. The patterns seemed to form runes,
or maybe totems of a more complex sort than adorned the
doorposts of the houses. Mara bowed with the same respect
she might show to a Great One come to visit her estate.

The Thuril magician did not acknowledge with any
gesture beyond raising one withered hand to dew bade
the voluminous hood. Mara saw revealed a shock of silver

Council

S35

hair, looped into braids like Mirana's, but knotted in ritual
bindings. Beneath this crownlike arrangement was the aged
face of a crone.

A woman! Forgetting manners, the Lady of the Acoma
gasped. 'Your assembly of magicians allows females?'

The ancient woman tossed her head with a click of her
heavy earrings, her manner dangerously vexed. 'We have
nothing like your Assembly in this land, thank the gods,
Mara of the Acoma.'

Two townswomen appeared at the bread-shop door, to
complete a late errand. On the point of entering, they spied
the cloaked enchantress, bobbed a hasty obeisance, and
backed out into the street in silence. A young man on their
heels also turned and hurried away. The hide flap slapped
shut, but the room felt drained of warmth.

'Forgive me,' Mara murmured, almost stammering. 'Lady
Kaliane, I am sorry, but I never guessed-'

'I have no title. You may address me as the Kaliane,'
the crone snapped back, seating herself with a swish of
robes. She arranged her long sleeves, folded tiny hands,
and suddenly looked very human and sad. 'I know that
your Empire's Assembly' - she all but spit the word '
kills all girls who are discovered to have the talent. My
predecessor in this office was a refugee from Lash Province
who barely escaped with her life. Her three sisters were not
so fortunate.'

Faintly ill from nerves and wine that did not sit well with
worry, Mara bit her lip. 'I was told such by a magician of
the lesser path who hated the Assembly. But in my heart I
could not force myself to believe it.'

The Kaliane's pale eyes were deep as she locked her gaze
with Mara's. 'Believe it, for it is true.'

Shaken, and infused with fresh fear for the loved ones
left behind, Mara locked her teeth to keep from shaking.
Though the Kaliane was slight, and bundled up like an

536

Mistress of the Empire

aged grandmother in layers against the draft, her presence
radiated a power sharper than the bite of any mountain
frost. Aware that her every word would be weighed in
judgment, Mara spoke before the last of her courage ebbed
away. 'I was told the Assembly fears you. Why?'

'Truth,' the Kaliane rapped back. She loosed a cracked
cackle that inspired chills. 'In your Empire, slaves are
mistreated, and told it is the will of your gods. Your Lords
contend and kill for honor, but what do they accomplish?
Not glory. Not the favor of heaven, no. They lose sons,
engage in war, even fall upon their swords, and for nothing,
Lady Mara. They have been duped. Their vaunted honor is
naught but the shackle that keeps the power of the nations
fragmented. While house contends against house in the
Game of the Council, the Assembly is left free rein. Its
power is vast, but it is not without limit, nor has it always
been so strong.'

Touched by hope in the light of such a frank admission,
Mara said, 'Then you might help me?'

At this the Kaliane's face became a mask of inscrutable
wrinkles. 'Help you? This has yet to be determined. You
must accompany me upon a short journey.'

Afraid to leave Lujan, Saric, and, worst of all, Kamlio in
the hands of highlander captors without her, Mara knew a
stab of dread. 'Where would we go?'

'There are things you must see. A council of my peers
must hear your reasons and your history, and question -'
you.' Then, as if sensing the source of Mara's discomfort
directly, the Kaliane softened her unequivocal demand. 'We ;shall
be gone no longer than the time it takes two women
to talk, lest your warriors become fearful for you, and try ~j
something stupid in desperation.' i

'I am in your hands, then,' Mara said, her resolve forced
over the indecision in her heart. Tsurani in upbringing, ~]
and not yet so immersed in desire for change that she
could discount all the codes of her people's honor as
false, still she could not escape the awareness that she
would not be offered another chance. She embraced the
Kaliane's option in desperation, but was unprepared for
how swiftly her acquiescence would be followed up. The
Thuril crone reached across the narrow table, took Mara's
wrist in dry, sure fingers, and spoke a word.

Mara heard only the first sibilant syllable. A rushing in
her ears drowned the rest, fierce as the buffet of a sea gale.
The floor dropped away from her feet, as did the chair she
perched upon. The shadowy walls of the bread shop also
vanished, replaced for an eye's blink by an expanse of a
howling grey void.

Time froze. The air went icy and thin. Mara might have
shamed her ancestors and cried out in terror for her life,
but the passage through the void ended suddenly, leaving
only an impression.

Restored jarringly to firm soil, she found herself standing
in a plaza lit by cho-ja globes. Her wrist was still clasped
by the Kaliane's hand, which was steady, whereas her
own shook like storm-blown reeds. Where Tsurani cities
were built upon level ground, the buildings here had been
carved in tiers into the steep granite face of the hills. On
the valley floor, the open square that surrounded Mara
was circled by terraces, each level fronted by doorways,
windows, and shops. Her eyes lifted to follow the lines of
columns, buttresses, and arches, arrayed in breathtaking

artistry against the backdrop of night. Totems supported
galleries with wood and stone railings, some carved into
dragons or the great serpents of sea and sky that figured
prominently in Thuril myth. Spires and domes speared
upward against starry skies, or pierced through lamplit
streamers of mist. Mara caught her breath in delight at
a beauty her Tsurani-bred mind could not have imagined.
Never had she expected such a city in these barren uplands!

538

Mistress of the Empire

The streets were peopled with highlanders in plain kilts and
trousers. Most young warriors went bare-cheated, despite
the evening chill, but a few sported brightly woven shirts.
Women wore long skirts and loose-fitting overblouses,
the youthful ones offering glimpses of slender arm or
rounded bosom to draw admiring glances from passing
young men.

'What is this place?' Mara murmured, drawing in a deep
breath of incense, and staring upon wonders like a farm
yokel on her first trip into town.

'Dorales,' said the Kaliane. 'You are the first Tsurani to
see this city, perhaps.' More ominously, she added, 'You
could be the last, as well.'

The enchantress's quaint phrasing caused Mara a shiver.
She felt as if she were dreaming, so alien was this place,
and so vast; tike a vision too beautiful to be real. The
slender spires, the thousands of brightly lit windows and
doorways, the leering totems, and the press and jostle of
street life - all lent a feeling of precariousness, as if at any
moment she might be swept unconsenting into nightmare.
Amazement and uneasiness would have held the Lady
frozen in place had the Kaliane not tugged her forward
with the same brusque impatience a mother might show
a reluctant child.

'Come! The circle of elders expect you, and there is no
wisdom gained by making them wait.'

Mara stumbled numbly forward. 'You say I am expected?
How?'

But the Kaliane had little patience for what to her ears
were aimless questions. She towed Mara through the crowd,
drawing much attention in the process. Bystanders stared
and pointed, and not a few spat in contempt. Tsurani
pride caused the Lady of the Acoma to ignore such
insults as beneath her dignity, but she was left in no
doubt that these people considered her an unforgiven

Council

539

enemy. Dreadful, creeping doubt plagued her, that imperial

'Lords should in contemptuous ignorance have dared call the

Thuril barbarians; this city with its marvels of engineering
most emphatically proved otherwise.

Curious even through shame, Mara asked, 'Why did my

people never hear of this place?'

The Kaliane hustled her past a painted wagon pulled by
two sour-tempered querdidra, and driven by a wizened man
wearing a cloak of patchwork colors. He carried a strange
musical instrument, and passersby tossed him coins, or
called out cheerful encouragement for him to play. He
gave them back colorfully pungent imprecations, his red
cheeks dimpled with a smile.

'Those of your people who would hear of this place your
Assembly would kill to keep silent,' the Kaliane replied
tartly. 'The towers you behold, and all of the carving
of the rock, were done by means of magic. Were you
to be permitted entry to the City of the Magicians in
Tsuranuanni, you might see such wonders. But in your
land, the Great Ones keep the marvels their power can
create to themselves.'

Mara frowned, silent. She thought of Milamber, and
his reluctance to speak of his experience as a member of
the Assembly. After witnessing the fearful powers he had
unleashed in the Imperial Arena, she was struck by the
conclusion that the oaths that bound him to the Assembly
must have been fearfully strong, to force one of his stature

to keep silence. She knew nothing of the characters of the
magicians, but from Hokanu she had come to understand
that Fumita was not a greedy man. Powerful, yes, and
steeped in mystery, but not one to place selfishness above
the common good of the Nations.

As if the Kaliane held uncanny means to read Mara's
thoughts, she shrugged under her heavy cloak. 'Who knows
why the magicians of your land are so secretive? Not all

540 Mistress of the Empire

of them are bad men. Most are simply scholars who wish
only to pursue the mysteries of their craft. Perhaps they first
formed their brotherhood to ward off some threat, or to
suppress the wild, dangerous magic of renegade magicians
who refused to be trained to control, or who used their
powers for ill. The gods alone might say. But if there were
good and cogent reasons for such a course of action in
the past, time has seen them corrupted. That thousands of
daughters have been murdered to suppress their talents is
utterly inexcusable by Thuril law.'

Touched by an unpleasant possibility, Mara asked, 'Am
I being held on trial for the injustices of all Tsuranuanni?'

The Kaliane.,bobbed her head and fixed her with a glance
that itself inspired dread. 'In part, Lady Mara. If you wish
our help against the Assembly, you must convince us. If we
act, it will not be for Acoma survival, nor for your personal
gain, nor even to make the Empire a fairer nation. For to
us the honor of your ancestors, and even the lives of your
children, are as meaningless as dust in the wind.'

Mara might have slammed to a stop at once, for what
was more innocent than the lives of her baby daughter
and her son? But the crone's grip bound her like feners
and dragged her inexorably toward the looming arch of
an imposing, many-tiered building. 'What does move your
people, if not the lives of the young?' Despite all effort,
Mara's dismay showed through.

The Kaliane's reply stayed as impersonal as the grind of
waves on the beach. 'If we mourn, it is for the loss of the
mages who died with their talents untried. With each one
of them, irrevocable knowledge was lost. And if we despair,
it is for the cho-ja, masters beyond our finest initiates of
mystery, that in your land are disbarred from the magic
that is the glory of their race.'

'The Forbidden!' Spurred to excitement, Mara forgot
for a moment to fear. 'Was it arcane power that
the cho-ja Queen meant when she spoke of the Forbidden?'


Lost in shadow as she stepped under the massively carved
arch, the Kaliane answered obliquely. 'That, Lady Mara, is
the secret you must unlock if you are to survive in your
contention against the Great Ones. But first you must
convince the Elder Circle of Thuril of your worthiness.
We will hear and judge. Choose your words carefully,
for once you have seen this place, the perils you face are
redoubled.'

Beyond lay a maze of corridors, vaulted like tunnels,
and lit with rows of cho-ja globes. The floors were marble.
The artistry of the fluted pillars took Mara's breath away:
not even the Emperor's palace held stonework polished
to such a lustrous shine. The people who congregated
in antechambers and doorways wore beaded costumes,
headdresses of feathers, and some the plain kilts of servants.
Others in white robes the Kaliane named acolytes of the
craft. All without exception bowed to her passage, and
Mara felt their stares upon her back like the touch of heated
coals. There was magic here, a weight of power upon the
air that made even echoes seem oppressive. Fervently Mara
wished herself home, surrounded by familiar walls, and by
customs she understood.

The Kaliane guided her into a wider hall that led into
an echoing antechamber. Thousands of tiers of candles
lit the expanse, burning Mara's eyes with intense light.
Beyond lay a yet more immense room, surrounded by
pillared galleries carved and pierced in arrays of intricate
patterns. There dozens of robed figures crowded landings
that circled the room, rising six levels high. Ladders, and
successions of narrow, spiral stairs provided access to the
topmost floors.

'This is our archive,' the Kaliane explained. 'Here we
house all of our knowledge, and copies of all writings upon

542

Mistress of the Empire

the subject of our craft. It serves also as our meeting hall,
on those occasions when the magicians of Thuril gather
together, which is as dose as our kind come to being
organised. We have no fellowship such as your Assembly,
and keep no formal officers beyond the Kaliane, who is
empowered only to act as spokeswoman.'

Mara was led through a gap in a railing on the lowest
level. Her elbows brushed against walls inlaid with corcara
shell and ebony in spiraling patterns that made her uneasy.
The newel posts were carved totems, beaked, dawed, ant
fierce of expression. The creatures were scaled or winged in
feathers, and their eyes were cut with the predatory slant of
a snake's.

The Kaliane ushered Mara across an intimidating expanse
of bare floor. There were no furnishings, not even patterns,
beyond a circle that lay at the center. Its perimeter seemed
to be marked out in golden light, unmistakably the effect
of some spell. Aware of the levels above, now crowding
with robed forms who all faced her way, the Lady of the
Acoma felt like an object of sacrifice before the ritual that
would seal her final fate.

'there.' The Kaliane pointed at the magical circle. 'Step
in and stand, if you have courage enough to be judged. But
be warned, Lady Mara, Servant of the Empire. Lies and
deceit are impossible for any who cross that line.'

Mara tossed back her hair, fallen loose over her shoulders
in the absence of the accustomed attention of her maids. 'I
do not fear truth,' she said boldly.

The Kaliane released her restraining grip. 'So be it,' she
said, a look near to pity in her eyes.

Mara moved toward the line without trepidation. She
did not fear truth, in the moment she raised her foot to
step across the bar of yellow light. Yet in that instant she
felt pierced by a force that negated all of her will, and by
the time her foot struck the flooring on the inward side

,

Council

543

of the spell, every vestige of her self-confidence was tom
from her.

Halfway across the line, she could not retreat. The part
of her body that lay within the spell circle was frozen in
place as if shackled. She had no choice but to raise her
other leg and enter fully, though to do so now terrified her
beyond thought.

Helplessness acquired new meaning. Her ears heard no
sound, and her eyes saw nothing but the shimmering golden
web of force. She was physically unable to move, or sit, or
clasp her arms close about her chest to quell the thump
of her fast-beating heart. Slavery itself seemed a freedom,
before the magic that ringed her into confinement; her very
thoughts were held prisoner. Mara fought despair, even as
someone high up in the galleries called down a question.

The Kaliane repeated the query in the Tsurani language.
'Lady of the Acoma, you have come here asking for power.
You claim you will use it to defend, to aid the common
good. Show us how you came to hold this belief.'

Mara tried to draw breath to answer, and found she
could not. Her body would not answer her desire; magic
held her from speech. Panic drove her to anger. How
could she defend her intentions if the spell prevented her
from speaking? The next moment she discovered that her
thoughts had also escaped her control. Her mind seemed
to overturn, then to spin like a pinwheel toy made for a
child's amusement. Memories sifted past her inward eye,
and she was no longer in the chamber of the magicians in

Dorales, within any magical circle. She was seated in her
study in the old Acoma estates, arguing hotly with Kevin
the barbarian.

The illusion of his presence was so real that the tiny
part of Mara's mind that retained separate self-awareness
longed to take shelter in his arms. In dawning trepidation,
she realised the intent of the Thuril truth spell: that

544

Mistress of the Empire

she would not be permitted to answer any inquiries
verbally.

These mages would ask, and take their answers directly
from her experience. She would be given no chance
to justify, to reconcile the outcome of any event with
explanations. These magicians would observe her actions as
they happened, and then judge. She was in fact put on trial,
her only defense the acts that comprised her past life.

Mara realised this much in the instant before the spell
claimed her wholly, and she was in the study on that
long-past day with Kevin, facing him in heated anger as
he cried, 'You push me about like a chess . . . shah pawn!
Here! There! Now here again, because it suits you, but
never one word of why, and never one second of warning!
I've done as you've bid - not for love of you, but to save
the lives of my countrymen.'

Then Mara herself replying, in red-faced exasperation:
'But I gave you promotion to slave master and allowed
you charge of your Midkemian companions. You used
your authority to see them comfortable. I see they have
been eating jigabird and needra steak and fresh fruits and
vegetables along with their thyza mush.'

On the memory played, as real as the moment it
happened, even to its ending in a flushed entanglement of
passion. Mara knew a wrenching moment of disorientation
as, one encounter after another, her relationship with Kevin
unfolded, each day bittersweet with joys and frustrations,
and difficult lessons. Forced to see again in retrospect,
she recognised her own narrow-minded arrogance; how
miraculous it was that Kevin the slave had seen anything
in her apparent hard-heartedness to love and nurture at
all! The days unreeled in staggering jumps as the magicians
manipulated her recall. Again she endured the horrors as
wave after wave of assassins were repulsed from her town
apartments on the Night of the Bloody Swords. Again she
stood on a butane-whipped hilltop and exchanged words
with Tasaio of the Minwanabi. She saw the Emperor
Ichindar break the staff of the Warlord's power, her
assumption of the title Servant of the Empire.

Again she saw Ayaki die.

There followed another question, mercifully, and the
scene changed to the fragrant noon heat of a kekali garden
where Arakasi abased himself before her, begging leave to
take his own life. Again she shared the scented, dry evening
air in Lord Chipino's command tent on campaign against
the desert men in Tsubar.

Time whirled, fumed, backtracked; and scene overlaid
scene. Sometimes she was sent back into childhood, or to
the silent halls of meditation in Lashima's temple. Other
times she suffered the brutality of her first husband. Again
she faced his grieving father, over the wrapped bundle of a
grandson, now dead also, by equally treacherous means.

Wrenchingly, she shared afresh her relationship with
Hokanu, and his uncannily accurate understanding. Through
the eyes of the Thuril magicians, she came to realise that his
rare perceptions were in fact an unfledged aspect of talent.
A near miss of fate might have seen him a member of the
Assembly, rather than as husband at her side. How much
poorer her life would have been without him, she realised.
A part of her heart ached for the distance grown between
them, and between the manipulations of the truth spell,
she vowed she would remedy the misunderstanding that
lingered since Kasuma's birth.

Lastly, Mara saw herself in Hotaba's long house, delivering
a flat refusal to trade her servant Kamlio for
freedom to pursue her business in Thuril. A probe like
a needle pierced her, but found only sincerity in her
heart.

-The spell's reel of memories lagged for a stretch, and

words leaked through, spoken by she knew not whom.

Council

545

546

Mistress of the Empire

They were in Thuril but understanding of their meaning
came to her.

Said one voice, 'She is indeed different from other
Tsurani: to see honor in a slave, and to recognise the
rights to freedom of a servant, even above her blood
family.'

And the Kaliane, replying: 'I believed so, or I would not
have brought her.'

Upon the heels of that first thought came, 'Yet do we
concern ourselves with Tsurani well-being?'

Another voice of the mind answered, 'Justly governed
neighbors are to be desired, and perhaps . . .'

Yet another mind spoke, 'But there is an opportunity to
put right the great wrong .

More words that seemed to blur together; someone
mentioned risk, and someone else spoke of the cho-ja
empire.

Mara's hearing faded. She felt suddenly weak in the
knees. And then the golden ring of light that held her
imprisoned melted away, and she felt herself collapse.

The Kaliane's strong hands caught her. 'Lady, it is
over.'

Weak as a baby, and shamed to discover she had been
crying in the throes of the spell, Mara fought to recover from
the shambles of her composure. 'Have I convinced you?'

'No. That will be argued through the night,' the Kaliane
admitted. 'Word of our decision will reach you at dawn.
For now I will return you to Mirana, who will see you are
given a chance to rest.'

'I would prefer to wait here,' Mara protested, but she
lacked the will to resist. Strength left her, and she knew
no more beyond darkness like the night between stars.

..

21

Decision

Mara awakened.

It was dark; she breathed in the scent of burning beech
logs, and the mustier odor of querdidra wool. There were
wooden rafters over her head, faintly picked out of shadow
by the weak red light from the hearth. Blankets covered her.
They constricted her limbs as she rolled over, puzzled as to
her whereabouts.

Her head ached. Memory of events returned slowly, and
then in a rush, as she saw the basket of carding Mirana
had carried from the long house and the council with her
Thuril husband. Now Mara remembered the excursion to
the bread shop, and the dreamlike visit to Dorales in the
company of the Kaliane. Suddenly stifled by the dark
warmth and the blankets, she pushed herself erect.

'Lady?' ventured an uncertain voice from the shadows.

Mara turned, to see Kamlio's oval face, alert and watchful
with concern. 'I am all right, little flower,' she murmured
back, unthinkingly using Lujan's nickname. i

This time Kamlio did not flinch at the diminutive. Instead
she shed her own bedclothes, and prostrated herself in
abject abasement against the sanded boards of the floor.

Mara was not flattered but disturbed, though servants
and slaves had made such gestures to her life long. Such
was the Tsurani way, to give total loyalty to please one's
master. However, after the experience in the golden spell
circle, the tradition left Mara sickened. 'Get up, Kamlio.
Please.'

The girl did not move, but her shoulders spasmed under
her river of pale hair. 'Lady,' she said miserably, 'why did

S48 Mistress of the Empire

you set me before your very family? Why? I am not worth
so much, surely, that you could not trade me to these Thuril
to keep your children safe.'

Mara sighed, bent her tired back, and caught Kamlio's
outstretched wrists. She tugged, ineffectively because she
was left weak from the truth spell. 'Kamlio, please, arise.
My concern for my children is paramount, truly, but the life
of another free individual is not mine to bargain with, even for
my loved ones' survival. You have not taken my honor
for your own; you are not obligated to House Acoma.'

Kamlio allowed herself to be coaxed upright. Swathed in
a night robe borrowed from the Thuril that was overlarge
for her slender curves, she crouched on the edge of her cot.
Her eyes were deep as pits in the dimness. Mara saw they
sat in what must be Mirana's sewing room, by the loom
frame tucked in one corner, and crates of cloths strewn
about. She was still trying to reorient her nerves from the
trauma of reliving the past brought on by the truth spell D
when the ex-courtesan spoke.

'Arakasi,' Kamlio said in halting and pitiful certainty.
'You did this for him.'

Weary to the bone, but compassionate, Mara shook her
head. 'I did nothing of the sort for Arakasi - though he has
sacrificed again and again for my family.'

Kamlio did not look convinced. Mara twisted a fold of
blanket around her shoulders, and perched on the edge
of her own cot, facing the girl. 'You are not in any way
indebted to my Spy Master.' The Lady of the Acoma
gestured emphatically. 'I'll repeat this if I must until you
are old and deaf, or until you see fit to believe me.'

Silence followed Mara's stab at humor. The coals in the
hearth hissed against the whistle of wind around the eaves.
In the Thuril uplands, the breezes played endlessly, dying
out only at dawn. The hour of the night could not be
determined, but the fact that in Dorales the magicians

l

..
: :~

,

Decision

549

and the Kaliane yet debated upon their decision played
upon Mara's nerves. She focused upon Kamlio's troubles
to stave off her own worries.

'Arakasi,' the ex-courtesan repeated, a frown marring her
forehead. 'Whatever does he see in me? He is clever enough,
surely, to win any woman to his bed.'

Mara considered carefully. 'I can only offer conjecture,'
she ventured at length. 'But [believe he sees his salvation in
you. A healing, if you will, for certain of life's disappointments.
And I equally suppose that he wishes to give you in
return what he could not give his own family: happiness,
security, and a love neither bought nor bargained for.'

'You found such a love with Hokanu,'Kamlio observed,
her tone spiked with accusation.

Mara forced herself not to feel ruffled. 'Partly. In Hokanu
I found near-perfect understanding. He has been my spirit's
companion. In another man I found the love that I believe
one such as you might discover in Arakasi. As to any other
woman sharing our Spy Master's bed, I avow not- I
honestly do not know his appetites and passions - but
he is not a man who shares his feelings or his affections
easily. Arakasi offers you a very solemn trust, and would
never have done so, as reticent as he is wont to be, if he
did not first believe you worthy.'

'You sound as though you admire him,' said Kamlio.

'I do.' Mara paused in recognition of this truth. 'For a
man of formidable cleverness, who lived his life as a grand
game of strategy, I would guess it took great courage to
take the step to acknowledge compassion. Though one who
knew always where he stood, able to second-guess most of
the moves of his fellows, Arakasi now is like a sailor adrift
upon an unknown sea. He must draw his own chart to
see his way back to familiar harbor. He has thrown away
competence for self-discovery. For one such as he, it must
be as frightening an undertaking as any he could imagine.
sso

Mistress of the Empire

But I have never seen him run from a challenge, even those
that other men would consider impossible.' Looking for a
moment into the girl's eyes, Mara added, 'These words
make a poor substitute for the experience of knowing the
man himself'

Kamlio digested this information slowly. Her small hands
worried at her robe, twisting the fabric into wrinkles. 'I
cannot love him,' she admitted, the words wrung from
her as cruelly by circumstances as she herself treated th.
hapless cloth, 'nor any man, I think. His hands once gave
me pleasure, true enough, but bed sport for me is an empty
pastime.' Her eyes seemed unfocused in distant memory. 'I
grew to hate the hour of sundown, when my master would
come to me.' She paused, then added bitterly, 'There were
times when' felt like a performing dog. Fetch this robe.
Rub this place. Turn this way.' Looking again to Mara,
she said, 'There is nothing of feeling or love in knowing
a man's body, Lady, for one such as me.' She lowered her
eyes. 'I confess, the real attraction in taking a younger lover was
in the danger. Arakasi brought me to pleasure, Lady,
because he risked death to do so.' Moisture gathered in
her eyes. 'Gods, Lady, do you see what a twisted thing
I've become? There were whole months when I considered
suicide, except that I felt too low, too honorless, to sully a
blade with my blood.'

Tsurani pride, Mara thought. She longed to reach out
and reassure the tortured girl; except that to Kamlio, touch
of any sort on her body was divorced from emotional
contact. Though words alone seemed cold, Mara had
no other comfort to offer. 'Arakasi understands this far
better than you think.' She waited a moment for this to

...

fsinK in.

Thoughtfully, Kamlio nodded. 'It is true that he did not
once try to touch me since the hour he bought my freedom.
Since you told me he was a reed woman's son, I realise why.
But at the time, I was too furious over the death of my sister
to notice.'

Mara took this for encouragement. 'If you cannot love
him, be his friend instead. He has a lively intellect, and
piercing wit.?

Kamlio looked up, her eyes sparkling with held-back
tears. 'He would settle for so little from me?'
'Try him.' Mara smiled. 'Love doesn't demand; it accepts.
It has taken me my life to learn this.' Lowering her voice,
she added, 'And the gift of two exceptional men.' Looking
at Kamlio directly, she took on a conspiratorial tone. 'I
have seen nothing, and no man living, who was capable of
shaking Arakasi's nerve. The challenge of your friendship
might teach him some much needed humility.'

Kamlio flung back her glorious light gold hair, her
expression turned impish. 'Are you implying I could get
back at him for his presumption where I am concerned?'

'I am thinking you could learn from each other,' Mara
finished. Then she glanced around the room. 'But that
depends upon us returning from these highlands alive.'

Kamlio's brief happiness drained away. 'They could force
you to trade me.'

Mara's insistence came back whip-cracksharp. 'No. I am
a Lady, and Tsurani. I stand by my word. Your life is not
mine to bargain away. Either I win my requests upon my
own merits, or I face whatever fate the gods intend. If it
comes to your continued captivity, Kamlio, hear now that I

give you my blessing to take your own life by the blade or to
escape into freedom as you can; you are a free woman. Let
there be no question that your blood or your desires are any
less honorable than Lujan's, or Saric's, or those of any other
warrior of my honor guard.' Suddenly overwhelmed by how
tired she was, Mara stifled a yawn behind her blankets. 'But
I do not think things will come to that. The later events of
my evening cause me to surmise that Hotaba's offer was a

552 Mistress of the Empire

test. My test. If I won any concessions, we will not know
until the morning. Sleep now, Kamlio. For the rest of this;
night, we can only wait patiently on the outcome.'

Daybreak, and the silence as the winds stilled, found both
Lady and courtesan sleeping. Mara lay curled in a tangle d
black hair, the blankets twined tightly around her shoulders
from restless dreams. She started upright on a sharp intake
of breath at the touch of Mirana's hand.

'Lady, arise and dress quickly,' softly urged the chieftains
wife. 'The Kaliane has returned to announce the decision

made in Dorales.'

Mara threw herself out of the cot and gasped at the chill
in the air. The hearthfire had gone out during the night.
While she.pulled on her ice-cold robes, Mirana rebuilt
the blaze with kindling, so that Kamlio might wake up
in better comfort. The crack in the shutter showed grey.
Clouds or mist obscured the sunrise, and Mara felt stiff in
her joints.

There were silver hairs caught in her comb as she finished
making herself tidy. Her heart beat too fast in apprehension,.
and her thoughts circled again and again back to home, and
the children, and Hokanu. Would she ever regain the chance
to repair her marriage? Gods, she prayed, let me not die on
foreign soil. Let Kamlio return home for Arakasi.

For the first time where the girl was concerned, Mara
saw hope in the doomed tie to her Spy Master. Thuril
captivity had shaken the child from bitter cynicism, made
her reexamine her self-worth and those bits of her life that
were now her own to control.

'Hurry,' Mirana urged quietly, so as not to wake Kamlio..
'The Kaliane is not known for patience.' ;

Mara laced her cold feet into her sandals, the leather worn
thin now, and stretched out from wetness and sliding on the shale
of the mountain paths. One of the toes was frayed;

out. Who in the Empire would recognise her for the Good

Servant, with her face unpainted, and her robes as plain as

a pot girl's? Rising and walking out the door to meet the
Kaliane without even token appearance of her rank took
a shameful amount of courage.

Mara strove without success to feign unconcern. But her
palms were sweating and her hands trembled, and she had
to be grateful to the horrid, clammy mist for hiding the
moisture in her eyes.

Her memories brought back within the golden circle
troubled her more than she cared to admit. Were Kevin
here, he would have commented in atrocious humor, even
in so tense a moment. Mara missed his irreverent sense of
mistiming that no amount of chiding had ever managed
to correct. Long before she was ready, she found herself
chivvied by Mirana into the wide main square, where
the tatterdemalion person of Hotaba awaited, along with
a figure hunched under layers of robes whose person
emanated presence more awesome than the Emperor's.

Mara swallowed her pride and bowed low. 'I await the
Kaliane's decision,' she murmured.

Old, clawed hands tugged her erect. 'Lady, stand upright.
Here obeisance is an insult.' The Kaliane regarded the
Acoma Lady with a stare as piercing as the bit of glass
Jican used to magnify questionable guild seals to check
their authenticity. 'Lady Mara,' said the enchantress in
her dry crone's voice, 'our decision has been made. We
have decided to support your cause in this way: you will
be granted permission to journey, along with the one of your
company that you designate. You will be shown through the
high passes, to the gates of Chakaha, the cho-ja city wherein
dwell their masters of magic.'

Mara's eyes widened. The Forbidden! she thought to
herself. If cho-ja could breed mages, and the 'treaty' with
the Assembly forbade them to practice within the borders

Decision

5S3

554

Mistress of the Empire

of Tsuranuanni, much of the cho-ja Queen's reticence was
explained. Her excitement mounted

The Kaliane seemed to sense this, for her next words
were stem. 'Lady Mara, know that the cause of the Tsurani
people is not our cause. Thuril made war only when our
lands were invaded. We do not hold it to be our duty to
concern ourselves with the politics of an enemy nation
However, the cho-ja may see their part differently. Their
people within Tsurani borders are a captive nation. You
will be given your chance to be heard by them, and to win
their alliance if you may. But be warned: the cho-ja hive
will view you as an enemy. Our people can conduct you
in safety to the hive's borders and no farther. We cannot
act as your spokesman. Neither can we intervene to spare
you if the cho-ja receive you with enmity. Understand me
dearly: you could die for your good intentions.'

This was an uncertain step forward, Mara assessed in the
split second that followed, but a step nonetheless. Clearly
she said, 'I have no choice. I must go. I will take Lujan, my
Force Commander, and in his absence, my adviser Saric will
captain my honor guard.'

The Kaliane's eyes flickered with what might have
been guarded admiration, or maybe pity. 'You have courage,'
she admitted, and then sighed. 'You also do not
know what you face. But very well. Be assured that
your servants and warriors will be shown the hospitality
of guests until your kite is known. If you return,
they will be restored to you. If you die, they will bear
your remains back to your homeland. So say I, the
Kaliane.'

Mara inclined her head to seal her agreement that these
arrangements were satisfactory.

'well,' Mirana snapped from the sidelines, 'husband, are
you going to stand there gaping in disappointment because
you could not wrest away the gold-haired lass for our son,

or are you going to go to the soldiers' compound and roust
out Force Commander Lujan?'

'Shut up, old woman! The peace of the dawn is sacred,
and you profane life itself with your poise.' He squared his
shoulders and glared, until the Kaliane cast him a glance
of disapproval. Then he hurried off at a shuffling, comical
run on the errand as his wife had bidden him.

As he vanished, the Kaliane "gathered her robes against the
streaming mist. To Mara she said, 'You will leave as soon as
supplies can be "gathered for your journey. You will go on
foot, as the uplands are too rough for other conveyance.'
She paused, as if assessing some inward thought, then
added, 'Gittania, one of our acolytes, will act as your
guide through the passes. May the gods smile upon your
efforts, Lady Mara. It is no easy task you have set for

Decision

555

yourself, for the cho-ja are a fierce race with a memory
that does not readily allow forgiveness.'

An hour later, following a hot meal, Mara and her
one-man delegation were ready to set off. A small crowd
of noisy children and idle house matrons, headed by
Hotaba and his council, gathered to see them off They
were joined by the acolyte Gittania, who proved to be a
slight, mousy-haired girl who looked lost in the-voluminous
folds of the cloak of her order, a knee-length garment woven
in blinding patterns of red upon white. She had flushed
cheeks, a sharp nose, and an irrepressible smile. Where
the sober, broken colors of Thuril plaids tended to blend
with the landscape, Gittania's garb would mark her like
a target.

Lujan was quick to comment upon this. 'Perhaps,' he

philosophised in rare reflection, 'she wears her gaudiness
like those birds or berries that are poison, a warning that
her magical powers bring retribution to any who might
attack her.'

Although he spoke quietly, the acolyte heard him.

S56 Mistress of the Empire

'Actually not, warrior. We who take vows as apprentices
are marked apart because we wish to be seen. For the
years of our reaming, we are bound to serve any man or
woman who needs assistance. The cloaks serve as badges
of recognition, that we may be easily found.'

Huddled against the streaming mist, Mara asked, 'How
many years do your kind apprentice to the masters?'

Gittania gave back a rueful grin. 'Some, up to twenty-five
years. Others never reach passage, and wear the white
and scarlet for life. The youngest master on record held
apprenticeship for seventeen years. He was a prodigy.
His accomplishment has stood unbettered for a thousand
years.'

'The requirements of your peers are tasking indeed,'
Lujan observed. Since war was a young man's trade, he
could hardly contemplate the patience it must take to spend
half a lifetime in study.

Yet Gittania did not seem resentful of such arduous
standards. 'A master wields great power, and with it,
tremendous responsibility. His years as an acolyte teach
temperance, patience, and, above all, humility, and provide
time to develop wisdom. When one has tended sick babies at
the bequest of every herder mother in the fells, one learns in
time that the small things count for as much as, or perhaps
more than, the great affairs of rulership and politics.' Here
the girl paused for a saucy, sidelong grin. 'At least, of this my
elders assure me. My years are too few yet to understand the
significance of a baby's rash in all the great turnings of the
universe.'

Tired as she was, Mara laughed. Gittania's outgoing
honesty was a pleasant change after Kamlio's difficult
moods and sullen bitterness. Although the Lady had
fears enough concerning the outcome of her forthcoming
encounter with the Thuril cho-ja, she looked forward to
the journey as a time to settle her worn nerves, and to

Decision

557

contemplate how she would handle her audience with
a strange cho-ja Queen. Gittania's blithe humor would
certainly be a balm to ease the strain.

The Kaliane had silently observed the conversation, while
the bundles of food and waterskins were made ready on the
back of a querdidra. 'The cho-ja are secretive, untrusting,'
she confided in last minute counsel. 'Once this was not so.
Their masters and ours mingled freely, exchanging ideas
and knowledge. In fact, much of our foundational training
as mages derives from cho-ja philosophies. But the war
centuries ago between cho-ja and Tsuranuanni taught the
creatures that men with power can be treacherous. Since
then the hives have been reticent, and contact reluctant to
nonexistent.' She moved to stand before Mara, and said,
'I do not know what you will face, Good Servant. But I
warn you one last time: Tsurani are anathema to these
cho-ja. They do not forgive what has happened to their
counterpart hives across the border, and they may well
hold you accountable as if you had been the very one who
forced the treaty upon them.'

At Mara's expression of surprise, the Kaliane reacted
sternly. 'Believe me, Lady Mara. Cho-ja do not forget, and
to them good does not tolerate the presence of repression
or evil. Right-thinking men, they would say, would have
dissolved the so-called treaty that forbids Tsurani cho-ja
their rights to magic. Each day that passes without such
remission keeps the crime fresh; to them the insult of
centuries past is as one committed this moment. In the hives
of Thuril, you might find no ally against your Assembly,
but only a swift death.'

Sobering the words might be, but Mara was not deterred.
'Not to go is to embrace defeat.' with a nod to Lujan and
a wave to Gittania to indicate her readiness, she faced the
town gates.

From behind, Kamlio watched her mistress's departure

SS8

Mistress of tl~e Empire

with wide eyes. Mara had captured her admiration. Had the
Lady looked back, she might have seen the ex-courtesan's
lips move in a vow that, should any of the Acoma party
survive to return to the Acoma estates, she would give the
Lady what she so plainly hoped: an attempt to be friends
with Arakasi. Kamlio bowed her head as Mara became
lost to view and Lujan's plumes disappeared in the mists
She swore her oath, humbled that the fears that seemed
overwhelming to her had little substance when compared
with the dangers that Mara strode to meet with straight
back and raised chin, and no sign at all of trepidation.

The journey through the Thuril high pass proved an
arduous trail. After one day's travel, the terrain steepened;
gorse-covered. highlands reared up into rocky outcrops
scoured clean of moss by wind. The sun seemed always
scudded over by clouds, and the valleys, swathed in
streamers of mists that twined over the courses of becks ant
streams. Mara managed the stony footing with difficulty,
helped over the rougher patches by Lujan's steadying hand.
Her sandals became scuffed on the shale, and she had no
breach to spare for talk.

Gittania seemed as untroubled by the territory as the
querdidra billy they brought to carry their supplies and
bedding. She chattered almost constantly. From her comments
as they passed by this valley or that, which sheltered
its little village or cluster of herders' hamlets, Mara learned
more about Thuril life. The highlanders were a fierce race,
wedded inseparably to their independence, but contrary to
the opinion held by most Tsurani, they were not warlike.

'Oh, our young men play at battle,' Gittania allowed,
leaning during a rest break upon the tall herder's staff
she used to steady her walking. Lujan also guessed she
knew how to use it as a weapon, if it did not also serve
as a staff for magic. But that assumption was shattered
when Gittania accidentally broke the wood and, without
ceremony, bought another stick from a man who trained
herd dogs. Now her fingers ran up and down, stripping off
the rough bark that might give blisters. 'But raids, fighting,
these are things young men do to gain the skills to steal
their wives. A few boastful ones venture into imperial lands.
Most do not return. If they are caught, and fight, they have
broken the treaty and are outlaws.' Her face darkened as
she said the last.

Mara recalled the captives condemned to die as sport for
Tsurani nobles in the arena, and was shamed. Did any of
the games masters who staged such atrocities have a clue
that the men they sent out to duel were just boys who
might have first committed no worse a mistake than a
prank? Had any imperial warrior or official ever troubled
to question the ones who strayed across the border, naked
and painted as if for war? Sadly, she thought not.

Gittania seemed not to notice the Lady's melancholy
contemplation. She gestured with her staff over the scrubcovered
valley, dotted, here and there, with the querdidra
herds bred for cheese and wool. 'Mostly we are a nation
of traders and herdsmen. Our soil is largely too poor to

farm, and our strongest industry is weaving. The dyes, of
course, are very costly, imported as they are from your
warmer lowlands, and from Tsubar.'

Gittania chided herself for her rambling talk, and urged
Mara and Lujan to set off once again. The pace she
set was brisk. Days were shorter in the uplands, where
the high crowns of the hills pushed the sunsets earlier.
The place where at last they made camp was in a hollow
between two rock-crowned knolls. A stream gushed
from a spring there, and short, wind-stunted trees offered
shelter.

'Wrap well in your blankets,' Gittania urged as she and
Mara scoured the dinner utensils dean in the icy water.

560 M'stress of the Empire

'Nights get cold in these highlands. Even in summer, there
can be an occasional frost.'
Morning saw leaves and grass etched in a silvery patina
of ice crystals. Mara marveled at their intricate patterns,
and admired the fragile beauty as a chance ray of sun fired
the edges like gilt. Barren this land might be, but it had a
wild grace all its own.

The trail steepened. More and more, Lujan had to assist
Mara in the climb, as his studded battle sandals gained
better purchase than hers, which were soled in plain leather
The roof of the clouds seemed close enough to touch, and
the querdidra herds thinned, forage being too sparse to
sustain them. Here the splash and tumble of spring-fed
streams formed the sole sound, beyond the whip and moan
of the wind.

The pass itself was a winding ledge that snaked between
steep, slate faces that glistened black where water seeped
from the earth. Mara gulped deep breaths of the thin air,
and commented on the strange, sharp smell that seemed to
ride the gusts.

'Snow,' Gittania explained, her cheeks nipped red by the
chill, and her smile the warmer by contrast. She tugged her
scarlet-and-white sleeves down over her hands for comfort,
and added, 'Were the clouds thinner, you might see ice on
the peaks. Not a sight you Tsurani are accustomed to, I'll
warrant.'

Mara shook her head, too breathless to speak. Hardier
than she, Lujan said, 'There are glaciers in the great range
we call the High Wall. Wealthy lords in the northern
provinces are said to post runners into the hills to gather
rare ice for their drinks. But for myself, I have never seen
water harden from the cold.'

'It is a magic of nature,' Gittania allowed and, seeing
Mara's distress, called for another short rest.

The passes fell behind, and the trail descended. On this
side of the mountains, the lands were less arid, and the
plantlife thorny and leaved in silver grey. By Gittania's
explanation, more rain fell here. 'The clouds will thin
before long, and then we will be able to see the cho-ja
city of Chakaha in the distance.'

No querdidra herds grazed these slopes, the vegetation
being too thorny to be edible, but a few families eked out
a living by harvesting plant fibers to twist into rope. 'A
hard living,' Gittania allowed. 'The cordage is among the
best available for strength and longevity, but this valley is
a long, difficult distance from the seaside markets. Carts
cannot cross the pass, so all of the haulage must be done
by packbeast, or on the backs of strong men.'

It occurred to Mara that the sure-legged cho-ja might
handle such a burden over the rugged trails with an ease
unmatched by any human, but she was too unsure of what
relationship the Thuril hives might share with humans to
offer any such suggestion. And then the thought left her
mind, for the trail crooked and dipped down, and the clouds
thinned and parted to reveal the valley below, spread out
like a tapestry beneath a high, pale green Tsurani sky.

'Oh!' Mara exclaimed, utterly forgetful of protocol. For
the sight that greeted her and Lujan was a wonder more
overwhelming than even the intricate beauty she had
witnessed in Dorales.

The mountains fell away, thorny growth and stony
washes descending into a lush, tropical valley. The breezes
carried the scent of jungle vines, exotic flowers, and rich
earth. Frond trees raised fanlike crowns skyward, and
beyond them, more delicate than the gold filigree wrought
by the most skilled of the Emperor's jewelers, arose the

cho-ja hives.

'Chakaha,' said Gittania. 'This is the cho-ja's crystal
city.'

As if spun from glass, fingerlike spirals rose from pastel

562

Mistress of the Empire

domes that sparkled in all colors, like gems in a crown.
Rose, aquamarine, and amethyst arches of impossible
delicacy spanned the gaps between. Shiny black cho-Ja
workers, looking like strings of obsidian beads in the
distance, scampered across these narrow catwalks. Mara
feasted her eyes upon the gossamer, sparkling architecture,
and was further astounded. In the air above, winged cho-ja
flew. They were not the jet black she was accustomed to, but
bronze and blue, with accenting stripes of maroon. 'They
are so beautiful!' she breathed. 'Our Queens in Tsuranuanni
birth only black cho-ja. The only color I ever saw was the
shade of an immature Queen, and she darkened like the
rest with her maturity.'

Gittania sighed. 'Cho-ja magicians are always brilliantly
marked. You have none in the Empire because they are
forbidden there. To our sorrow, Good Servant, and your
everlasting loss. They are wise in their power.'

Mara did not immediately answer, entranced as she was
with Chakaha. The glass spires were backed by a blue range
of mountains whose tops sparkled white against the sky.

'Ice!' Lujan surmised. 'There is ice on those peaks. Ah,
but I wish Papewaio were here to see this wonder! And
Keyoke. The old man will never believe what we saw when
we return home to tell him.'

'If you return home,' Gittania said in uncharacteristic
acerbity. She made a shrug of apology to Mara. 'Lady, I
may go no farther. You must follow the trail into the valley
from here, and seek your way to Chakaha on your own.
There will be sentries. They will intercept you long before
you reach the crystal gates. Gods go with you, and may
they allow you audience with their Queen.' The acolyte
fell awkwardly silent as she reached into her mantle and
pulled out a small object, oblong in shape, and heavily
dark as obsidian. 'This is a reading stone,' she explained.
'It carries a record of the memories the Kaliane's council

.

Decision

S63

called from you within the golden truth circle. It shows why
we granted you passage through our lands, and gives our
advice to the hives of Chakaha. The cho-ja magicians can
interpret its contents, if they choose.' She pressed the object
into Mara's hands with fingers that were cold with nerves.
'Lady, I hope the memories recorded in the stone will help.
The Kaliane spoke of some of them. They form an eloquent
testimony on behalf of your cause. Your danger will be in
establishing contact, for these cho-ja can kill swiftly.'

'Thank you.' Mara turned the stone over in her grasp,
then tucked it into her robe. Glad that her Force Commander'
s weapons had been returned, for she disliked the
notion of walking unarmed into a potentially hostile camp,
Mara took her leave of Gittania. 'Please give your Kaliane
my thanks also. With the grace of the gods, and good luck,
we will meet again.'

So saying, she nodded to Lujan, and stepped off toward
the lush lowland valley where the city of Chakaha awaited.
Neither she nor her handsome Force Commander looked
back, Gittania saw. That saddened her, because over
their three-day march, she had come to like the Good
Servant, whose curiosity held so much compassion for
others, and whose hope was to change the, course of
Tsuranuanni's future.

The trail descended sharply, over stones that were loose
underfoot. Lujan steadied his Lady's elbow, and though
his touch was sure, Mara still felt the precariousness of
their position. Each step forward carried her farther into
the unknown.

Brought up in the crowded sprawl of the Acoma estates,

accustomed to the throngs of Tsurani cities, and to the
presence of servants, slaves, and the numerous officers that
made up the households of the noble-born, she could not
recall a time in her life when she had been so alone. Her

564

Mistress of the Empire

meditation cell in the Temple of Lashima had been isolated
from others only by the thickness of a wall, and during
the most solitary of her evening contemplations at home,
a single word would bring servants or warriors instantly to
attend upon her needs.

Here there was only the wild sweep of fog-shrouded stone
slopes behind, and the jungle ahead, with its indigenous
population of cho-ja, whose culture was other than the
safe,. treaty-bound commerce she knew with the insectoids
upon her estates.

Never in her life had she felt herself so small and the world
she trod so large. It took all of her will not to turn back,
to call after Gittania, and ask to be guided back to Thuril
territories, which now did not seem strange or threatening,
but simply and understandably human. But back in the
Thuril village awaited the rest of her honor guard, and
Kamlio, dependent upon her efforts; and linked to them, her
family and children and all of the lives upon three sprawling
estates answerable to Shinzawai and Acoma. She must not
let them down, must secure them haven against the wrath
of the magicians to come. Mara faced resolutely forward,
and resorted to conversation.

'Lujan, tell me: when you were left the life of a grey
warrior, and had no hope for a life of honor, how did
you cope?'

Lujan's helm tipped, as he looked askance at her. In
his eyes she saw that he, too, sensed the immensity and
emptiness of the landscape surrounding them, and that
he was Tsurani enough to be uneasy as well with the
solitude. How much we have grown to understand each
other, Mara thought; how the difficulties of this life have
woven our efforts together into a relationship that is special,
and cherished. Then his reply stopped her introspection.

'Lady, when a man has lost everything that his peers and
fellows consider to be important, when he lives a life that is
meaningless by the tenets of his upbringing, then all that is
left is his dreams. I was very stubborn. I held to my dreams.
And one day I awoke to find that my existence was not
all misery. I realised that I could still laugh. I could still
feel. Feasting on wild game could still ease my belly, and
a tumble with a kind woman could still make my blood
race and my spirits soar. An honorless man might suffer in
the future when Turakamu took his spirit, and the Wheel
of Life ground his fate into dust. But day to day? Honor
does not add to joy.' Here the man who had led the Acoma
armies for close to two decades gave an uncomfortable
shrug. 'Lady, I was a leader of thieves, brigands, and
unfortunates. We as a band might not have had the great
honor that house colors may give a man. But we did not
live without creed.'

Here Mara could see that her Force Commander was
embarrassed to silence. Aware that his discomfort stemmed

from an issue that was central to the man himself, and
aware, too, that more than curiosity prompted her, she
urged gently, 'Tell me. Certainly you realise that I do not
hold to traditions for their own sake.'

Lujan gave a small laugh. 'We are alike in that more
than you know, my Lady. All right. The men that I led
swore a covenant with me. Outcasts though we were, and
cast off by the gods, that did not make us less than men.
We formed what might be called our own house, swore
loyalty to ourselves, and added that what befell one would
be shared by all. And so you see, Mara, when you came
and were willing to embrace us all in honorable service, we
could not have accepted save as a whole. When Pape devised
his clever ruse to find distant kinship so that we might be
called to Acoma service, had one man been refused, we all
would have turned away.'

Mara looked at her Force Commander in surprise, and
by the sheepish look in his weathered face, deduced further.

566

Mistress of the Empire

'This covenant you speak of, it still exists.' She did not ask,
but stated.

Lujan cleared his throat. 'It does. But when we swore you
our loyalty by the Acoma natami, we added a coda, that
our wishes, needs, and honor came second after yours. But
within your loyal army there is still a band of us who feel
a special kinship to one another, one we cannot share with
your other soldiers, no matter how honorable they may be.
It is a badge of honor unique to us, as was Papewaio's black
band of condemnation his own peculiar accolade.'

'Remarkable.' Mara fell silent, her eyes downcast as if
she negotiated a particularly hazardous step, but the footing
was less rocky now, the trail of beaten soil bordered by
the first fronds and greenery that edged the jungle. The
glass towers of Chakaha had disappeared with the loss
of altitude, eclipsed by the dense, high crowns of tropical
trees. Their danger was not lessened but increased, and
yet Mara spared a moment from worry to ponder what
her Force Commander had revealed: that he was a leader
born, and that his loyalty was rare and deep; that even after
advancement to a high post, he had kept his word with the
ruffians Burned soldiers that he had once commanded. It was
noteworthy, Mara thought, that the man at her side had an
inborn sense of himself and his personal responsibilities that
ran deeper than in most Lords who ruled in the Nations. All
this, Lujan had done, without fanfare, without recognition,
without even the knowledge of his Lady, until now.

Mara glanced aside at him, and saw his face had resumed
the mask of Tsurani inscrutability appropriate to a warrior
in house service. She was glad the opportunity had arisen
to learn what had passed between them. All that remained
to be asked of the gods was the opportunity to ensure
that such special qualities and talents that Lujan had
revealed might be brought to full flower. If they survived,
Mara decided, this was a man who deserved rewards
above and beyond the ordinary recognition for exemplary
service.

Then her thought was interrupted by a rustle in the
undergrowth. The first of the high trees lay ahead, their
trunks ancient and wide enough that five men with linked
hands would have difficulty girdling their circumference.
As their deep shade fell chillingly over Mara and Lujan,
a ring of cho-ja sentinels arose seemingly out of nowhere,
silent, shiny-black, and naked but for their natal armor of
polished chitin. Bladed forearms were Burned outward at
an aggressive angle.

Lujan jerked Mara to a stop. His second, instinctive
movement to thrust her behind him and away from the
danger and then to draw his sword was checked, as he saw
that they were surrounded. These Cho-ja wore none of the
humanlike accoutrements of rank that their counterparts in
the Nations affected, and they moved in uncanny silence.

For a moment, the two human invaders and the insectoid
sentinels stood motionless.

Mara was first to break the tableau, giving the full bow
an envoy might use to greet a foreign delegation. 'We come

in peace.' .r ~

Her words were punctuated by a snap as in unison the
sentinels raised forearms to guard position. One among
them advanced a half-step, its face plates unreadable.
These cho-ja of Chakaha made no effort to mimic human
expressions, and the result left Mara uneasy. These foreign
insectoids might attack and butcher them both where they
stood, and not even Lujan's fast eye might detect the signal
that started the slaughter.

'We come in peace,' she repeated, this time unable to
keep the tremble from her voice.

For a drawn-out moment, nothing moved. Over the
drone of insects in the jungle, Mara thought she detected
the high-pitched buzzing she had earlier experienced in the

S68

Mistress of the Empire

chamber of the Queen who inhabited her home estate. But
the sound ended before she could be certain.

Then the one who had stepped ahead, and who might be
classified as their Strike Leader, spoke out. 'You are from
the Empire, human. Peace to your kind is but a prelude to
treachery. You are trespassers. Turn and go, and live.'

Mara sucked in a shaky breath. 'Lujan,' she said in a
tone she hoped sounded convincing,'disarm yourself. Show
that we mean no harm by surrendering your blade to these
whom we would call friends.'

Her Force Commander raised his arm to follow her order,
although she could see by his tension that he disliked the
idea of giving up what small defense he might offer her.

But before he could set hand to sword grip, he heard the
snap, snap as t,he cho-ja left guard position and angled their
weight forward to charge. Their spokesman said, 'Touch
your sword, man, and you both die.'

To this, Lujan jerked up his chin in a flushed blaze of
anger. 'Kill us, then!' he half shouted. 'But I say that if you
do so, when my intent is to surrender, you are cowards
all. With my sword, or without it, at your first charge
we are dead.' Here he glanced at Mara, asking unspoken

permission.

His mistress returned a stiff nod. 'Disarm,' she repeated.
'Show that we are friends. If attack follows, then our
mission is wasted effort anyway, for the Lady of the Acoma
and the Servant of the Empire does not treat with a race of
murderers.'

Slowly, deliberately, Lujan reached for his sword. Mara
watched, running with sweat, as his hand touched, then
closed over the weapon hilt.

The cho-ja did not move. Perhaps above the drone of the
insects, their buzzing communication gave them discourse
with their Queen, but Mara could not tell. Her ears were
numbed by nerves and the fast, loud pound of her heart.
Decision

569

'I will draw and set my sword upon the ground,' Lujan
said tightly. He kept his movements careful, and seemed
outwardly confident, but Mara could see the drops of
perspiration sliding down his jawline beneath his helm
as, ever so slowly, he drew the sword from the scabbard,
took hold of the blade with his bare left hand so that his
intent not to fight could not possibly be mistaken, and
placed the weapon point toward himself upon the earth.

Mara saw the cho-ja shift their weight forward as one,
a movement she had seen before. In another second they
would charge, despite her pleading for peace. As loud as
she could make them, she mimicked the sounds of greetings
she had learned from the hive Queen upon her estates, a
poor human attempt at the clicks and snaps made by the
cho-ja throat.

Instantly the cho-ja stood like statues, frozen a heartbeat
away from murder. Yet when Lujan's sword rested upon
the ground, and he straightened, defenceless, their postures
did not ease.

Neither did the leader of their party speak out. Instead,
a great gust of air arose, lashing Mara's hair into disarray,
and causing Lujan to squint through watering eyes. Down
through the canopy of jungle descended a cho-ja form,
leanly streamlined and brilliantly striped. It possessed an
unearthly beauty that was somehow almost dangerous,
and above neatly folded limbs its seemingly delicate weight
was suspended upon crystalline wings that beat up a storm
of wind.

A cho-ja magician had come!

Mara drew breath to exclaim in involuntary delight, but
her throat gave voice to no sound. The air around her
seemed to shimmer suddenly, and the forms of the cho-ja
advance guard shattered into patternless colon Her feet lost
contact with the ground, and Lujan's presence became lost
to her. There were no trees, no jungle, no sky; nothing at

570

Mistress of the Empsre

all could her senses detect that was familiar, but a chaos
of whirling light.

She found her voice, and her cry became one of terror.
'What are you doing to us?'

A reply boomed back from nowhere, echoing in her
mind. 'Enemies who surrender become prisoners,' the voice
admonished.

And then all of Mara's perception drowned in a great
tide of darkness.


22
Challenge

Mara awoke.

Her last memory of open air, and lush jungle, and a
patrol of cho-ja sentinels did not mesh with her present
surroundings: a narrow, hexagonal chamber of windowless,
featureless walls. The floor was of polished stone, the ceiling
fashioned of a mirrorlike substance that threw back the light
of the single cho-ja globe that drifted unsupported at the
chamber's center.

Mara raised herself on her elbows, then her knees, and
discovered that Lujan stood behind her, awake, and visibly
battling against a restless bout of nerves.

'Where are we?' asked the Lady of the Acoma. 'Do you
know?'

Her Force Commander spun to face her, pale with anger
only barely held in check. 'I don't. The where hardly
matters, though, because we are being held as enemies of
the city-state of Chakaha.' -'

'Enemies?' Mara accepted Lujan's hand to help her
rise; she noticed his scabbard was empty, which partially
explained his edginess. 'We were brought here by means of
magic, then?'

Lujan raked back sweat-damp hair, then from habit
tightened the strap that secured his helm. 'Magic must have
conveyed us from the glen. And only magic can secure our
release. If you look around, you will see there is no door.'

Mara quickly checked. The walls arose sheer and smooth,
unbroken by any sort of portal. At a loss to account for
the freshness of the air, the Lady deduced that the chamber
must be entirely wrought of cho-ja spellcraft.

572

Mistress of the Emp~re

The conclusion made her tremble.

She was no longer dealing with humans, who might by
their nature share some empathy. Cold with foreboding,
Mara knew she and Lujan had become embroiled in the
unknowns of the hive mind. More than ever, she was
confronted by the incomprehensibility of an alien species
whose 'memory' and 'experience' spanned millennia, and
whose framework of reason would be judged only by
collective prosperity and survival. Worse, unlike the hive she
had conversed with inside the Empire's borders, these free,
foreign cho-ja had never been forced to coexist with humanity
except on terms they chose. There would not be even
the imperfect understanding she shared with the Queen with
whom she had exchanged companionship over the years.

Lujan sensed his Lady's despair. 'We are not without
hope, my Lady. These are civilised creatures who hold us
captive. They must be disinclined to kill out of hand, or we
would have died on the trail.'

Mara sighed, and did not voice her following thought:
that if they were adjudged enemies, it was not for their
individual deeds, but for the actions of all Tsurani over
every age of history. The past records of sincere treaties
broken by bloody betrayals were too numerous to count,
and within Mara's lifetime, the tenets of the Game of
the Council had many times caused sons to kill fathers,
and clansmen to rend clansmen. Her own hands were far
from clean.

Her first husband's ritual suicide had been manipulated
by her; so even if the hive mind were to measure her by
the acts she alone had authored, contradiction would be
found in abundance - between the vows she had sworn in
marriage, and the hatred she had held in her heart for Jiro's
brother; and in her betrayal of Kevin, the barbarian she
loved, then sent away against his will, ignorant she carried
his child. It occurred to her, as she bit her lip to keep back

Challenge

i

.

573

tears born of shame, that it was not the cho-ja way to learn
by mistakes, for all of the errors made by ancestors were
available to living memory. They were a race for whom the
past did not fade. Forgiveness for them would not be the
ever renewable resource it was for humankind - grudges
might be kept for millennia.

'Lujan?' The echo of Mara's voice in that confined
chamber was hollow with fear. 'Whatever should become
of us in the end, we must find a way to be heard!'

Her Force Commander spun in a frustrated circle. 'What
is left to do for you, Lady, but to pound on these walls with
my fists?'

Mara heard the desperation he tried to mask behind
bravado. His distress sobered her; ever since leaving the
Coalteca, nothing of Lujan's training as a warrior had
served him. He had held no army to command. The day
the Thuril first arose in ambush upon the trail, she had
forbidden him to defend her. At Loso, he had suffered
insults that he would have spilled blood over rather than
endure. He had been humiliated, driven in bonds like a
slave, against every instinct of his upbringing. Out of his
depth, separated from his warrior companies, he must
find his circumstances incomprehensibly bleak.

Lujan had humor, and cleverness, and courage; but he
owned none of Arakasi's detached fascination with the
unknown. Sobered to acknowledge the demands she had
placed on her Force Commander's loyal spirit, Mara
touched his wrist. 'Bide patiently, Lujan. For either we

are near to our end, or our goal is just within reach.'

Striking to the core of her thoughts, Lujan replied, 'I feel
most worthless, my Lady. You would have done better to
bring Arakasi, or to have kept Saric at your side.'

Mara attempted humor. 'What? Endure Saric's questions,
even when the gods themselves impose silence? And
Arakasi? Lujan, do you suppose that he could have watched

Mistress of the Empire

Kamlio led away without flying weaponless in the face of
armed guards? Unless, of course, she had clawed him to
ribbons on the Coalteca before we even saw landfall. No,
I do not think I would wish either Saric or Arakasi with
me at this time. The gods work as they will. I must trust
that fate brought you here for a reason.'

The last line was false conviction. In truth, Mara knew
only foreboding. Still, her effort had coaxed a quirk of a
smile from her officer. His fingers had ceased drumming
against his empty scabbard. 'Lady,' he allowed wryly, 'let
us pray you are right.'

Tedious hours passed, with no daylight in sight to reveal
the passage of day to night, and no interruption or sound to
break the monotony. Lujan paced the tiny chamber, while
Mara sat and unsuccessfully tried to meditate. Tranquil
thought evaded her, torn through again and again by
longing for her children and husband. She fretted, afraid
she would never again have the chance to make peace
with Hokanu. Irrational worries gnawed at her: that if
she failed to return home, he would marry and beget sons,
and little Kasuma might never inherit the legacy that was
her due. That Justin might be killed before manhood, and
that the Acoma line would fail. That Jiro, with the backing
of the Assembly, would topple Ichindar's new order, and the
golden throne of the Emperor become relegated to a seat for
a slave to religious ceremony. The Warlord's office would
be restored, and the Game of the Council resume with all
its internecine feuding and bloodshed. Lastly, the cho-ja of
the Nations would forever remain bound to subservience
through unjust treaty.

Mara's eyes snapped open. A thought occurred, and her
heartbeat accelerated. These cho-ja might not be moved by
a Tsurani, a sworn enemy - but would they turn their backs
upon their fellows in captivity within the Empire? She must
make them understand that she, as the only opponent of

::

Challenge

575

the Assembly with the rank and influence to threaten them,
offered the cho-ja within Tsuranuanni their first hope of
change.

ùWe must find a way to be heard!' Mara muttered, and
she joined in step with Lujan's pacing.

More hours passed. Hunger began to trouble them, along
with the urgency of bodily needs too long denied.

To this last, Lujan remarked wryly, 'Our captors might
at least have equipped our cell with a latrine. If they leave
me no better choice, I shall have to shame my upbringing
and empty my bladder upon their floor.'

Yet before that point of crisis could arise, a flash of intense
white light smote the eyes of the Lady and her officer.
Blinking against temporary blindness, Mara realised that
the walls that held them appeared to have dissolved. She
had discerned no moment of disorientation, nor heard any
whisper of sound; and yet whatever spell of release had
been keyed, she found herself no longer confined. Had their
prison been an elaborate illusion, she wondered. Daylight
fell through a high, transparent dome tinted soft purple.
She and Lujan stood at the center of a patterned floor, the
tiles fashioned of glass, or precious stones, and laid with
a breathtaking artistry. The mosaics Mara had seen in the
hall of Tsuranuanni's Emperor seemed clumsy as a child's
scrawls by comparison. The beauty might have held her
staring in wordless admiration, but a double-file escort of
cho-ja warriors prodded her forward.

Frantically, she glanced around for Lujan. He was not
with her! She had been mesmerised by the floor, and if
he had been led away, she had not seen where. Another
prod from her escort sent her stumbling ahead. Leading
the column of warriors, she saw a cho-ja with yellow

markings on its thorax. By the tools hung in the satchel
at its belt, it appeared to be a scribe; and it followed on the
heels of another figure of towering height that trailed what

576 Mistress of the Empire

Mara had at first presumed to be some sort of gossamer
mantle. More careful inspection revealed wings, overlaid in
elaborate folds as a lady's train might be. They slid with the
faintest of rustles over the polished floor, emitting sparkles
of light that danced and died in the air. By the palpable
sense of power that chased prickles over her skin, Mara
understood she beheld a cho-ja magician up dose.

Awe held her tongue-tied. The creature was tall! Built
with. slender, stilt-like limbs, it moved with a grace that
recalled to her Kevin's long-ago description of the elves
that inhabited his world of Midkemia. But this alien being
owned more than beauty. Its sleek, wide head was crowned
with antennae that et times gave off glow. Its foreclaws were
ringed with precious metal, silver and copper and iron.
What from a.,distance had looked like striped markings
were actually more intricate, a maze of thread-fine lines
that almost seemed to have meaning, like temple runes, or
text beyond the ken of human perception. Curiosity warred
with Mara's fear, until only uncertainty for her fate held
her silent. Upon her rested the future of the Empire and, as
had chose predecessors named Servant by past Emperors,
she felt that responsibility weigh upon her.

She was ushered down a passageway, and through an
outer door that let onto a catwalk of dizzying height. It
crossed in an arch between two spires, affording a dramatic
view of the glass city, its surrounding jungle, and the teeth of
the mountain ranges that hemmed the valley around. Mara
saw more of the cho-ja magicians in flight over the city's
towers, before her escort of warriors hastened her ahead.
She was urged across the catwalk, which had no railings
but was surfaced with a strange, almost tacky substance
for secure footing. The pillared entry at the far end opened
into another wide, domed chamber.

Here more cho-ja squatted in a semicircle, these marked
similarly to the one she had guessed to be a scribe.
Their colors were baffling, accustomed as she was to
the unadorned black of the creatures in her own land.
She was led into the center of their congress, and there
the tall magician swept around and fixed ruby eyes upon
her. 'Tsurani-human, who are you?'

Mara took a deep breach. 'I am Mara, Lady of the Acoma
and Servant of the Empire. I come to you to plead for-'
'Tsurani-human,' the magician interrupted in a sonorous
boom. 'These before you are the judges that have already
convicted you. You are not brought here to plead, as your
fate has already been determined.'

Mara went rigid as if struck a blow. 'Convicted! Of what
crime?'

'The crime of your nature. Of being what you are. The
actions of your ancestors were your testimony.'

'I am to die for what my ancestors did ages past?'

The cho-ja magician ignored the question. 'Before your
sentence is read, and for the sake of Tsuranuanni, the
human-hive-home that birthed you, our custom holds that
you shall be granted the right of testament, that your kind
not be deprived of such wisdom you choose to impart. You
are granted the hours until nightfall to speak. Our scribes
will record what you say, and their writings will be sent back
to your hive-home in the hands of the Thuril traders.'

Mara regarded the patterned features of the cho-ja
magician, and rage took her. Like Lujan, she desperately
needed to attend to the functions of her body. She could
not think with a full bladder, and she could not accept what
the magician's short speech had implied, that she was just
one member of a hive, and that her permanent absence held
no more consequence than knowledge gained or lost.

The ruby depths of the magician's gaze showed no
quarter. Argument would be futile, she knew. The bluster
that had won her through to audience with the Thuril
council would here gain her nothing. Humbled by feeling

578

Mistress of the Emp~re

that this civilisation made her Empire's achievements seem
less than the efforts of a human babe to make order in a
sandbox, she repressed her desire to shout in frustration
at her fate. In the eyes of this race of beings, she was
an infant: a dangerous, murderous infant, but a child
nonetheless. Well then, she would indulge the curiosity
that plagued her! Perhaps there would be inspiration to
be gained. Pressed by a white heat of impulse, Mara put
aside. her concern for her family and country. She gave in
to the instincts of a child.

'I have no great legacy of wisdom,' she announced in
a bold voice. 'Instead of giving knowledge, I would ask:
in my birth-lands, there is a treaty that holds the cho-ja
nation captive. In my land, to speak of it or to impart
knowledge of the war that gave rise to its making is
forbidden. If the memory of this great battle and the
terms of its peacemaking are recalled in Chakaha, I wish
to be told of these events. I would ask to know the truth
of the past that has condemned me.'

A buzzing murmur arose among the tribunal, a sibilance
that grew into a cacophony that set Mara's teeth on edge.
The cho-ja guard squatted behind her, motionless as though
they might hold their position until the end of time. The
scribe that stood by the magician twitched once, then shifted
its stance as though with uncertainty. The magician itself
did not stir, until, suddenly, it raised its wings. Gossamer
folds unfurled with a gusty hiss of air, and snapped taut
with a crack that silenced the chamber immediately. Mara
stared like a peasant shown wonders, noting that the wings
connected somehow to the forelimbs and hind limbs of
the creature, almost like webbing, but vast as sails. The
forelimbs were many-jointed, and extended high overhead
until they nearly touched the roof of the dome

The magician turned on its stilt-like legs. Its now heated
gaze swept the stilled tribunal, and as it turned full


,
:
j

Challenge

579

around, it glared again down at Mara. 'You are a curious
being,' it said.

Mara bowed, though her knees threatened to give out
on her. 'Yes, Great One.'

The cho-ja magician hissed a high-pitched breath of
air. 'Assign me not the title your kind awards to those
perpetrators of treachery, your Assembly.'

'Lord, then,' Mara rang back. 'I offer my humble respect,
for the oppression of the Assembly has been mine to
suffer also.'

A twitter from those assembled arose at this, then stilled.
The magician's glare seemed to sear through Mara's skin
and touch the core of her thoughts. Swept by a sense of
violation, and a moment that rang like fever, or the pain of
contact with flame, she cringed and choked back a scream.
Then the sensation passed, leaving dizziness. She fought to
keep her balance and stay upright.

When her senses cleared, the cho-ja magician was speaking
rapidly to the tribunal. 'She speaks truth.' Its tone
had turned musical, perhaps resulting from surprise. 'This
Tsurani has no knowledge of the doings of her ancestors!
How can this be?'

Mara mustered the tatters of her dignity and answered for
herself. 'Because my kind have no hive mind, no collective
memory. We know only that which we experience, or are
taught by others, within the span of the days of our lives.

Libraries preserve our past history, and these are mere
records, subject to the ravages of time, and the limitations
set upon them by those factions who set down their
contents. Our memories are imperfect. We have no ...'
Then she intoned the click-chuck that the Queen on her
land had used to indicate the hive consciousness.

'Silence, Tsurani!' The magician furled its great wings,
with a sigh of air currents and a sparkle of light that arose
from no visible source. 'We are not children. Humans have

580 Mistress of the Empire

no hive mind, this we know. The concept is awkward, a
thing that ill fits our thought processes. We understand
you use libraries and teachers to convey your hive-nations'
wisdom through the generations.'

Mara seized upon what appeared to be a moment of
neutrality. 'One of your kind once told me that the hive
mind of the cho-ja resides with the Queens. What one
Queen knows, all experience. But I ask, what happens if
a Queen is to die with no successor? What becomes of her
workers and her males, and all the individuals that make
up hive society?'

The magician clicked its mandibles. 'Her subjects have
no mind,' it allowed. 'Should mishap kill a Queen, her
rirari, those of her chosen breeding attendants, will behead
her survivors out of mercy, for, mindless, they would rove
aimlessly and die.' It stated this without guilt, the concept
of murder being different than that for a human.

'Then.' Mara surmised boldly. 'they would not forage

'They could not.' Metal flashed as the magician made
a curt gesture with its forelimb. 'They have no purpose
beyond the hive. I am no different. The Queen who bred
me is all of my guiding directive. I am her eyes, her hands,
if you will, and her ears. I am her instrument, even as this
tribunal is her arm of judgment. Part of me is conscious,
and I may act in independence if it is of benefit to the hive,
but all that I am, all that I know, will remain with the hive
when this body no longer functions.'

'Well, I offer that we humans are not like cho-ja subjects.
Even as do your Queens, we each have our own mind, our
own purpose, our own directive for survival. Kill our rulers
and Lords, and we will each go on with our affairs. Leave
but one child alive, or one man, and he will live out his
days according to his own wishes.'

The cho-ja magician seemed bemused. 'We have thought

for food, or sustain themselves to survive?'
for generations that the Tsurani hive is insane; if it must
answer to teeming millions of minds, we know why!'

'That is individuality,' Mara said. 'I have little of importance
to offer the Tsurani nation, as one person. Instead,
I repeat my request to know the actions of the ancestors
that have caused your tribunal to condemn me without
hearing.'

The scribe-like creature at the magician's side peered at
Mara and for the first time spoke. 'The telling might take
until nightfall, which is all of the time you are allotted.'

'So it must be,' Mara said, steadier now that she had

been able at least to open conversation with these alien
cho-ja. Of more immediate concern were the bodily needs
that had been denied, and how much longer she must be
forced to put them off.

But the cho-ja, after all, were not entirely insensitive. The
magician's scribe spoke again. 'Your will shall be granted,
along with whatever comforts you may require to keep
your ease through the hour of sundown.'

Mara inclined her head in thanks, and then bowed. When
she arose, the magician cho-ja had departed, without sound,
without ceremony, as if it had melted away into air. The
scribe-type cho-ja remained, directing a sudden influx
of unmarked workers who were dispatched to attend
Mara's needs.

Later, refreshed and fed from a lavish tray of fruits,
breads, and cheeses, Mara reclined on fine cushions while,
still before the tribunal, she was given the services of a
cho-ja orator whose task was to fill in for her those gaps
in Empire history that were forbidden within the borders
of the Nations.

Relieved of discomforts, Mara waved for the cho-ja
orator to begin recitation. While the afternoon spilled
purple shadows through the pillared windows, and the
sky above the crystal dome deepened toward sundown,

S82

Mistress of the Empire

she shared a tale of great sorrow, of hives burned by
hideous, crackling bolts of magic, and thousands upon
thousands of cho-ja subjects mercilessly beheaded by the
rirari of slaughtered Queens. She heard tell of atrocities, of
eggs stolen, and cho-ja magicians put to useless torture.

Cho-ja in those times had been ill prepared for the
realities of an arcanely waged war. They had magic with
which to build marvels, magic to adorn nature with the
beauty of intelligent artifice, and magic to bring fortune
and favorable weather. In such peaceful arts, the insectoid
mages held the accumulated wisdom of centuries, and the
oldest among them had carapaces whorled and stippled
with the patterns of a million spells.

Here Mara dared an interruption. 'Do you mean that the
markings on your mages are badges of experience?'

The orator bobbed its head. 'Indeed, Lady. Over time they
become so. Each spell that they master becomes inscribed in
colors upon their bodies, and the greater their powers, the
more complex are their markings.'

The orator went on to emphasise that the cho-ja mages
from the era of the Golden Bridge held no spells for warlike
violence. They could cast beneficial wards to protect, but
these were no match for the aggressive magic of the
Assembly. The wars involving magic were not battles but
massacres. The treaty that bound the cho-ja of the Nations
to subservience had been submitted and sworn into being
entirely out of need to survive.

'The terms are harsh,' the orator finished on a note that
might have been sorrow. 'No mages are to be hatchet
within Tsuranuanni. Cho-ja there are forbidden to wear
the markings that show age or rank, but must be colored
black in adult life, even as your Tsurani slaves who are
human are restricted to garments of grey. Commerce with
cho-ja outside your borders is not allowed, exchange
of information, news, or magical lore being specifically
forbidden. It is our suspicion, if not the sad truth, that the
Queens within your nations have been forced to excise from
hive memory all record and means of cho-ja magic. Were
you Tsurani all to perish, and the Assembly's edict become
obsolete, it is doubtful if an Empire-bred Queen could still
create the egg to hatch out a mage. And so the sky-cities of
our kind are forgotten, reduced by human decree to damp
warrens beneath the earth. Our proud brethren are forced
to become grubbers in soil, with their arts of spell-building
forever lost.'

By now the sky beyond the arch had darkened under
twilight. The tribunal, who had heretofore sat-in perfect
stillness, arose, while the orator in obedience to some
unspoken signal fell silent. A cho-ja sentinel at Mara's
back prodded her up from her cushions, and the magician's
scribe tilted its head her way in a manner that suggested
regret. 'Lady, your time of last testament is now ended, and
the moment for your sentencing is come. If you have any
last bequest, you are urged to state it now.'

'Last bequest?' Wine and sweet fruit had dulled the edges
of Mara's apprehension, and the familiarity shared with the
orator throughout the afternoon made her bold. 'What do
you mean by this?' ~

The magician's scribe shifted its weight and became
implacably still. The tallest of the tribunal cho-ja delivered
her answer. 'Your sentence, Lady Mara of Tsuranuanni.

After your last testament is given, it will be formally read
that you are to be executed at tomorrow's dawn.'

'Executed!' A jolt of adrenaline and fear caused Mara to
square her shoulders, and ire lit her eyes. She abandoned
protocol. 'What are your kind, if not barbarians, to condemn
an envoy unheard?' The tribunal members twitched,
and the sentinel cho-ja angled forward aggressively, but
Mara was already frightened witless and she did not take
any note. 'It was a Queen of your own kind who sent me

584

Mistress of the Empsre

here to treat with you. She held hope for those cho-ja who
are a captive nation within our Empire's borders, and she
saw in me the chance to rectify the human misdeeds of the
past. Would you execute me out of hand, when I am the
opponent of the Assembly, come here to ask aid against
their tyranny?'

The tribunal regarded her with identical sets of gem-hard
eyes, unmoved. 'Lady,' rang their spokesman, 'state your
last bequest if you have one.'

Mara closed her eyes. Were all of her efforts to end here,
with her life? Had she been Servant of the Empire, wife
to a fine Lord, Ruling Lady of the Acoma, and adviser
to the Emperor only to die in shame on foreign soil? She
repressed a violent shiver, and stayed the hands that itched
to scrub the sweat of outright terror from her brow. She had
nothing left to her at this moment beyond the dignity of her
people. Her honor she no longer believed in, after hearing
of what her forebears had done on the battlefield against
a peaceful civilisation. And so her voice rang oddly steady
as she said, 'Here is my last bequest: that you take this,'
She held up the magical token given her by Gittania, which
should have been her testimony to these hostile aliens. She
forced herself to press on. 'That you take this record, and
incorporate it into your hive memory along with the details
of my "execution", so that all of your kind to come will
recall that humankind are not alone in the perpetration of
atrocity. If my husband and my children - indeed, if my
family that serves as my hive must lose me in retribution
for the treaty of the Assembly, then at least my heart's
intentions must survive in the hive mind of my killers.'

- A buzz of noise met her statement. Mara yielded to
reckless, icy resolve. 'This is my last bequest! Honor it
as my death wish, or may the gods curse your kind unto
the ending of time for perpetrating the very injustices you
deplore in us!'

'Silence!' The command rocked the chamber, reverberating
off the crystal dome with force enough to deafen.
Cringing from the sheer volume of the sound, Mara took
a second to realise that the command did not arise from
the tribunal but came instead from a cho-ja magician that
had materialised out of nowhere at the chamber's center
Its wings were deployed to full extension, and its markings
were complex enough to lose the eye in dizziness. It stalked
toward Mara, hard turquoise eyes like the ice that sheathed
the distant mountains. When it halted before the Lady, its
stance was menacing.

'Give me your token,' it demanded.

Mara offered the object, certain she could not have done
otherwise even had she been of a mind to resist. There was
magecraft in the cho-ja's tone that compelled response from
her flesh.

The cho-ja mage scooped up the token with a touch
that barely grazed her skin. Ready with an appeal she
had no chance to deliver, Mara was startled by a blinding
flash. Light enveloped her, densely implacable as suffocation,
and when her senses recovered from the shock
of spell-craft, the domed chamber of the tribunal was
gone, swept away as though it had never been. She
found herself resumed to the hexagonal cell, windowless
and doorless as before, but now the stone floor was
scattered with colored cushions and a pair of Tsurani-style
sleeping mats. On the nearest of these crouched Lujan,
his head resting in his hands, and his mien one of total
despair.

At his Lady's arrival he started to his feet and gave a
warriors obeisance. His bearing might be correct to the
last detail, but hopelessness lingered still in his eyes.

'You have heard what is to become of us?' he asked of
Mara. There was a whipsnap of fury in his tone.

The Lady sighed, too discouraged to speak, and unwilling

Challersge

585
586

Mistress of the Empire

to believe that she had come all this distance to be
summarily consigned to an unjust kite.

'Did they ask your last bequest before they read your
sentence?' Lujan asked Mara.

Numbly she nodded; and between hopelessness and grief,
she thought of one small detail that offered comfort: the
cho-ja of Chakaha had not read her sentence. Somehow the
token and the disruption caused by the reappearance of the
cho-ja mage had interrupted the formal proceedings.

Unwilling to read hope into that small anomaly, Mara
made conversation. 'What did you ask for, as your last
bequest?'

Lujan gave back an ironic smile. As if nothing were
wrong, he offered his hand and helped Mara down to
a more comfortable seat amid the cushions. 'I did not
ask,' he allowed. 'I demanded. As is a warrior's right
when condemned by the state for crimes committed by
his master, I claimed death by single combat.'

Mara raised her eyebrows, too sober to be amused, but
wildly seizing upon the implications of this development.
Right of death by combat was a Tsurani custom! Why
should these Chakaha cho-ja honor such a tradition? 'Did
the tribunal that judged you grant your bequest?'

Lujan's crooked grin of irony told her as much, before
he answered, 'At least I shall have the opportunity to chop
at some chitin before they have my head.'

Mara stifled an inopportune rise of hysterical giggles at
his vehemence. 'Who have the Chakaha cho-ja selected as
their champion?'

Lujan shrugged. 'Does it matter? Their warriors all look
the same, and the hive mind most likely ensures that they
are of equal ability. The only satisfaction I may have is that
I will be chopped to pieces in combat before their headsman
gets his chance to cut my neck.' He loosed a bitter laugh.
'Once I would have considered such a death in your service

Challenge

587

to be a warrior's honor, and the paeans that would have
greeted me upon my entrance to Turakamu's halls would
have been the only reward I desired.' He fell silent, as if in
deep thought.

Mara ventured conclusion of his statement for him. 'But
your concept of honor has changed. Now a warrior's
death seems meaningless beside the opportunities offered
by life.'

Lujan turned a tortured glance to his Lady. 'I could not
have summed up so neatly, but yes. Kevin of Zun opened
my eyes to both principles and yearnings that the Tsurani
way can never answer. I have seen you dare to challenge
the course of our entire culture, as no male ruler might have
done, for fear of ridicule by his peers. We are changed, Lady,
and the Empire is poised on the brink of change with us.' He
glanced around, as if to savor what life was left to him. 'I
care not for my own life; who have I to mourn after me who
will not soon follow me into death when we fail?' He shook
his head. 'It is the frustration of losing any opportunity to
somehow . . . pass along what we have reamed, that these
insights will not perish with us.'

Mara spoke insistently to cover her own pang of fear.
'Hokanu will be left, and our children, to carry on after
us. They will somehow rediscover what we have, and find
a way to act without blundering into this cho-ja trap.' She
let out a long sigh. Looking at her old companion, she said,
'My largest regret, most strangely, is that of a wife and a
woman. I'm everlastingly sorry that I cannot return to make
peace with Hokanu. He was always the soul of sensitivity

and reason before: something of importance must have
prompted his behavior toward Kasuma. I maligned him
unfairly, I think, by accusing him of a prejudice his nature
would not allow. Now it's too late to matter. I must die with
the question unasked that could restore our understanding.
Why, when I could easily bear another child that is male, did

588

Mistress of the Empire

Hokanu act so aggrieved when he learned that his firstborn
was a daughter?'

Her eyes sought Lujan's in appeal. 'Force Commander,
you are a man who understands the game between sexes
well, or so I have been informed through kitchen gossip.
The scullions never tire of describing the serving girls and
ladies of the Reed Life who languish for your company.'
She gave a wry smile. 'Indeed, if they are to be believed,
there are droves of such women. How is it that a husband
as wise as Hokanu should not be gladdened by the birth
of a healthy, unblemished daughter?'

Lujan's demeanor softened, very near to pity. 'Lady, did
Hokanu never tell you?'
'Tell me what?' Mara demanded sharply. 'I was harsh
with my husband, and bitterly outspoken. So deeply did I
believe his behavior was in the wrong, I drove him from
me. But now I regret my hard-heartedness. Maybe Kamlio
taught me to listen more carefully. For like these cho-ja of
the Thuril territories, I condemned my husband without
ever asking his testimony.'

Lujan stood a moment looking at her. Then, as if reaching
some decision, he folded to his knees before her. 'Gods
forgive me,' he murmured softly, 'it is not my right to break
confidence between a Lord and his wife. But tomorrow we
will die, and I have always been your loyal officer. Lady
Mara, I would not have you pass this life without the
understanding you desire. Hokanu was stricken with a
grief, but he would never have spoken of its cause, even
had you returned and begged to hear. But I know what
sorrow afflicted him. I was in the chamber when the healer
of Hantukama informed your husband of what he, in his
kindness, swore he would never reveal to you: that after
the poisoning by the tong that cost you your unborn babe,
you should bear but one more child. Kasuma was your last
issue. Hokanu kept the secret because he wished you to

Challenge

589

hold the hope of another pregnancy. His daughter is a
joy to him, never doubt, and his consecrated heir for the
Shinzawai mantle. But he knows, and is saddened, that you
will never give him the son he longs for in his heart.'

Mara sat stunned. Her voice came out small. 'I am
barren? And he knew?' The full import of Hokanu's
courageous resolve struck her, sharp as the most stinging
thorn. He had been raised motherless and his blood father
had been taken beyond reach by the Assembly of Magicians;
Hokanu's whole world had been one of male camaraderie,
with his uncle, who became his foster father, and his cousin,
who became a brother. This was the root of his longing
for a son.

But he was also a man of rare sensitivity and appreciation
for the company of intellectual minds; where another Lord
with less heart would have taken on courtesans as his
gods-given male right, Hokanu had loved her for her
mind. His craving for equality in companionship had
become realised in marriage to a woman with whom he
could share the most inspirational of his ideas. He spurned
the usage of concubines, the company of women of the Reed
Life, the pleasures to be found with bought creatures like
Kamlio. ~

Now Mara understood how he had been faced with a
choice abhorrent to him: to take another woman to his bed,
one that meant nothing beyond her capacity to conceive and
breed, or to go without a son - to forgo the fraternity he
had shared with his adoptive father, his brother, and Justin,
whom he had given back to Mara for the sake of Acoma
continuance.

'Gods,' Mara all but wept. 'How stone-hearted I have
been!'

Instantly Lujan was beside her, his strong arm supporting
her shoulder. Mara sagged against him. 'Lady,'
he murmured in her ear, 'you of all women are not

590 Mistress of the Empire

insensitive. Hokanu understands why you reacted as you
did.'

Lujan held her as a brother might, in undemanding
companionship, as she ran through all the details to the
half-painful, half-hopeful conclusion that if she died here,
her beloved Hokanu would have Kasuma for his heir, and
freedom to take another wife to bear him the son he longed
for. Mara clung to that thought. At last, to escape her own
woes, she said, 'What of you, Lujan? Surely you do not
contemplate the leaving of this life without regrets?'

Lujan's fingers stroked her shoulder with a rough tenderness. '
I do have one.'

Mara turned her head and saw that he seemed to be
studying the woven patterns of the cushions. She did not
press for his confidence, and after a moment he gave a
wry shrug.

'Lady, it is strange how life shows us our follies. Always
I have enjoyed the favors of many women, but never held
the desire to marry and be content with one.' Lujan stared
fixedly, self-conscious, but oddly freed from embarrassment
by the fact that with the dawn, he must face an ending of life,
an ending of dreams. The nearness of his accounting with
Turakamu lent them both the solace of honesty. 'Always,
I told myself, my roving ways were the result of my
admiration for you.' Here his eyes flashed toward her
in a glance of truthful adoration. 'Lady, there was much
about you for a man to appreciate, and a toughness that
made other women seem . . . if not lacking, then at least
smaller of stature.' He made a tight gesture of frustration
at the inadequacy of words. 'Lady, our journey into Thuril
has taught me to know myself too well, I think, for ease
of mind.

Mara raised her eyebrows. 'Lujan, you have never been
less than the exemplary warrior. Keyoke overcame his
distrust of grey warriors to choose you above others to fill
his former post as Force Commander In these late years I
believe that you have come to hold as much of a place in
his heart as Papewaio did.'

'Now, there is a tribute.' Lujan's lips quirked toward a
smile, and then hardened. 'But I have been less than honest
with myself, now that my spirit lies near to its reckoning. I
am sorry, this night, that I never found any woman to share
my hearth and home.'

Mara regarded the bent head of her Force Commander.
Recognising that in some manner Lujan wished to unburden
himself, very gently she said, 'What kept you from
starting a family and raising children?'

'I outlived my master of the Tuscai,' he admitted with
a tightness in his throat. 'The misery of a grey warrior
cannot be described, for his life is outside society. I was a
young man, strong, and skilled in arms. And yet there were
moments when I very nearly did not survive. How would a
child or a woman fare, were they to be left houseless? I saw
the wives and children of my fellow warriors driven away
as slaves, forever to wear grey and answer to the needs of
a master who cared little for their comfort.' Lujan's voice
sank almost to a whisper. 'I see now that I was afraid that
someday those children would be mine, and my woman
become some other man's to use as he chose.'

Now Lujan looked his mistress squarely in the face. There
was an unnerving depth to his eyes, and a ring to his voice
as he added, 'How much simpler it was to admire you from
afar, Lady, and guard your life with my own, than to live
the possibility of the nightmare that even yet wakens me
sweating from my sleep.'

Mara reached out and touched his hands, then kneaded
them until they relaxed their furious grip. 'Neither you nor

any unborn child of yours will ever in this turn of the Wheel
go masterless,' she said softly. 'For I very much doubt that
either of us will escape this prison with our lives.'

592 Mistress of the Empire

Now Lujan did smile, a strange serenity to his bearing
that Mara had never seen. 'It has been my pride to serve
you, Lady Mara. But if we do live past tomorrow's dawn, I
ask a boon of you, that you command me to find a wife and
marry! For I think that with the magicians as your enemy,
such straits as these might easily be repeated, and if I am
to die in your service, I should prefer not to face the Death
God with the same regret in my spirit a second time!'

Mara regarded him with a smile of deep affection. 'Lujan,
knowing you as I do, I doubt I shall have to command you
to do what is clearly in your heart to do. But, we must win
past tomorrow's dawn.' Crossing her arms as if to ward off
cold, she said, 'We must sleep, brave Lujan. For tomorrow
will come.'


23

Contest

Sleep was impossible.

Since her strangely intimate exchange of confidences with
Lujan, Mara felt no urge to converse. The Acoma Force
Commander had shown no indication to sleep and settled
cross-legged on his mat. The cho-ja had confiscated his
armor along with his sword. Left the padded underrobe
designed to protect his skin from chafing, he looked both
undressed and vulnerable. Battle scars normally concealed
by his raiment were exposed, and although he was as
fastidious as any Tsurani officer, his last opportunity for
a bath had been in an icy river current while enduring
Thuril jibes. His clothing was greyed with dirt, and his
hair spiked up into whorls from long hours under his
helm. Muscled as he was, he seemed somehow diminished
without his trappings and officer's plumes.

Looking at him, Mara was forced to recognise his human
side, his maleness that would never know fatherhood, and
the incongruously tender comfort he had given with hands
better accustomed to the grip of a killing sword. As if his
coming fate held no consequence, he meditated peacefully,
his soldier's discipline forcing worries aside to husband
strength against demands of battle.

Mara, despite every training of the mind garnered in the
Temple of Lashima, was left without such solace. This time
her mind found ease in ritual; if she was not feeling regret for
loved ones who had been lost, she felt rage against an intolerant
fate that condemned her to failure in protecting those
still alive. Try as she might, her thoughts could not be forced
to subside toward anything approaching tranquillity.

594

Mistress of the Empire

The ignominy of imprisonment without any way to
contact her captors left her galled. The magical chamber
effectively sealed the condemned away from all other living
beings. Sourly, Mara wondered whether even gods could
hear prayer in such a place. And with no windows, nor
even the sounds of outside activity, the minutes dragged.
Darkness itself would have carried a blessing of change,
but the cho-ja globe drifted always, its light stark and
constant.
The dawn would come, inevitably.

And yet for all the creeping agony of waiting, daybreak':
caught Mara unprepared. Her racing, trapped thoughts
still circled, repeatedly reviewing events and questioning
whether this action, or that word, or that decision differently
handled might have won them alliance and freedom.
Her futile pondering left her with a crushing headache.
With the flashing magical whirl of light that signaled the
dissolution of their prison, Mara felt tired, and depressed.

A double-file guard of cho-ja marched forward to take
custody of the condemned. Mara retained enough presence
of mind to rise and cross to where Lujan waited, awake and
already on his feet.

She took his dry hands into her own clammy ones. Then
she regarded his expressionless face and intoned the ritual
words, 'Warrior, you have served in highest honor. You
have leave from your mistress to claim what death you
choose. Fight well. Fight bravely. Go singing to the halls
of Turakamu.'

Lujan sank into a bow. His return courtesy seemed to
exhaust the patience of their captors, for cho-ja guards
advanced and hauled him to his feet. Mara also was
grasped and tugged away as a herder might drive a
needra calf to slaughter. She lost sight of Lujan as the
bodies of cho-ja warriors dosed around her. They allowed'
her no chance for protest, but set her on the march
through the maze of hallways that riddled the city of
Chakaha.

She raised her chin high, though pride seemed meaningless.
The cho-ja of these lands were not impressed by honor,
or courage, nor did they have any care for human dignity.
She presumed that very soon she would be greeting the
spirits of her ancestors; but not as she had always expected.
Here, now, the most glowing of her Tsurani attainments and
even her illustrious title of Servant of the Empire seemed
empty. Now she would have traded all for a last glimpse
of her children, or one tender embrace from her husband.

Kevin had been more right than ever she knew. Honor
was only a glorified word for emptiness, and no sane
replacement for the promise of continued life. Why had it

taken until now for her to fully understand what prompted
the opposition of the Assembly? And if help to break their
stagnating hold upon Tsuranuanni could not be found here,
and these Thuril cho-ja would make no alliance, where
would Hokanu seek for resources to end the tyranny the
magicians so jealously guarded? If there were answers, they
must remain a mystery.

The cho-ja guard were indifferent as beings of stone.
They moved briskly through the corridors, and across
two catwalks that sparkled like glass. Mara regarded
the clear sky, never so green and fresh before now. She
smelled the fragrance of rich earth and jungle greenery,
threaded through with the perfumes of tropical flowers;
and on the breeze she drew in the scent of ice carried
on the winds from the mountain peaks. She drank in
these pleasures of life, and also the beauty of Chakaha's
tracery of towers. She walked, bathed in colored arrows
of light caused by sunbeams that shone through the
towers, and her spirit shrank from the senseless end
to come, the giving up of all hope, and the end of all
dreams.

S96 Mistress of the Empire

Too soon, the cho-ja guard escorted her into the translucent
purple dome where the tribunal had judged her the
day before. Now there were no officials present, not even
scribes. The chamber was occupied by the spindly presence
of a single cho-ja mage. It stood in a domed alcove. Upon
the marble floor at its feet was a scarlet line that described
a perfect circle.

Mara recognised the figure's significance. Set to a diameter
of twelve paces, with a simple symbol scribed at east
and west, where two warriors would stand confronting each
other, she beheld the Circle of Death, traditionally drawn
within the Empire for time out of mind. Here would two
warriors battle until one lost his life in the ancient rite
of challenge that Lujan had chosen in place of honorless
execution.

Mara bit her lip to hide an unseemly apprehension. She
had once stood to witness a husband's ritual suicide with
less trepidation in her heart. For then she had regretted the
waste of a young man whose own family's neglect had left
him open for her exploitation. That indeed had been the
first moment when the Game of the Council had shown
itself to be less than a rigid code of honor and more a
license to indulge any excuse to exploit another human's
faults. Now honor itself seemed empty.

Mara beheld Lujan, standing between the cho-ja guards
on the opposite side of the room. She knew him well enough
to read his stance, and she saw, with a terrible pang, that
the human warrior who would take up his weapons to die
no longer subscribed to the beliefs he had been raised in.
He valued the esteem he might gain in the Red God's halls
far less than the lost chance to marry and rear children.

To Mara, Lujan's challenge to combat was a tragic
and meaningless gesture. The honor he might win for
his shade was like the fool's gold that Midkemian swindlers
foisted upon the unsuspecting merchant. And yet
the charade would be played through to its senseless
conclusion.

Lujan was both more and less than the grey warrior she
had rescued from masterless oblivion in the mountains.
Guilt for her own responsibility in that change closed
her throat. She had difficulty breathing, far less holding
herself expressionless and erect as a- noble Tsurani Lady
must in public.

The cho-ja mage waved a forelimb, and an attendant
scurried into view, bearing Lujan's confiscated weapons
and the plain, unmarked armor he had worn into Thuril.
Not without disrespect, it crouched and deposited the gear
at the warrior's feet.

'Our hive has no knowledge of the manner of usage of
these protections,' intoned the cho-ja mage, which Mara
interpreted as an apology that the worker could not offer
Lujan the courtesy of helping him arm.

On impulse, she stepped forward. 'I will assist my Force
Commander.'

Her words echoed across the dome. But unlike in a gathering
of humans, no cho-ja present turned its head,, Only the
mage twitched a forelimb to permit Mara to cross to Lujan's
side. She bent and selected one of his greaves from the floor,
then flashed a glance at his face. By the slight arch to his
brows, she saw he was surprised at her gesture, but also
secretly pleased. She gave him a surreptitious half-smile,
then bent to lace on the first of his accoutrements. She
did not speak. He would understand by her unprecedented
behavior how highly he was regarded by her.

And in truth, the handling of armor was not unknown
to her. She had girded on Hokanu's sword many times, and
before him, her first Lord Buntokapi's; and as a child, she
had played at adult behavior with her brother, Lanokota,
when he had carried his wooden practice sword to workouts
with Keyoke.

598 Mistress of the Empire

Lujan gave her a nod to indicate that she had the lacings
right - tight enough to bind, but not so much that they
would restrict his movement. She finished with the heavy,
laminate sword that had more than once stopped enemies
at her door. When the last buckle of the sword belt was
clasped, she arose and touched Lujan's hand in farewell.
'May the gods ride your blade,' she murmured, which was
the ritual phrase one warrior might say to another who
sallied forth, expecting to die.

Lujan touched her hair, and tucked a drifting strand
back behind her ear. The familiarity might have been
an impertinence, had Lujan not come to hold the place
of her dead brother in her heart. 'Lady, feel no sorrow.
Had I the choices of my youth to make over, I
would live them all again.' His mouth quirked with a
ghost of his old insolence. 'Well, maybe not quite all
There were the instances of an unwise wager or two,
and then the fat madam of that brothel whom I once
insulted . . .'

The cho-ja mage rapped a hind limb upon the paving
with a sound like the crack of a mallet. 'The time appointed
for the combat is at hand!' it intoned, and at no other
discernible signal, one of the cho-ja guard advanced to the
edge of the circle.

It waited there, its bladed forelimbs shining in the soft
light under the dome.

Lujan flashed Mara his most insouciant grin, then
sobered, his mien as taut as any time he had waited
poised for battle. Without a look back, or any sign of
regret, he walked to the circle and took his place on the
side opposite his cho-ja opponent.

Mara felt alone and vulnerable. Uneasily she noticed that
her cho-ja guard had closed the space she had crossed; they
now stood arrayed at her back, as if prepared to block her
retreat, or any other desperate move she might attempt.

Contest

.
:



599

Her knees shook. It embarrassed her that even that small
weakness showed.

She was Acoma! She would not flee her fate, nor would
she demean Lujan by shirking her place at the circle's edge.
Still, when the cho-ja mage intoned the procedure, that at
its signal both Lujan and the cho-ja warrior appointed to
face him should cross within the line and commence the
contest, the Lady fought back an overpowering wish to
close her eyes, to shut from view the petty striving that
was all Lujan might claim for his epitaph.

Lujan gripped his sword. His hand was firm, and his sinews
did not quiver from apprehension. Nervousness seemed to
have fled him, and indeed, to Mara's eyes he seemed more
assured than before other forays in the past. This battle was
to be his last, and that knowledge eased him. Here, on the
edge of the circle of challenge, there were no unknowns to
worry over: the outcome of this fight would be the same
whether he fought well or not, whether he won or he lost.
He would not leave the circle alive. To wish events had been
otherwise was a waste of his strength, and a lessening of the
courage he had been born and raised to exhibit. According
to the creed of the Tsurani warrior, he had let no one down.
He had served his mistress well and fully; he had never
turned his back on any foe. By all that he had been taught
to believe, his death by the blade here was a fitting thing,
the culmination of honor that was more sacred to the gods
than life itself.

Quiet in his readiness, Lujan inspected his sword edge one
last time for flaws. There were none. He had drawn it for

nothing but sharpening since departure from Tsuranuanni.

Then all considerations were ended as the cho-ja mage
spoke out. 'Hear me, combatants. Once the line of the
circle is crossed, the ward of its making will activate. To
step over the line again, either from within, or if another

600

Mistress of tbe Empire

should try to intervene from without, will bring death. The
terms of battle shall be according to Tsurani tradition: either
the condemned shall die in combat inside the circle, or if he
proves the victor, he shall be permitted to choose the hand of
his executioner. I, mage of the city-state of Chakaha, stand
as the witness that these proceedings require.'

Lujan gave the cho-ja mage a crisp salute. The cho-ja
warrior he was to fight gave no acquiescence at all beyond a
change in stance, from a position of rest to the angled crouch
that signaled its readiness to charge. Beads of reflected light
glanced off the knife-sharp edges of its forelimbs, and its
eyes sparkled inhumanly. If pity and regret were part of the
hive mind, such emotion was not reserved for the fighting
arm of its society. The cho-ja warrior held but one directive:
to do battle and to kill. In Tsurani conflicts, Lujan had seen
companies of the creatures turn a battlefield into a butchery,
for unless the weather was cold, the speed and reflexes of
a human warrior were inferior. At best, he judged by the
humid air that wafted through this chamber, he might get
in a few parries before his body was diced up. His passage
to Turakamu would be quick and almost painless.

His mouth tipped into a ghost of a crooked grin. If he
was lucky, he would be drinking hwaet beer with his old
friend Papewaio in Turakamu's halls before sundown.

'Cross the line and commence on my signal,' intoned the
cho-ja mage; and it stamped its hind limb against the floor
with a sound like the chime of a gong.
Lujan's levity faded. He sprang into the circle, barely
aware of the red flare of heat at his back that spelled the
activation of the death ward. The cho-ja warrior came on
with all of the speed he had anticipated, and he barely
completed three steps before his guarding blade clashed
into chitin. Against this foe his peril was doubled, for
cho-ja possessed two forearms with which to sally and
chop at him. He, with his longer blade, had the better
reach; and that humans were more naturally inclined to
two-legged stance meant he could sometimes snatch the
advantage of height as well.

But the Cho-ja was superbly armored. Only a lunge
with the point or the most hefty of two-handed chops
could wreak any damage through chitin. Their joints were
their sole point of vulnerability, yet too often their speed
precluded tactics. Lujan parried and parried again. His
footwork stayed light to deflect the cho-ja's double-sided
attack. He squinted, circled, and spun his blade in the
tight-knit forms proven over time to best defend against
a cho-ja opponent. Blade dashed with chitin as he tested:
the creatures usually had preferred sides. The right limb

might tend more to guard, while the left was cultivated
for attack. Sword and bladed forelimbs whirled in deadly
dance. Lujan became aware of a stickiness to his grip;
exertion had set him sweating. Inwardly he cursed. Once the
leather wrappings of his sword hilt became saturated, they
would loosen. His hold might slip, making his bladework
sloppy. And against a cho-ja adversary, even the slightest
change of angle must be fatal. The strength behind their
blows was such that a direct hit on the outer curve of a
laminate Tsurani sword could shatter its cutting edge.

Lujan beat back another attack, snapped straight as the
guard limb of the cho-ja effected a stroke that would have
severed him at the knees. His leap back saved him from
harm, but a burning sensation in his heel as he landed
warned how near to the edge of the ward circle his evasive
maneuver had carried him. He feinted, used a disengage
that Kevin the barbarian had taught him, and was nearly
fatally surprised when his stroke rasped across chitin and
snicked the edge of a leg joint.

The cho-ja warrior hissed and clattered back, its claws
stiffened with alarm.

And Lujan was nearly taken in the neck by its return

602 Mistress of the Empire

stroke, so unprepared for his small success that he had
dangerously overextended. He half turned on reflex and
caught a glancing slice in the shoulder that peeled through
armor and grazed enough flesh to sting cruelly. The parry
he barely brought up to deflect the guard limb jarred him
down to his sandals.

It took the spinning leap of an acrobat to escape from
being cornered. He ducked away from the milling whirl
of the cho-ja's attack, desperately aware of his peril. He
needed to catch his breath. The fight would give him no
chance. As his toughened hide blade crashed together with
chitin again, he used his bracer to deflect the guard blade,
while the attack blade whistled for his throat. He lunged,
trusting impetus to carry him inside the arc of the cho-ja's
main thrust. he hit its jointed forelimb on the unbladed
inside of the elbow and it folded, its sharpened side deflected
harmlessly against the back plate of his armor.

The blow still had force enough to wind him. Lujan
danced back a half-step, to bring his blade back in play,
while the cho-ja warrior huffed in astonishment. Lujan
followed with the classic riposte, and his curved sword
stabbed in at the juncture where a mid-limb joined its
thorax. The cho-ja scrabbled back, wounded. Its mid-leg
was no longer neatly folded, but dragged, limp at its
side. Caught in wonderment that his attack had gone
through, Lujan felt the dawn of revelation: these cho-ja
were unexperienced at fighting humans! They were well
enough schooled to combat the ancient forms of Tsurani
swordsmanship that they had faced in ages past. But the
shutdown of information across the borders must have
prohibited any experience with the innovations that had
followed the Tsurani treaty. The newest refinements of
bladework introduced by the wars with Midkemia, and
styled on their barbarian way of fencing, had never been
encountered by the hives outside the Empire. Chakaha's

Contest

603

warriors held to the old ways, and despite their superior
speed, despite their double-bladed style, a Tsurani human
held an advantage: his newer techniques were not predictable,
and Lujan had drilled against cho-ja warriors in
the past.

Thought during battle slowed the warrior; Lujan took
a cut to his calf and another to his forearm behind his
left-hand bracer. Despite his wounds, he realised that the
cho-ja was holding back. Perhaps it was the tiniest bit
hesitant because of Lujan's unorthodox attack patterns,
because either one of its blows could as easily have lopped
off a limb. Something had caused it not to follow through
with its full strength and capability.

Lujan paid special heed to his footwork, which was
paramount to the Midkemian style. He slapped the cho-ja's
next stroke aside as he might have dispatched a practice
stick, then tried another disengage. To his gratification,
the cho-ja retreated, proving his theory that it did not
understand Midkemian fencing tactics.

Lujan grinned in a wild, adrenaline-sharpened exultation.
He had crossed practice sticks with Kevin the barbarian
many times and, better than most of his peers, had
mastered the foreign technique. More suited though it
was to a straight sword than to the broader blade his own
culture favored, there were forms a Tsurani swordsman
could execute with good effect. The cho-ja was now
disadvantaged and uncertain, and for the first instant since
Lujan had claimed his right to challenge, he entertained the
hope of victory.

He feinted, lunged, and felt his next stroke connect.
Grinning wider, he saw a spurt of the milky liquid that
served the cho-ja as bodily fluid. His opponent dropped
briefly to its unwounded mid-limb as it counterattacked;
but four-legged posture was sure sign of a cho-ja prepared
to retreat. Lujan lunged for his opening, a clear stroke

604

Mistress of the Empire

to his foe's neck segment. Never mind that its dying
follow-through would take him in the heart. His would
be the victory, his the first lethal strike. He would gain
the time-honored Tsurani reward of death in battle by an
enemy's blade.

Yet even as his trained body responded and on ingrained
reflex began the stroke that would end all contention, his
mind shied away.

What was such a death, if not futile?

Had he learned nothing in his years of service to Mara?
Would killing this cho-ja, against whom he had no quarrel,
achieve one single bit of good toward her goal?

It would not, he saw in a rush of cheated anger. Nothing
would be served, except to confirm Tsurani ways in the hive
mind of the cho-ja of Chakaha.

What is my life or my death worth? Lujan thought,
trapped in a split second between motion. To become the
victorious warrior, no, to kill his opponent out of hand,
would serve no living thing: not Mara, not this hive, and
not the captive nation of cho-ja within Tsurani borders.

Gods, he raged in a moment of lacerating inner anguish:
I cannot live by the warrior's code alone; and neither can
I die by it.

His hand followed the heresy of his thoughts. Lujan
pulled his stroke.

The move was awkwardly timed of necessity, and it cost
him. He gained another slash in the thigh, this one deep
enough to cripple.

Back he stumbled, hopping on his good leg. His cho-ja
opponent sensed his weakening resolve. It reared up. A
whirling forelimb sliced down from above, and Lujan
deflected the cut, barely. His forehead was laid open to
the bone, and as blood ran down his face and blinded his
eye, he was aware of Mara's stifled outcry.

He stumbled back. The cho-ja pursued. He felt hot

Contest

605

pavement beneath his heel, and knew relief: he had
reached the outermost edge of the circle. If he crossed
over, he would die.

He would perish anyway, but perhaps not entirely for
nothing. His end could still make a point. Even as his
opponent scuttled to finish him, he parried furiously, and
cried out to the looming figure of the cho-ja mage who
stood yet in judgment over him.

'I did not come here to kill! You cho-ja of Chakaha are not
the enemies of my mistress, Lady Mara.' Chitin rang against
his blade as, desperate to be heard, he parried again. 'I will
not fight any longer against a being she would have for
a friend.' He parried again, lunged to drive his opponent
momentarily back, and in that half second of respite, threw
down his sword in disgust. On his good leg, he spun, turning
his back to the killing stroke.

Before him glowed the scarlet line of the circle. He was
grateful, in that arrested moment of time, that he had got
his positioning right: the cho-ja warrior could not cross in
front of him without violating the ward spell. If it killed,
it must use the coward's stroke, the murderer's cut, and
butcher him from behind.

He drew a shuddering breath, eyes raised to the cho-ja
mage. 'Strike my back, who would be your friend and ally,
and see your unjust execution done.'

Lujan heard the whistle of the air parted by the cho-ja
warrior's bladed forearm. He braced himself, prepared for
the bone-rending finish to its descent. The end was foregone
conclusion. At this point, a man with a sword could not curb
inertia and snatch back the stroke as it fell.

But the reflexes of a cho-ja were not human.
The blade stopped, soundless and motionless, a hairsbreadth
from Lujan's neck.

The cho-ja mage reared back, its sail-like wings upraised
as if in alarm. 'What is this?' it rang out in what plainly

606

M,stress of the Emp~re

served as astonishment. 'You break the tradition of the
Tsurani. You are a warrior, and yet you give up your
honor?'

Shivering now in the aftermath of nerves and adrenaline,
Lujan managed a steady answer. 'What is tradition but
habit?' He shrugged stiffly, feeling the sting of his wounds.
'Habits can be changed. And as any Tsurani will confirm,
there is no honor in killing an ally.'

Blood dribbled into his left eye, obscuring his vision. He
could not see to tell whether Mara approved of his gesture.
A moment later, it did not matter, for the blood left his
head in a rush. His wounded leg gave way, and he fainted
and fell with a grinding crash of armor to the floor. The
red circle died in a fizzle of sparks, and the great domed
chamber hushed.

Lujan wakened to a sharp tingle of pain. He gasped, opened
his eyes, and saw the head of a cho-ja bent within inches of
his own. He lay on what felt like a couch. Pointy, claw-like
appendages gripped the wounds in his-forearm and thigh,
and by the prick of what felt like a needle, he realised he
was being sewn up by a cho-ja worker physician.

While the medicinal skills of the creatures were exemplary,
and they did neat, careful work, they had spent
little time in the art of practicing upon humans. Lujan
stifled a second grimace of discomfort, and judged that
their knowledge was decidedly lacking in the area of
anesthetics. Even on the field, he would have been given
spirits to dull his awareness of the pain.

So it was that he took a moment to notice the secondary,
more pleasant sensation of small, warm fingers gripping the
hand of his unwounded arm.

He turned his head. 'Mara?'

Her smile met him. She was close to weeping, he saw,
but with joy, not sorrow. 'What happened, Lady?'

Contest

607
Belatedly, he realised they were no longer in the domed
chamber of judgment, nor restored to confinement, but
were installed in a beautifully appointed chamber high up
in a tower. A window behind Mara showed sky and clouds,
and left the Lady awash in bright sunlight. She squeezed his
hand in youthful excitement, though in truth this trial had
aged her. The grey shot through her dark hair had grown
more pronounced, and her eyes showed deep crow's-feet
from prolonged exposure to the weather. And yet never
before had her face seemed more beautiful; maturity had
given her depths and mysteries impossible to the trackless
face of youth.

'Lujan, you have won for the Acoma highest honor,'
she said quickly. 'By your act in the circle, you proved
to these cho-ja of Chakaha that Tsurani tradition is
not the all-consuming way of life they believed it to
be. For ages they have seen Tsurani demonstrate a lie.
They understood all I said, even knowing through their
magic that I believed in my convictions, but their own
past taught that such displays of peaceful ways were but
preludes to more violence and betrayal.'

She took a deep breath of relief. 'You have won us
reprieve, through your courage and innovation. Your
actions lived as one with my words and convinced them
that perhaps we are different from our ancestors. The
cho-ja mage in attendance was astonished by your act,
and was convinced to review the memory stone left to us
by Gittania. On it were records of my meeting with the hive
Queen on the old Acoma estates, and her entreaty made an
impression.'

'Our sentences are rescinded? We're to go free?' Lujan

gasped out, as he could when the cho-ja physician paused
in its labors.

'Better than that.' Mara's eyes glowed with pride. 'We
are to be given safe passage through Thuril to our ship,

608

Mistress of the Empire

and with us when we return to Tsuranuanni will travel two
cho-ja mages. The city-state of Chakaha has decided it will
aid us, in the hope that the liberation of the Tsurani cho-ja
may be accomplished by the Emperor. I have pledged to
use my office to intercede; I am almost certain that once I
explain to Ichindar the truths we have learned, he cannot
say no.'

'Gods!' Lujan exclaimed. 'Everything we could have
asked for has been granted.' He was so excited he forgot
his hurts and attempted to move.

At this, the cho-ja physician said, 'Lady Mara, this
warrior's wounds are severe. Excite him not, for he must
rest for several weeks if his leg is to heal as it should.'
Black, faceted eyes swiveled toward Lujan. 'Or would the
estimable Force Commander prefer to limp?'

Lujan felt suddenly flooded with strength, and he laughed.
'I can be patient while my body repairs itself. But not so
patient that I can stay in bed for weeks on end!'

He rolled his head on the pillow, warmed afresh by
Mara's smile. 'Rest you easy,' his mistress commanded.
'Never mind the delay. Word will be sent back to Hokanu
by way of the Thuril settlements, and from thence, with
the traders overseas. For we have time now, Lujan. And
while your wounds are knitting, I shall prevail upon our
host hive to show us wonders.'


24

Homecoming

The barge left the shore.

Mara leaned on the rail and drew a deep breath of the
warm breeze. The familiar smell of dank earth, fresh lake
water, wet planking, and the slight taint of sweat from the
slaves who manned the oars made her shiver. Home! In
scarcely another hour, she would reach the estates. She
savored the heat of the sun on her flesh.

This was the first glimpse of sky and daylight she had had
since a stealthy night debarkation from Coalteca, and weeks
of underground travel across the Empire by cho-ja tunnels.
For the cho-ja mages had confirmed what heretofore had
been her surmise: that the Assembly of Magicians could
not spy through the dark earth. What transpired in the
cho-ja tunnels lay beyond their ability to scry, a difficult
concession at the time of the treaty. And so her band of
picked warriors, her servant Kamlio, and the two Chakaha
cho-ja had thus proceeded to reenter the Empire in secret.

This they had accomplished with neither permission nor
help from the local cho-ja who dwelt there, lest harboring
the Chakaha mages in any fashion void the terms of the
treaty. The mages' presence was shunned with scrupulous
precision, so that none of the Empire cho-ja could claim to
have seen them pass or to have known of their existence.
Mara's request that all cho-ja vacate the tunnels before
her until after she had passed had been accepted without
question by the Tsurani cho-ja Queens. They might suspect,
but they could answer truthfully they had no knowledge of
what Mara attempted.
As a result of near-total isolation, Mara felt distressingly
uninformed. Only a few scraps of news were given her by
those cho-ja workers she encountered while waiting for the
answer from the local Queen that she might pass through
the hives unobserved; the only important information was
that a Great One yet maintained surveillance over the
entrance of the Red God's temple in Sulan-Qu, waiting
for her to break her seclusion.

That might have been amusing, had it not revealed her
danger. Even after the passage of months, that any member
of the Assembly, however minor, still should deem such a
watch to be necessary meant her next few actions must
be well plotted and executed without flaw; she felt in her
bones that only her unique rank was keeping her alive, for
certainly some members of the Assembly must be at the
end of their patience.

Mara had dared not pause to establish contact with
Arakasi's network of agents along the way. The pace
she had set to reach the Empire's heartland had been
relentless. As she had not cared to risk her own exposure,
or to compromise the hives that gave her shelter, she had
no way to determine how Jiro might have spent the months
of her absence. She did not even know if her husband
had successfully dealt with his dissident cousins and den
rivals who had ambition to upset his inheritance. Mara
had learned only moments before from workers on the
docks that Hokanu had returned to their lakeside estates,
and that the Lady Isashani had teasingly tried to pair him
off with a concubine who had in some way failed to please
one of her dead husband's many bastards. Hokanu had
sent a charming refusal. Although in such social gossip
Mara could find no implication of threat, she asked
out of caution for the foreign mages to stay closeted
within an unused chamber in the hive nearest to the
estate. With them she left two warriors to attend their
needs, and these bound strictly to secrecy. They would
emerge to forage only at night, and would not divulge
their duties to any of the Acoma patrols or local cho-ja.
Mara gave the soldiers a paper affixed with her personal
chop as Servant of the Empire, instructing anyone that the
two soldiers should be permitted to go their way without
question. Such precaution would give no protection from
her adversaries, but it would prevent friends or allies from
blundering into her secret.

Mara leaned into the breeze and faintly smiled. She
had much to tell Hokanu! The wonders she had seen
during Lujan's convalescence in Chakaha defied rational
description, from the exotic flowers the cho-ja workers
cultivated that bloomed in combinations of colors not seen
anywhere else, to the rare liquors distilled from red-bee
honey and other elixirs that they traded with their eastern
human neighbors. Within her baggage she had brought
medicines, some made of molds, others extracted from
seeds or rare mineral springs, that her healers would call
miraculous in their curative properties. She had watched
the heated forging done in the glass works where they
created everything from vases to cutlery to building stone
that shone in clear colors like gems.

She had watched apprentice mages master their first
spells, and seen the fine scrollwork of patterns appear
on their unmarked carapaces. She had watched the most
ancient of the mages, who was lined in a maze of colors, at
his work. He had shown her visions of the far past, and one,
misty with a haze of unresolved probability, that showed
the future as yet unformed. It had looked much like dyes
awash in a fishbowl, but sparkling with flecks like golden
metal. 'If that is my future,' Mara had said laughingly, 'I
shall perhaps die a very wealthy woman.'

The cho-ja mage had said nothing in return, but for a

moment his shiny azure eyes had looked sad.

Mara could not contain her high spirits. She watched
a flock of marsh birds take flight over the reed beds,
and remembered the models that had flown like birds in
Chakaha, and other living, untamed birds beguiled to sing
in counterpoint. She had seen animals grow fur in colors
as brilliant as exotic silk. Cho-ja magic held ways for stone
to be spun into fibers and woven, and ways for water to be
fashioned into braided cable that flowed uphill. Between
times she had been feasted with exotic foods and dishes
seasoned with spices that were as intoxicating as wine.
There existed enough trade possibilities in Chakaha to
tempt Jican to commit sacrilege, and with excitement akin
to any schoolgirl's, Mara longed for her perilous quandary
with the Assembly to be resolved, so that she could resume
more peaceful pursuits. Her problems were not ended, yet
in her high spirits she could not help but feel that things
must work out in her favor.

That mood of frivolous excitement had over-ruled Saric's
more sober advice to remain in the cho-ja tunnels until dose
to her estate house. Mara was so homesick for the sights
and smells of Tsuranuanni that she brought her company
aboveground near the lakeshore, and then commandeered a
barge from her own Acoma tradesmen to finish her journey
by water.

A shadow fell over her. Musing cut short, Mara looked
up. Lujan had crossed the deck and paused at her side.
His inspection of her honor guard was complete, and
if the armor they wore was unmarked in house colors,
their lacquer accoutrements sparkled. Lujan had deduced
his helm with officer's plumes of Acoma green. He moved
yet with a limp, but his wound had healed cleanly under
the ministrations of the cho-ja physicians. In time, he would
recover fully. At present, his eyes glinted with mischief, and
by that Mara knew his excitement equaled her own.

'Lady,' he greeted with a salute. 'Your men are ready for
their homecoming.' The corners of his mouth bent wryly
upward. 'Do you suppose we'll give the dock sentries a
fright? We've been gone for so long, they might see our
colorless armor and think us all spirits returned from
the dead.'

Mara laughed. 'In a way we are.' A second figure
approached and paused on her other side. Sunlight glowed
on a mantle of cho-ja silk, patterned by the Chakaha mages
with an intricacy that might be the envy of any of the
Emperor's wives. Mara saw a fall of gold hair beneath the
hood, and her heart warmed. 'Kamlio,' she greeted. 'You
look extraordinarily pretty.'

In fact, this was the first time Mara or any of the warriors
who had ventured off into Thuril territory had seen the girl
dress other than plainly.

Kamlio lowered her eyelashes in shy silence. But the
building embarrassment caused by Lujan's stare of admiration
a moment later gave rise to her reluctant explanation.
'After our experiences with the Thuril, I reamed to trust my
Lady's word - that I will not be married off or given to any
man I do not choose.' She gave a self-conscious shrug that
set the colored fringes on her garment flying free in the
wind. 'There is no need, here on your estate, to hide in
tattered clothes.' She sniffed, perhaps with disdain, perhaps
with relief. Lujan received a flickering glance that hinted at
temper. 'Our men do not steal their wives by raiding, and if
the Spy Master Arakasi chances to be at the docks, I would
not wish him to think me ungrateful for the raised station
bestowed upon me.'

'Oho!' Lujan laughed. 'You have come far, little flower,
that you speak his name without spitting!'

Kamlio tossed back her hood and gave the Force Commander
a sultry pout that might have been prelude to a

slap. At least Lujan thought it might, for he raised his hand
in mock fear to ward off the result of womanly fury.

But Mara interceded, stepping between her officer and
the former courtesan. 'Behave, you two. Or else the dock
sentries will not mistake you for ghosts, but for miscreants
fit to be sent off for punishment. Doubtless there are enough
dirty latrines in the barracks to keep you both cleaning for
a week.

When Lujan gave no insolent reply to this threat, Mara
raised her eyebrows and looked to see what was amiss. She
found his levity banished, and his expression as stern as any
he might wear in the moment before charging into battle,
as his eyes turned to the distant shoreline. 'Lady,' he said
in a tone grim as granite, 'something is wrong.'

Mara followed his gaze, her heartbeat accelerated by
sudden fear. Across a narrowing strip of water lay the
landing, and the stone walls and peaked cornices of the
estate house. at first glance, all seemed tranquil. A trader
barge much like the one her party rode upon lay warped
to the bollards. Bales and boxes lay piled on the dock
from the offloading, presided over by a tally clerk and two
stalwart male slaves. Recruits in half-armor were dashing
from the practice field, as if they had just finished sparring.
Smoke rose in a spiral from the kitchen chimneys, and
a gardener raked fallen leaves off a walkway between
courtyard gardens. 'What?' Mara asked impatiently, but
the answer became obvious as the sun caught and flashed
on a sparkle of gold. The anomaly drew her eye, and she
saw the imperial runner who raced away down the lane
leading from the great house.

Mara's unease crystallised into dread, for such messengers
rarely brought good news. No longer did the sweetness
of the breeze offer comfort, or the beauty of the green
hillsides lift the heart.

'Bargeman!' she cracked out. 'Get us to shore with all
speed!'

A string of orders answered her command, and the rowers
bent over their looms in double time. The clumsy trader
barge bored ahead, spray flying in sheets from its blunt
bow. Mara restrained an urge to pace in rank impatience.
She was paying for her brash impulse now. Had she
listened to Saric's more prudent suggestion and continued
underground to the hive entrance nearest to the estate, she
might already be getting information from a runner sent
to meet her. Now she was powerless to do other than
watch and wait, while every possible scenario of disaster
played through her imagination. Kamlio looked terrified,
and Lujan sweated in feverish anticipation, lest the troops
he should rightly be commanding be called to the field
without his knowing why. He might be wielding his sword
all too soon, Mara thought. Judging by the furious activity
on the docks, it was plain that no time could be spared to
allow his scars the restful recovery they required.

Already drums boomed from the estate house, the heavy,
deep-noted ones that signaled a marshaling of the garrison.
'It will be war,' Lujan surmised, an edge to his words.
'The rhythm is short, patterned in threes. That code
spells a call for total mobilisation, and Irrilandi would
never stir his old shanks so fast for less than serious
trouble.'

'Keyoke must have shared in that decision,' Mare thought
aloud. 'Even before he was appointed Adviser for War, he
was not an officer to take extreme measures without reason.
If Jiro's hands are presumably still tied by the Assembly,
what could have happened? Is it possible some hothead has
called upon Clan Honor, or worse, that House Shinzawai
might be under attack?'

Lujan stroked his sword grip, as miserable with taut

nerves as she. 'We cannot know, Lady, but I cannot shake
off the hunch that what we see is the beginning of something
worse.'

Mara turned her back to the rail. She found her adviser
Saric looking on, and at her tight-lipped silence, he offered,
'Should I shake up the barge master to force more speed
from the rowers?'

Her face as pitiless as fine marble, the Lady of the Acoma
nodded. 'Do so.'

The barge was commodiously built to carry cargo, and
its lines took unkindly to speed. The increase as the oar
slaves applied themselves to ememity was negligible; the
bows seemed only to carve up more spray, and the roil of
the oar strokes raise deeper eddies. Mara saw the bodies
of the rowers run with sweat before many minutes had
passed. Activities on the docks at the landing intensified,
even as she steeled herself to look.

The bales and boxes that only minutes before lay spread
out for tallying were now trodden by a massing wedge of
warriors. The trader barge had been cut loose half-unladen,
and the tall' keeper set on board in frantic arm-waving
dismay. He sprang shouting into the stern as a shove
from a plumed officer carried his craft from the dock.~
Two brawny stevedore slaves were all he had left to man
the craft to safe anchorage, and his cries of outrage flew - i
across the water like the yips of fisher birds, soon lost in
the boom of the drums. Like the massing warriors, Mara
had little concern for the fate of the clerk and the barge.
The length of the shoreside warehouses, great double doors
had opened along the waterline, revealing the wooden rails
of the launching ways for the craft stored in the dry sheds. 4:
Slaves swarmed in the shadows inside. Out of the dimness
deployed the Acoma war boats, long double-hulled craft
steadied with outriggers, and planked across their lean
length with archer platforms. More slaves rowed these
toward the landing, where company after company of
bowmen boarded. As each boat was filled, it pushed off
into the lake, with the outriggers lowered, like a water
bird's great wings dipping to touch the water. Before the
outriggers were fully lashed into place, archers had taken
position along the narrow firing platform along the top of
each pontoon.
Lujan ticked numbers off on his fingers. After counting
a dozen boats, and noting the banners that flew at the prow
and stern of each, he knew which companies had been called
to action. His conclusion was chilling. 'This is a complete
defensive deployment, mistress. An attack must be in the
offing.'

Mara's apprehension burned away in a surge of fierce
anger. She had not crossed the sea and treated with
barbarians and nearly lost her life in Chakaha to see
all fall to ruin upon her return. She had sent Hokanu
word that she was on her way back to the Empire; but
detailed communication was too dangerous, an invitation
to enemies to set an ambush should it fall into wrong hands.
And when the need of secrecy was past, for her own selfish
pleasure she had held out at the moment of reunion in the
hope of giving her loved ones a joyful surprise. But there
would be no celebration upon her return. Setting aside
both her anticipation and disappointment, she hardened
her manner and turned to Saric. 'Break out the Acoma
standard and let my personal pendant fly beneath. It is
time to make our presence known. Let us pray there is
one sentry not racing to put on war armor who can carry
word of our arrival to Hokanu that his Lady is back on
Acoma soil!'

The honor guard on the trader barge's decks raised cheers
at her brave words, and directly the green banner with its
shatra bird symbol was run up the pole at the stern. No
sooner did it unfurl upon the breeze than an answering cry
arose from the shore. One of the tiny figures on the dockside
pointed, and there followed a great shout from the army
gathered and engaged in boarding. The noise settled into a
chant, and Mara heard her name called over and over, along

with the title bestowed upon her by the Emperor, Servant of
the Empire! Servant of the Empire! Her concern nearly gave
way to tears, that her people could raise such a commotion
of affection at her return, with dire trouble afoot.

The barge master shouted himself hoarse with frantic
orders, and slowly his craft was poled into the gap that
opened in haste at the jammed dockside to receive Mara's
landing. A figure in scarred blue armor hurried out from
the press. Beneath the crested helm that denoted the
Lord of Shinzawai, the Lady saw Hokanu's face, concern
and gladness struggling to burst through proper Tsurani
reserve.

That her husband wore his scarred, sun-faded battle
armor, and not the decorative ceremonial gear reserved
for state occasions, was sign enough that bloodshed was
imminent, for Lords did not march with their troops for
any but a major engagement. Yet after close to a half year of
absence, and the months and agonies of misunderstanding,
Mara paid that detail little heed. She could not pause for
formal greeting, but ran forward the instant the gangplank
spanned the gap from rail to dock. She rushed like a girl
ahead of her officers and threw herself headlong into her
husband's arms.

As if she had performed no breach in proper manners,
Hokanu gathered her dose. 'Gods bless your return,' he
whispered into her hair.

'Hokanu,'Mara replied, her cheek pressed to the unyielding
curve of his breastplate, 'how I have missed you!' And
then the worries of the moment marred their reunion, killing
their fleeting surge of joy as she recalled the absence of
her little ones. 'Husband! What passes? Where are the
children?'

Hokanu set her back at arm's length, his dark, worried
eyes seeming to drink in the sight of her face. She was so thin
and sunburned and vital! His longing to ask the most simple
question after her health was painful to read on his face. But

the smothered panic behind her question demanded answer.
Urgency warred with Hokanu's native tact, and in the end
he settled for bluntness. 'Justin and Kasuma are safe as yet.
They are still in the Imperial Palace, but ill news has come.'
He took a quick breath, as much to brace himself as to allow
her a moment to prepare. 'My love, the Light of Heaven has
been murdered.'

Mara rocked back as if physically pushed off balance,
but Hokanu's fast grip prevented her from falling backward
into the lake. Shock drained the blood from her face. Of
all the calamities she had imagined might happen in her
absence, and after all of the perils she had escaped to bring
back the Chakaha mages, the death of the Emperor was the
last event she could have anticipated. From somewhere she
summoned enough presence of mind to ask, 'How?'

Hokanu gave an unhappy shake of his head. 'The news
just came. Apparently an Omechan cousin attended a
small imperial dinner yesterday. His name was Lojawa,
and before thirty witnesses, he stabbed Ichindar in the
neck with a poisoned table knife. The vial of poison
must have been hidden in the hem of his robes. A healing
priest was brought within minutes, but help came too late.'
Quietly, almost kindly, Hokanu finished, 'The poison was
very fast.'

Mara shivered, stunned. This atrocity seemed impossible!
That the slender, dignified man who had sat on the golden
throne, hag-ridden with worries, and driven nearly to
distraction by the quarreling of his many wives, should
never again hold audience in his grand hall! Mara mourned.
No more-would she offer counsel in the lamplit privacy of
his apartments, or enjoy the man's gentle and dry wit. He
had been a serious man, deeply concerned for his people,
and often careless of his health under the crushing burdens
of rulership. Mara's delight had been to try to make him
laugh, and sometimes the gods had allowed her some
success, giving his sense of humor free reign. Ichindar had
never been the figurehead for her that he had been for the
multitudes he had ruled. For all of his grand state, and all of
the pomp that his office demanded - that he should always
seem the image of god on earth to the Nations - he had
been a friend. His loss was overwhelming and the world
was poorer. Had he not seized courage and opportunity
and sacrificed his own happiness for the burden of absolute
rule, none of the dreams that Mara had journeyed to Thuril
to save would ever have grown beyond idle fantasy.

The Lady of the Acoma felt old, too shaken to look
beyond the horizons of personal loss. And yet the bite of
Hokanu's fingers on her shoulders reminded her that she
must. This tragedy would bring terrible repercussions, and
if their combined household of Acoma and Shinzawai were
not to sink in the backlash, she had to renew her grasp on
current politics.

She fixed first on the name Hokanu had mentioned, that
of a total stranger. 'Lojawa?' Dismay cracked her Tsurani
facade. 'I don't know him. You say he is Omechan?' In
desperation, she appealed to her husband, whose advisers
were versed in recent events, and presumably had offered
some theories. 'What possible motivation could have driven
an Omechan to such an act? Of all the great families that
might vie to restore the Warlord's office, the Omekan stand
the furthest from claiming the power of the white and gold.
Six other houses would see their own candidate enthroned
before the Omechan . . .'

'The news just came,' Hokanu repeated, at a loss himself.
He gestured to a waiting Strike Leader to continue directing
troops into the boats. Over the stamp of hobnailed battle
sandals across the dock, he added, 'Incomo hasn't had time
to make sense of the details yet.'

'No, not a Warlord's office,' Saric broke in, too fired by
a sudden insight to observe proper protocol.
Mara's eyes swung and locked with his, but she whispered, '
No. You are right. Not a Warlord's office.' Her
face went from pale to deathly white. 'The golden throne
itself is now the prize!'

The stooped, grey-haired figure who elbowed his way
through the press to Hokanu's side overheard. Incomo
looked rumpled, red-eyed; and more shriveled with age
than Mara recalled. The cares of the moment made him
querulously shrill. 'But there is no imperial son.'

Saric spoke fast in correction. 'Whoever takes the hand
of Ichindar's eldest daughter, Jehilia, becomes the ninety-second
Emperor of Tsuranuanni! A girl barely twelve years
old is now heir to the throne. Any of a hundred royal
cousins who might bring a war host to storm the walls
of the Imperial Palace could try to claim her in marriage.'

'Jiro!' Mara cried. 'This stroke is brilliant! Why else
should he be studying and building siege engines in secret
all these years! This is the plot he must have been working
on all along.' It meant that her children were not just unsafe,
but in jeopardy of their lives, for if the Anasati were to
break into the Imperial Palace with their armies, any child
with both enemies and a tie to the imperial line would be
at risk.

Interpreting her appalled silence, Saric burst out, 'Gods,
Justin!'

Mara choked back panic at her adviser's cruel understanding.
Even her highest honor now worked against her:
as Servant of the Empire, she had been formally adopted
into Ichindar's family. By law and tradition, her boy was
legitimately of the blood royal. Not only were her issue
subject to royal privilege, but Justin could arguably be a

claimant to the throne as a royal nephew, and Ichindar's
closest male relation.

Jiro would delight in arranging the demise of Justin and
Kasuma as a normal action in his feud with the Acoma, but

c7 _ ~

622 Mistress of tI7e Empire

with the throne as a goal, he would be doubly implacable
in seeing Justin dead. Nor would any other candidate for
Jehilia's hand be inclined toward mercy where a rival
heir might be concerned. Justin was but a boy, and fatal
'accidents' could easily happen in time of war.

Mara reined back a terrible urge to shriek curses at the
gods for this ugliest twist of fate. She had the Assembly to
contend with all along, but counted on its edict to hold
Jiro at bay until they were neutralised; but this tragic
assassination had placed the lives of her children once
again in the moil of politics - and had set them down at
the heart of the conflict!

Hokanu's eyes betrayed his realisation of the peril, and a
half-stunned Incomo voiced their worst fears aloud: 'Both
Acoma and Shinzawai could be rendered heirless at one
stroke.'

Awakened to remembrance that such momentous matters
must not be discussed among troops on the docks, Mara
responded to Hokanu's urging and made her way through
the surging ranks of warriors toward the great house. In a
flat tone of foreboding, she said, 'I see you have mobilised
our home garrison already. For the sake of our children,
we must also send runners to our allies and vassals and
command them to make ready for war.'

Hokanu steered her across the threshold with hands that
by some miracle did not tremble. He did not pause to object
that such a call to arms must certainly draw reaction from
the Assembly, but in a stony voice said, 'Incomo, see to
this. Send our fastest messengers, and ones who are loyal
enough to give their lives in this service.' To Mara he added,
'In your absence, I have set up relays of messengers to pass
between here and the Shinzawai estates. Arakasi helped,
though he did not approve of the project. It was done in
haste, and requires much manpower, but precaution was
needed to see our dispatches through without delays. My

Homecoming

623

cousin Devacai has caused difficulties enough that he might
as well be acting as one of Jiro's allies.'

As Incomo hurried off, his spindly legs pumping beneath
the flapping hem of his adviser's robe, Mara waved for
Lujan and Saric to stay and give counsel. Spotting Kamlio
looking lost as she trailed in their wake, Mara indicated
that the girl should follow. also.

Then her mind returned to the trouble at hand as Hokanu
added, 'Our supporters will be brought to the field in swift
order. For a while we may be able to hide some of our troops
under the banners of our allies, but that won't suffice for
long. Gods smile on our cause, and send chaos and dust
to confuse the eyes of the Great Ones! It will be a relief
to see an end to this inactivity at last!' His eyes narrowed.
'The Anasati have too long avoided Shinzawai revenge for
ordering my father's assassination.' Then, he paused, and
spun Mara into the longer embrace he had withheld in
the public view of the docks. 'My dear, what a terrible
homecoming. You left on your journey to Thuril to avert
the ugliness of war, and now you return to find the Game
of the Council causing bloodshed once again.' He gazed
down at her face and waited, tactfully not inquiring about
the success of her mission. ~

Mara caught the drift of his unspoken questions, among
them a wonderment that she no longer seemed to hold his
mishandling of Kasuma's birth against him. Her near-brush
with death had reordered her priorities. As if all the world
had not thrust pending disaster upon their combined house,
she murmured answer to the matter that lay closest to her
heart. 'I have been told of a certain fact you should have
revealed to me, and at once.' Her lips curved in a sad little
smile. 'I know I can have no more children. Let that not
be an impediment to your begetting the son you desire.'

Hokanu's brows arose in protest, first, that she seemed

to receive such news with equanimity, and second, because

624 Mistress of the Empire

the greater significance of her journey had been ignored by
her. But before he could speak, Mara added, 'Husband, I
have been shown wonders. But we must speak of them later
and in private.' She stroked his cheek, and kissed him, and
then, still loving the sight of him, she demanded without
averting her eyes, 'Has Arakasi sent any messages?'

'A dozen since you have left, but nothing since yesterday.
Not yet, anyway.' Hokanu's hands firmed around her waist,
as if he feared she might draw away as the exigencies of
Ruling Lady stole her attention.

To Saric, Mara commanded, 'Send word through the network
that I want Arakasi back here as soon as possible.'

Mara turned to see Kamlio standing with a look both
fearful and determined. Whatever she had said to Mara in
the distant mountains of Thuril about dealing with the Spy
Master now vanished with the realisation that he would
soon be here. The former courtesan saw Mara's eyes upon
her, and she threw herself prone on the floor in the lowliest
obeisance of a slave. 'Lady, I will not displease you.'

'Then do not distress Arakasi at this time,' the Lady
replied. 'For all of our lives may come to depend upon
him. Rise.' Kamlio obeyed and Mara said more kindly,
'Go and refresh yourself Gods know, we have endured a
harsh journey, and there will be little enough time to rest in
the days to comet' As the girl crept away, Mara said briskly
to Lujan, 'Help Irrilandi finish deploying our warriors, and
when they are away to their mustering point-' Here she
paused and asked of her husband, 'Which mustering point
did you designate?'

Hokanu gave her a half-smile in which anxiety outweighed
amusement. 'We gather on the riverbanks at the
edge of the estate, on the assumption that Jiro will float his
main army down the Gagajin. The Assembly cannot fault
us for defying any edict if we maneuver within our own
borders. Under clan colors, Shinzawai forces will march

Homecoming

625

toward Kentosani from the north, and a mixed garrison of
Tuscalora and Acoma forces split off from your estate near
Sulan-Qu will march by road to intercept any companies
of traditionalist allies, or Anasati troops that take the slow
route overland.'

Mara speculated, 'Jiro would have prepared for this
day.'

Lujan expanded her thought. 'The siege engines? Do
you think he has them hidden in the forests south of the
Holy City?'

'South or north,' said Hokanu. 'Arakasi reports that the
location of the Anasati engineers is a closely kept secret.
Several of the messages he sent in your absence mention
their being dismantled and shipped via circuitous routes
to points unknown. He also wrote that the saboteurs we
sent in with the toy maker's plans have reported back only
once. By the code, we can assume all is well, and that they
are in place with the siege engines. But their location has
been effectively guarded.'

'I would have hidden troops away also, were I in
Jiro's place,' Mara mused, then finished her last orders
to Lujan before dismissal. 'I want conference with you
and Irrilandi before the last boat leaves the docks. We do
not know any of Jiro's plan of deployment?' She read the
negative on Hokanu's face, and knew that they shared the
same thoughts that Arakasi's fears might be realised and
that Chumaka's spy network had evolved to surpass the
Acoma's. How else could such massive engines be moved
without observation? Mara went on, 'We can only guess,
and design our campaign to match all contingencies.'

While the Acoma Force Commander saluted and hurried
out, Hokanu looked upon his wife in fond exasperation.

'My brave commander of armies, do you think we have
been idle during your absence?' And he drew her through
the archway into the scriptorium, where cushions were

626 Mistress of the Empire

clustered for a council meeting, and a sand table now
replaced the copy desks. There, shaped of clay, was a
replica of Szetac Province, complete with-the arrays of
pins and markers that a tactician would use to represent
companies of warriors in the field.

Mara glanced over it. Her body took on a rigid set, and
her face became stamped with purpose. 'What I see is a
defensive deployment.'

Her gaze traveled from the sand table and lingered on
Saric, her last adviser still present. She ended with an
entreaty directed toward her husband. 'What we sought
to prevent, an all-powerful Warlord, has brought us to
a worse pass: there is no High Council to ratify the
girl Jehilia's blood right of ascension to the throne as
Empress. Unless the Assembly itself intervenes, Justin is
caught between the jaws of a coup as a legal claimant;
as such, he is a dead puppet, or a sharp weapon that
any dissident contingent can use as an excuse to rip this
land asunder in civil war. Bereft of the council, we cannot
appoint a regent to bind the government to stability until the
rational solution of marriage can reinstate a new Emperor
of the line. Even if we had enough loyal supporters in the
Imperial Precinct to seize control and reconvene the council,
we would have deadlock and bickering and murder to make
the Night of the Bloody Swords look like a practice match
between companies of green recruits. The violence would
continue until one house emerged strong enough to force
support to favor his cause.'

Saric looked grim. 'Which cause, mistress? After Ichindar's
boldness in seizing absolute rule, what Lord's ambition
would be sated with the restoration of the Warlord's
title?'

'You do see.' Mara's words were crisp. 'A ratification
will not happen. Even with all of our backing, can you
imagine a girl of twelve ruling? With Ichindar's pampered

Homecoming

627

First Wife as regent? If Lord Kamatsu were still alive
as Imperial Chancellor, perhaps, with our resolve, we
might see a woman where now there is a girl. But if
I read your comments aright, Hokanu, Kanazawai Clan
support has fragmented under pressure from your rivals
and discontented cousins. You hold the office, but not
yet the unified den that your father had forged. Possibly
Hoppara of the Xacatecas would stand forth as our ally,
but Frasai of the Tonmargu is still Imperial Overlord. Feeble
old man that he is, he still commands Hoppara's office, and
as clan brother to Jiro, if chaos breaks loose I doubt he can
hold out for a stalwart and independent course. No, a new
council could not stem the bloodshed now. Instead, the first
Lord who can take control of the palace will force the priests
to place Jehilia upon the throne, then take her to wife and
see himself anointed Emperor.'

Saric concluded, as always, with another question. 'You
believe that Jiro was behind the Omechan assassination of
the Emperor?'

But his words went unheard. Hokanu was staring into
the deep eyes of his wife in something close to outright
horror. He said very quietly, his voice edged with menace,
or a note of great pain, 'You are not thinking of defences,
Lady. You will not be calling out our troops to join with
the Imperial Whites against the storm that must soon beset
Kentosani?'

'No,' Mare admitted into an icy quiet. 'I will not. If I get
to the Holy City first, I mean to attack.'

'Justin ?' Saric's voice held a high note of awe. 'You would
set your son on the throne as Jehilia's husband?'

Mara spun around fast as a cornered beast. 'And why
not?' Her whole body quivered with stressed nerves. 'He is
a lawful contender for the divine office of Emperor.' Then,

into the shocked stillness that followed, she cried out in
heart-wrung appeal, 'Don't you see? Don't any of you see

628 Mistress of tl~e Empire

at all? He's just a little boy, and it's the only possible way j
to save his life!'

Saric's mind had always been nimble. He was the first
to sort the ramifications, and see past Mara's wounding
fear. To a stiff-faced Hokanu, he added with no trace of
his customary tact, 'She's right. Justin alive would pose a Z
threat to any outside faction who took the girl and forced
wedlock. No matter how strong the self-styled Emperor's
army, he would draw his enemies to the throne with him. No
point of law would be overlooked, and Mara's popularity as
Servant must force recognition of Justin's adoptive blood
tie. Dissidents would seize upon Justin's cause as a rallying
cry, whether we willed it or no. Others might be willing to
kill us all to win the opportunity to put the boy on the
throne as their puppet.'

'Civil war Mara sighed, sounding wrung to her very
core. 'If Jiro or any other Lord gains the crown, we would
have no Emperor, no revered Light of Heaven, but only a
more glorified Warlord. It would be a merging of the worst
of both offices, when we would hope to wed the best.'

Hokanu moved suddenly. He caught her shoulders,
turned her face into his chest in time to conceal her
dissolution into tears, then stroked her in sad gentleness.
'Lady, never fear to lose my support. Never fear that.'

Muffled into his warmth, Mara said, 'Then you don't
disapprove?'

Hokanu smoothed back the hair torn loose from her
headdress in the fever of their earlier embrace. His face
looked suddenly lined with care and no small foreboding.
'I cannot pretend to love the idea, Lady of my heart. But
you are right. Justin will make a wise ruler, once he reaches
maturity. And until then, as his guardians, we can continue
to reject the atrocities of the Game of the Council and
enforce a new stability in the Nations. The people must
all bow before his and Jehilia's combined claim, and the
gods know, the unfortunate girl deserves a mate close to her
own age and inclinations. She would indeed be miserable
as a puppet, wed to a man viciously driven by ambition,
as Jiro is.'

Then, as if sensing that Ayaki's loss lay very near to the
surface of his wife's thoughts, and that with this chilling
threat to Justin her need for solace at this moment must
outweigh all other matters, Hokanu lifted his Lady bodily
in his arms. He cradled her tenderly against the breastplate
of armor and bore her out of the scriptorium. As he turned
down the corridor in the direction of their bedchamber, he
called to Saric over his shoulder, 'If you have brought back
from Thuril some means to stay the hand of the Assembly of
Magicians, pray to the gods it will work. For unless I am
totally mistaken, it must soon be Jiro of the Anasati we
face across the field of war.'

Once in the privacy of the master suite, Mara pushed
impatiently against Hokanu's cradling embrace. 'So much
to do, and so little time!'

Ignoring her struggles, Hokanu bent and laid her down
on the sumptuous cushions of their sleeping mat, and only
his fighter's reflexes permitted him the necessary speed to
catch her wrists as she immediately tried to shove herself
erect. 'Lady, we are not caught unprepared. Arakasi has
kept us well informed, Keyoke is a craftier strategist than
you or I, and Saric will waste no time in giving them word
that Justin's claim must of necessity be pressed.' As Mara's
eyes bored furiously up into his, he gave her an ungentle
shake. 'Take an hour! Your people will all be the better for
being left free of distraction. Let your Force Commander
consult with Irrilandi and Keyoke and do his job! Then
when he has had time to assemble his ideas, we can hold

council, and forge the wisest course between us.'

Mara looked again as if she might crumble. 'You're not
worried for your Shinzawai holdings in the north, or your
cousin Devacai's meddling?'

'No.' Hokanu was bedrock-firm. 'I inherited Dogondi
for Shinzawai First Adviser, remember? My father relied
on him for years, particularly when he was absent from
home as Imperial Chancellor. Dogondi's as crafty as any
man alive, and with our new messenger relay in place,
he will hear of your need for aid in Justin's cause before
sundown tomorrow. Incomo and he have worked together
like old cronies. Trust the efficiency of your good officers,
Lady. My own servants you have won over shamelessly
Not one who wears Shinzawai blue would do less than give
their lives for you, but not if you throw your uninformed
opinion into their works just now.'
Another more violent tremor coursed through Mara's
body. 'How have I done without you all these months?'
she marveled in a voice shaved thin by jangled nerves. 'Of
course you are right.'

Hokanu felt her relax. When he judged it safe, he released
her from restraint and waved for a maid to remove her travel
clothing. As the woman set about her ministrations, he soon
found he could not resist joining in the unwrapping. As the
Lady s overrobe came off, and the ties to the underrobe were
loosened, he played his hands along the smooth warmth of
her flesh. 'A bitter homecoming,' he mused.

'Not the one I would have chosen, husband. I have
missed you.'

The maid attendant might as well have been invisible.

Hokanu smiled. 'And I you.' He reached to unbuckle the
fastenings of his breastplate, then lost his concentration at
even so simple a task as the maid let Mara's inner robe
fall away. The sight of his Lady, even tired and dusty from
the road, with her hair tumbling loose from its pins, took
Hokanu's breath away. She noticed his bemusement and
at last managed a smile. Putting her hands over his, she
began to work the leather straps through the buckles until
he laid his lips upon hers and kissed her. After that, neither
noticed as the maid took over the task of his undressing,
then bowed to master and mistress and softly stole from
the room.

Later, when the couple lay replete with their lovemaking,
Hokanu ran his finger gently along the line of Mara's
cheek. The light through the screen silvered the streaks
of age starting to grow in her black hair, and her skin
showed weathering from the harsher sun of the southern
lands. Even as he caressed her, she stirred and murmured
again, 'There is so much to do, and lime time.'

Mara pushed herself up onto her elbow, a restlessness to
her manner that now could not be denied.

Hokanu loosened his embrace, knowing he could not
hold her. A war waited to be fought, in open repudiation
of the Assembly's disapproval; young Justin's life depended
upon the outcome.

Yet as Mara did arise, and clapped for her maid to return
to atire her in battle dress, her husband stared after her with
a terrible, gnawing poignancy. Hereafter, nothing between
them would be the same. Either Jiro would sit on the golden
throne, and Mara and all he loved would be destroyed; or
they would perish in their attempt to make Justin emperor;

or perhaps most painful of all, Lady Mara would become
ruler of Tsuranuanni. Still, he simply had no choice; for his
own daughter's sake, he must add his knowledge of war
and trust that the legendary luck of the Good Servant would
keep both them and their children alive. He pushed away
from the mat, reached Mara in one stride, and while she
had one arm helplessly caught in the process of her robing,
took her face in his hands and gently, lovingly kissed her.
Then he said, 'Take time for a bath. I will go ahead of you
and take counsel with Lujan and Irrilandi.'

Mara returned the kiss, and flashed him a brilliant

632

Mistress of the Empire

smile. 'No bath would ease me so much as one we
could share.'

Hokanu let that cheer him, but as he slipped into his
discarded clothes and hurried to the council of war, he could
not help but recognise that whether they would survive or
fall in this full-scale conflict, inevitably their lives would
embrace change. He could not shake the foreboding that
the events must force distance between him and the Lady
he held most dear.


25
Assembly

Chumaka smiled.

He briskly rubbed his hands together as a man might do
to warm them, but the day outside his window was hot.
What the Anasati First Adviser reacted to was a chill of
deep excitement. 'At last, at last,' he muttered. He swooped
amid his clutter of papers and correspondence to grab what
looked to be a nondescript notation of tally marks on a
creased scrap of paper. But the markings hid a complex
code, and the imbedded message was precisely the one
that Chumaka had prodded and plotted and cajoled to
bring about.

Ignoring the raised eyebrows and questioning manner of
his clerk, Chumaka hurried out to seek his master.

Jiro preferred to pass midday in indolence. He never
took a siesta, nor, like so many Ruling Lords, did he amuse
himself through the heat in lascivious play with concubines.
Jiro's tastes were ascetic. He considered the chatter of
women distracting, so much so that on a whim he had once
ordered all of his female cousins consigned to chaste service
in the temples. Chumaka chuckled at the memory. The girls
would have no sons to become rivals, which made the master'
s short-tempered arbitration a wiser move than he knew.
Jiro instinctively preferred privacy. At this hour he would be
found at his bath, or else reading in the cool, breezy portico
that connected the library with the scribes' copy chamber.

Chumaka paused at the junction of two inner corridors,
dimly lit since no lamps burned in the heat, and faintly
scented with the wax and oil used to treat the wood floors.
His thin nostrils twitched.

634 Mistress of the Empire

'Not the baths, today,' he muttered, for he could smell no
trace of scent borne on the air by the passage of Jiro's bath
slaves. The master was fastidious to the point of fussiness.
He liked his food spiced to briskness to keep his breath
sweet, and favored perfumes in his wash water.

The old, drooping ulo trees that edged the portico outside
the library cooled the air even in the most sultry summer
weather. Jiro sat on a stone bench, a scroll in his hand,
and more heaped haphazardly around his feet. A deaf-mute
slave attended him, ready at the twitch of his master's finger
to attend to the slightest need. But Jiro's needs were notably
few. Beyond the occasional request for a cold drink, he often
sat at his reading until midafternoon, when he would meet
with his hadonra to discuss estate finances, or arrange for
a recital of poetry, or walk in the pretty gardens designed
by his great-grandmother, which it had been his pleasure
to see replanted and restored.

Immersed in his reading, Jiro did not immediately respond
to the rapid tap of Chumaka's sandals against the terra-cotta
tile of the portico. When he did notice the sound, he looked
up as if at an intrusion, his brows pulled down in vexation,
and his manner stiff with restraint.

His expression changed at once to resignation. Chumaka
was the most difficult of his servants to dismiss without
the fuss of enforcing his rank as Ruling Lord. Somehow
Jiro felt it demeaning to deliver bald-faced demands; they
were crude, and he prided himself on subtlety, a vanity that
Chumaka was well versed in the art of exploiting.

'What is it?' Jiro sighed, then checked his bored exhalation,
realising that his First Adviser was showing the
unabashed toothy smile he reserved for felicitous news.
The Lord of the Anasati brightened also. 'It is Mara,'
he second-guessed. 'She has arrived home to find herself
disadvantaged, I hope?'

Chumaka waved his coded note. 'Indeed, master, and

Assembly

-:~

,5
':~
fl

635

more. I have just received word directly from our s
implanted in Hokanu's messenger service. We have precise
descriptions of how she plans to deploy her troops.' Here
the Anasati First Adviser's manner dampened, as he recalled
how difficult it had been to break the private cipher of
Hokanu's correspondence.

As if sensing that a lecture on such subtleties might be
forthcoming, Jiro pressed the discussion ahead. 'And?' '

'And?' Chumaka for a moment looked vague as his train
of thought recentered. But his eyes never once lost their
sharpness, and his mind worked impressively fast. 'And our
ruse worked.'

Jiro reined back a frown. Always, Chumaka seemed to
expect him to follow the vaguest of references without
any accompanying explanation. 'Which ruse do you speak
of?'

'Why, the one concerning the engineers of the siege
engines and the toy maker's plans. Lady Mara believes we
were duped into hiring her false workers. She has arranged
for no attack on our forces that are positioned to storm
Kentosani.' Here Chumaka gave a wave of dismissal, 'Oh,
she's cozened her husband to call out the Shinzawai troops
from the north. They will attack our northern flank, she
believes, while we are in disarray and still struggling to
recoup from the deaths she expects will happen in the
mishap that results from the first firing of our battle rams

and ballistas.'

'They won't fail,'Jiro mused, his narrow face softening et
last. 'They will shatter those ancient fortifications and our
men will already be inside.' He gave a short bark of laughter.
'The Shinzawai troops will arrive only to do homage to a
new Emperor!'

'And to bury their boy heir,' Chumaka added in a low
voice. Again he rubbed his hands together. 'Justin, now.
Should we say he was killed by fallen masonry, or that

636 Mistress of the Empire

he was mistaken for a servant boy and given over to the
slave master as spoils? There are many unpleasant ways
for a boy to perish in the slave pens.'

Jiro's lips thinned in disapproval, and his eyes narrowed.
He was not comfortable with practices he considered brutal
or purposely crude- after a childhood spent being bullied
by his younger brother Buntokapi, he had no patience in
that respect.

'I want it done quickly and cleanly, without unnecessary
pain; a "miscast" spear should do well enough,' he snapped.
Then his tone turned thoughtful. 'Mare, though. If the living
body of the Servant of the Empire were to fall into the hands
of our troops, she would be another matter.'

Now it was S;Chumaka's turn to shy from the discussion.
Tsurani enough to arrange for men to be tortured or killed
when matters made such measures necessary, still he did not
relish the idea of causing pain for the Servant of the Empire.
The look in Jiro's eyes whenever he contemplated the Lady
Mara inevitably gave him an inward urge to shiver.

'I shall arrange to send your Force Commander, Omelo,
this latest news of Acoma and Shinzawai deployment, with
your leave, my master.'

Jiro gave a languid gesture of acquiescence, his thoughts
still focused upon revenge.

Barely waiting for this signal of approval, Chumaka
backed off, bowing, his spirits reviving almost at once.
Before Jiro had retrieved his scroll and returned to reading,
the Anasati First Adviser was hurrying off, muttering ideas
and plans half under his breath.

'Those Minwanabi warriors who did not swear service at
the time of Mara's ascension to the title of Good Servant,
now . . .' he mused. A wicked gleam flashed in his eyes. 'Yes.
Yes. I think the time is appropriate to call them in from that
frontier garrison and add their ranks to the confusion of
our enemies.'

Assembly

637

Chumaka hastened his step, loudly whistling now that
he was out of his master's earshot. 'Gods,' he broke off his
tune to whisper, 'what would life be without politics?'

The Empire mourned. On the announcement of Ichindar's
death, the gates to the Imperial Precinct had boomed shut,
and the traditional red banners of mourning had unfurled
from the walls. The land roads and the waterways of the
Gagajin had come alive with messengers. The rare metal
gongs and chimes in each of the temples of the Twenty
Higher Gods then rang in homage at the passing of Ichindar,
ninety-one strokes, one for each generation of his line. The
city would stay closed to trade for the traditional twenty
days of mourning, and all merchant shops and stalls not
essential for the maintenance of life had their doors sealed
with red bunting.

Inside Kentosani, the streets were subdued, the hawking
cries of food sellers and water brokers stilled; and the
chanting of the priests in prayer for the holy departed
rang out in the mourning quiet. By tradition, conversation
was forbidden in the streets, and even the city's licensed
beggars had to seek alms in pantomime. The Red God
Turakamu had silenced the Voice of Heaven on Earth,
and while Ichindar's embalmed body lay in state amid a
circle of lit candles and chanting priests, the Holy City also
observed its silence of respect and sorrow.

On the twenty-first day, the Light of Heaven would be
placed atop his funeral pyre, and the chosen successor
anointed by the priests of the Higher and Lesser Gods
would ascend the golden throne as- the ashes cooled.

And in anticipation of that day, plots seethed and armies
massed. The Assembly was not oblivious to the restlessness

of humanity.

Outside the city gates, anchored along the riverside, or
cramming the dockside of Silmani and Sulan-Qu, rested the

638 M'stress of the Emp~re

trader barges caught outside the gates by the observance of
the Emperor's mourning. Prices for rental of warehouse
space soared to a premium as merchants vied to secure
shelter for perishable goods caught in transit, or for
valuables too choice to be left on boats under insufficient
guard. The less fortunate factors bid for space in private
cellars and attics, and the least fortunate lost their wares
to the rising tides of war.

Clans gathered and house companies armed. The roads
became clouded with late summer dust raised by thousands
of tramping feet. The rivers became jammed with flotillas
of barges and war craft, and all oared or poled transport
were engaged to ferry warriors. The merchants suffered,
as trade goods were tossed wholesale into the river to
make way for human cargo, and shortages in the cities
ensued as provender was bought up by the cartload from
the costermongers who many times sold out their produce
before it could arrive at the city markets. Bartering by the
roadside was often conducted at spearpoint. The farmers
suffered. The rich complained of high prices; the merchants,
of desperate shortfalls; while the poorest went hungry and
mobbed the streets in unrest.

The Ruling Lords who might have lent patrols to
quell the masses and restore order were busied elsewhere,
sending their warriors to support this faction or that, or
using the upset of routine to stage raids against enemies
whose garrisons were pared down for field battle. Riots
threatened in the poor quarter, while profiteers grew fat
on inflated prices.

The Empire's various factions armed and banded together
into vast war hosts, and yet for all of the house colors
that sent troops to converge upon Kentosani, the banners
of three prominent houses were conspicuous by their
absence: Acoma green, Shinzawai blue, and Anasati red
and yellow.

~_

ll
.l

l
l

l

:

;

..
.l
.~

:

Assembly
639

In a high tower in the City of the Magicians, closeted
within a study cluttered with books and scrolls and
dominated by a dented hard-fired clay samovar of foreign
craft and origin, the Great One Shimone sat with bony
fingers laced around a teacup. He had developed a fondness
for the Midkemian delicacy in its myriad varieties, and
servants kept the brazier under the samovar hot day and
night. The cushions the Black Robe perched on were as thin
as his ascetic tastes. Before him rested a low three-legged
table whose top was inlaid with a seeing crystal, through
which danced the images of mustering war hosts. It showed
brief glimpses of Mara and Hokanu in conference with
advisers, followed by a view of Jiro gesticulating to make
some point with a stiff-lipped Omechan Lord who looked
reluctant.

Shimone sighed. His fingers tapped an agitated rhythm
on his tepid cup.

But it was Fumita, sitting almost invisibly in the shadows
opposite, who voiced the obvious thought. 'They fool
nobody, least of all us. Each waits for the other to move,
so that when we appear, they can say with clear conscience,
"We were but defending ourselves."' ~

Neither magician belabored the sad, self-evident conclusion:
that despite their personal endorsement of Mara's
radical ideas, the Assembly's prevailing sentiment ran
against her. Acoma and Anasati had sounded the horns of
war. Whether or not Mara and Jiro officially unfurled their
standards, whether or not they had formally announced
their intentions and petitioned the priest of the War God
to smash the Stone Seal on the Temple of Jastur, all but
the splinter factions in some way took their lead from
Anasati and Acoma. The Assembly of Magicians would
unavoidably be forced to take action. In the sad strained
silence that followed between Fumita and Shimone, a
buzzing sound could be heard beyond the door. This

640 Mfstress of the Empfre

was followed by a heavy thump and a fast tread, and
the wooden latch tripped up.

'Hochopepa,' Shimone said, his deep eyes seeming lazily
half-closed. He set down his cup, flicked his hand, and the
vistas in the seeing crystal muddied and faded away.

Fumita arose. 'Hocho in a hurry can only mean that
enough of our number have gathered for a quorum,' he
surmised. 'We had best join him in the great hall.'

The door to Shimone's private chamber creaked open,
and a red-faced Hochopepa shoved through, his large girth
hampered by the clutter. 'You'd better make haste. One
hothead down there in council just proposed to blast half
the population of Szetac Province to cinders.'

Fumita clicked his tongue. 'No discrimination was
made between spear-carrying warriors and peasant families
driven to flee the path of the armies?'

Hochopepa sucked in fat cheeks. 'None.' He backed,
wheezing, out of the doorway, beckoning for his companions
to follow. 'And for worse news, the point you just
made was the only argument that stayed the vote. Otherwise
some fool would be down there right this moment turning
everything in sight to smoking char!' He turned down the
hall without waiting to see if the others followed.

At this, Fumita was through the doorway hard on the
stout mage's heels. 'Well, I think we have the imagination
between us to trump up a few more objections and slow
them down a while longer.' He glanced over his shoulder to
admonish Shimone, who could seem as reluctant to move
quickly as to use words. 'It can't be helped, my friend. This
time you are going to have to talk as much as the rest of w
to help the cause along.'

The ascetic mage's eyes snapped open to show a spade
of affront. 'Talk is quite different an expenditure of energy'

.

from empty chatter!' ~ :
As the thin magician's glare swiveled toward the portly
leader of the party, it was Hochopepa's turn to look
offended. Yet before he could find something heated to
say in his own defence, Fumita hustled him ahead. 'Save
your energy,' he said, hiding a grin behind solemnity. 'What
inspiration we have we'd better muster for the council
chamber. They are probably quarreling like Midkemian
monkeys down there, and here we go rushing in to make
it worse.'

Without further discussion, the three hurried down the
corridor to the entrance to the Great Hall.

The debate Mara's supporters hastened to join continued
for days. Many times in the course of the Empire's history
arguments had divided the Assembly, but none before had
raged so long and so hotly. Stray winds ripped through
the great chamber that served as meeting hall in the City
of the Magicians, as more and more members gathered.
The high, tiered galleries were nearly filled to capacity, an
event only equaled in recent times by the occasion of the
debate of Milamber's exile and the abolition of the office
of Warlord. The only absentees were Great Ones in their
dotage. The air grew stuffy with the crowding' and since
no meeting of the Assembly ever adjourned without a final
decision, the proceedings dragged on day and night.

Yet another dawn seeped grey through the high windows
of the dome, silvering the lacquer floor tiles and revealing
weariness in every face present. It lit in drab colors the only
activity: in the middle of the vast chamber, a stout magician
paced back and forth, declaiming.

Fatigue etched Hochopepa's face. He waved one stout
arm, and grated on in a voice made hoarse by hours of
nonstop oratory, 'And I urge every one of you to consider:
great changes have begun that will not ~onet' He
raised his other arm, and clapped his/alms together to
emphasise his point, and several of the elderly Black Robes

642

Mistress of tl~e Empire

started in their seats, roused from dozing. 'We cannot simply
wave our hand and have the Empire return to the old ways!
The days of the Warlordship are finished!'
Shouts of disagreement sought to interrupt his argument.
'Armies are marching while we deliberate,' cried Motecha,
among the more outspoken of the Great Ones who disapproved
of the late Ichindar's policies.

On the floor, the stout magician held up his hand for
silence, actually grateful for the momentary respite. His
throat was scratched raw from speaking. 'I know!' He
waited for stillness to settle and went on. 'We have been
defied. So I have heard many of you repeat over and over" he
glanced around the room, aware of a change that rippled
like the movement of the tide through his audience - 'and
over and over' Even the more staid members of the council I
were now shifting in their seats. Their backsides were numb
from sitting, and no longer were they content to settle
back and politely listen. More than just the impatient
had started to cry out interruptions, and not a few were
standing belligerently on their feet. Hochopepa admitted
to himself that he would have to yield the floor at last,
and hope Fumita or the wily Teloro could find a strategy
to draw the discussion out further.

'We are not gods, my brothers,' Hochopepa summed
up. 'We are powerful, yes, but still merely men. For us
to intervene rashly with force, from pique or fear of the
unknown, would but increase the chance of lasting damage
being visited upon the Nations. I caution all that no matter
how inflamed passions may be, the effect of our act will
be lingering. When emotions at last cool, shall we regret
having done that which even we cannot undo?' He ended
his speech with a slow lowering of his arms, and an even
slower shuffle across the floor. The heaviness in him as he
sank into his seat was not feigned; he had successfully tied
up the floor for two and a half days.

The current spokesman for the Assembly returned onto
the floor blinking as if a bit bemused. 'We thank Hochopepa
for his wisdom.'

While the huge chamber echoed with the rising buzz of
conversation and dozens of Black Robes vied to speak next,
Fumita leaned across Shimone and whispered to his wilted
companion, 'Well done, Hocho!'

Drily Shimone interjected, 'Perhaps for the next few days
we will be blessed with a less loquacious companion when
we gather over our wine.'

Spokesman Hodiku said, 'We shall hear Motecha!'

The short, hook-nosed elder, whose two cousins had
once been known as the Warlord's Pets, arose from his
seat. Motecha moved with spry steps across the floor, and
spun with a flutter of robes. His sharp, narrow-set eyes
passed over the assembly briefly, and he said, 'While it has
been interesting in no sparse measure to hear our brother
Hochopepa recount the history of events, in great detail,
this does nothing to change fact. Two armies are even now
jockeying to engage in combat. Skirmishes have already
occurred between them and only those of us who are fools
do not see through the sham of masking their house colors
behind the banners of clan cousins or allies! KMara of the
Acoma has defied our edict. Even as we speak, her warriors
march and engage in illicit warfare!'

'Why name her ahead of Jiro of the Anasati?' the
impulsive Sevean called back.

Teloro seized the opportunity of the interruption to
add fuel to the argument. 'You call the actions of these
armies defiance. I urge remembrance upon us all: the
Light of Heaven has been murdered! It must be contested,
Motecha, that circumstances have forced a call
to arms. Lord Hokanu of the Shinzawai would naturally
defend the royal family. Mara was Ichindar's staunchest
SUpporter. Jiro, I submit, builds siege engines and hires

Assenzbly

643

F

644

engineers to plot for his own ambition, not to stabilise the
Empire.'

Motecha folded his arms, emphasising his roundshouldered
posture. 'Was it circumstance that led both Jiro
of the Anasati and Mara of the Acoma and her consort to
order their armies into the field? Neither of their home
estates was threatened! Is this conflict in truth inevitable?
Did the supposed "Good of the Empire" "force" Mara
to order the secondary garrison from her natal estate to
prevent Anasati forces and allies from their use of the public
roads to Sulan-Qu?'

'Come now!' cracked Shimone. He had an authoritative
voice, when he chose to raise it, and now his stillness
held pent-up ire. 'How do you know it was Mara who
instigated the attack, Motecha? I heard of no battle, but t
only a skirmish that ended with a drawing of lines. Do we
whimper civil war when there has been little but a calling.
of names and an exchange of insults and some sporadic

bowfire?'

Teloro expounded a second point. 'I would have you
note: the banner at the fore of the lines near Sulan-Qu
was not Acoma, but that of Lord Jidu of the Tuscalora.
He may be Mara's vassal, but his estate lies directly in
the path of Jiro's march. The Lord of the Tuscalora could
legitimately be defending his lands from invasion.'

Motecha narrowed his gaze. 'Our colleague Tapek went
to the field and observed, Teloro. I may not be the student
of history that your friend Hochopepa is, but I can certainly
hear the difference between a defensive position and an
army launching an assault!'

'And Jiro's collection of siege engines in the forests outside
Kentosani are for defence?' Shimone cried back, but his
point was drowned by the hubbub of other voices.

The Spokesman shouted for order. 'Colleagues! The
business at hand requires order.'

Mistress of the Empire

Assembly

64S

Motecha shrugged his robe straight like a jigacock
puffing its feathers. He stabbed a finger at the galleries.
'Arrows have been fired between a vassal of Mara's and
Anasati warriors masquerading under the banner of Clan
lonani. Are we going to sit about arguing until our edict is
defied a second time? Tapek reports that troops have felled
trees for buttresses to give their archers better cover.'

Clearing his throat, Hochopepa croaked hoarsely, 'Well
then, Tapek could have ordered a stop to the shooting.'
This brought laughter and an upwelling of derogatory
comments. 'Or was it the fact that stray arrows show
little regard for the majesty of a Black Robe that gave
our friend Tapek pause?'

At this, Tapek sprang to his feet, his red hair brilliant
against the black robes behind. He shouted, 'We already
told Mara to stop once! Has she so swiftly forgotten
the troop of warriors we destroyed as an example upon
the field?'

'Motecha has the floor,' objected the Spokesman. 'You
will stay seated unless you are formally given leave to lead
the discussion, friend Tapek.'

The red-haired magician subsided to his seat, muttering
to the contingent of young friends who sat with him.

Motecha resumed his point. 'I submit that Jiro of the
Anasati has made no move in aggression. His siege engines
may surround the walls of Kentosani, but they do not fire!

And they may never do so, if Mara is prevented from linking
up with her support inside the Imperial Precinct.'

'What support? Do you imply that Mara has been party
to treachery?' called Shimone. 'That she had no hand in
the Omechan plot to kill Ichindar has been documented!'

Again the Assembly erupted into disorder. For several
minutes Spokesman Hodiku had to hold up his
hands to restore quiet. The muttering subsided reluctantly,
with Sevean caught still gesticulating as he expounded

646

Mistress of the Empire

some point to a colleague. He lowered his voice, looking
sheepish.

Hochopepa mopped sweat from his brow. 'It begins to
look as if I did not need to spend my voice in speech making.'
He chuckled under his breath. 'Our opponents are doing a
fair job of tangling the issue by themselves.'

'Not for much longer, I fear,' Shimone said ominously.

Motecha added further accusations, more outspoken
than any of his predecessors'. 'I say Mara of the Acoma
is the culprit! Her disregard, no, her contempt of tradition
is well documented. How she came to wear the honored
title of Servant of the Empire is for others to conjecture.
But I suggest that she and the late Emperor had an ...
understanding. It is Mara's son, Justin, she would raise as
pretender t. the golden throne, and I endorse Jiro's right
to defend against this unconscionable show of Acoma
ambition!'

'That ends it,' Fumita said gloomily. 'Sooner or later,
the adoptive privilege of Mara's children had to be raised.
Someone had to drag the boy into the quarrel.'

There was true sadness in his tone, perhaps in his personal
remembrance of the son he had renounced upon his call to
join the Assembly. Yet whatever else he might have added
became drowned in a wave of shouting. Magicians sprang
to their feet, and several seemed to glow with the light
of inner anger. Through the tumult, Spokesman Hodiku
waved his staff, and when he was ignored, gave over the
floor to a young mage named Akani.

That many a seasoned elder had been passed over in favor
of a Black Robe barely out of his apprenticeship effected an
immediate and resounding silence.

Akani kept command of it with the voice of a powerful
orator. 'Assumption of facts not in evidence,' he summed'
up crisply. 'We know nothing of any plotting by Mara
of the Acoma. We cannot deny she has lost her firstborn
son. Justin is her sole heir. If she were party to a plot
to raise him to the Emperor's station, she would hardly
have set such intrigue in motion while she was absent
from the court. Only a fool would leave the boy to fend
for himself through a change in succession without Acoma
or Shinzawai defenders. Justin is housed with Ichindar's
children, in the imperial nursery, which I remind you was
quarantined upon his death for twenty days of mourning!
A child's life could be lost to a thousand mishaps in such
a span of time. If Acoma troops march, they do so to spare
their future Lord. Companions, I suggest,' Akani finished
tartly, 'that we not be swayed by speculation and street
gossip in the making of our decisions.'

Shimone raised his grey furred eyebrows as the young
magician continued a reasoned, dispassionate argument.
'Good choice of argument. The boy thinks like an imperial
court litigator.'

Hochopepa chuckled. 'Akani studied for that post before
his magical powers forced him to be recognised as a Black
Robe. Why do you think I called in a favor to ask Hodiku
to choose him when the discussion swung toward violence?
Jiro's supporters, like our outspoken Tapek, muse not be
permitted to stampede us into acting rashly.' ~

And yet even Akani's skills as litigator could not keep
the floor tied up for long. Feelings ran hot, and by now
even those Black Robes who had been neutral to the
contention were clamoring for decision, if only to bring

the long, tiresome session to an end.

Pressure from all sides erupted to draw the proceedings to
a close. Akani had exhausted his eloquence, and in fairness
to his earlier ruling, the Spokesman Hodiku had to yield
the floor to allow Tapek his say.

'Trouble now,' Shimone said flatly.

Hochopepa's brow wrinkled, and Fumita became statue-still.


648 Mistress of tbe Empire

Tapek wasted no time in convincing oratory. 'It is fact,
companions, that the Assembly acted as a body once before
and ordered Mara not to attack Jiro. For the Good of the
Empire, I demand her life be forfeit!'

Hochopepa shot to his feet, astonishingly fast for one of
his girth. 'I dissent.'

Tapek spun on his heel to face the stout magician. 'What
mortal in all our long history has ever been allowed to live
after defying our edict?'

'I can count several,' Hochopepa shot back, 'but I doubt
that would settle the issue.' The stout magician's voice
was stripped down to gravel. Now he abandoned flowery,
long-winded phrases. 'Let us not act impulsively. We can kill
Mara at our leisure, should we so decide. But this moment
we have more pressing problems to consider.' ~

'He's going to force a vote,' Fumita murmured worriedly
to Shimone. 'That could precipitate disaster.' ~

Shimone's brows seemed frozen into a glower as he
replied, 'Let him. Disaster is inevitable anyway.' ~

Hochopepa moved down the aisle. Clown-like in his
bulk, red-faced and smiling with good nature, he did no'
seem at all contentious, and such jovial posture in the face
of tense proceedings lent him liberty, if only for comic relief
Spokesman Hodiku did not reprimand him as he wandered
out onto the floor and began to pace in step with Tapek
His naturally short stride was forced to extend to ridiculous'
length to match the taller magician. Hochopepa's fat jiggled
under his robe, and his cheeks puffed with exertion. H'
capped his ridiculous appearance by waving a pudgy hand
just under Tapek's nose in vehement gesticulation.

As Tapek sucked back. his chin to avoid being stabbed
by a fingernail, Hochopepa said, 'I suggest we tq other
expedients before we obliterate the Servant of the Empire;:
Several members of the Assembly winced at such bald
reiteration, and Hochopepa boldly seized the advantage

Assembly

649

to drive home his point. 'Before we commit an act never
before done in the history of our Nations - to destroy a
holder of the most honorable title a citizen may obtain let
us consider.'

'We have considered -'Tapek interjected, stopping dead.

Hochopepa kept walking and with apparent clumsiness
seemed to slam into his younger colleague, knocking him
off balance. Tapek was compelled to stumble ahead, or fall
flat. Flustered and caught at a loss for words, he was swept
on as Hochopepa continued his monologue.

'We should stop the bloodshed first, then order Mara and
Jiro to the Holy City. There they can be held while we judge
this issue in a less muddled fashion. Shall we vote?'

The Spokesman called, 'A question is on the floor.'
'I hold the floor!' Tapek objected.

Hochopepa at that moment trod heavily upon the
redhead's slippered toe. Tapek's mouth opened. His cheeks
turned white, then burned bright red. He rounded angrily
upon Hochopepa, who stood with his full weight bearing
down as if oblivious. And while Tapek was distracted by
discomfort, Hodiku pressed on with the proceedings.

'Now, it's been a long and boring session,' Hochopepa
whispered to Tapek. 'Why don't we both sit down and
regain our composure before the very serious matter of
casting our vote?'

Tapek growled between clenched teeth. He knew it was

now too late to disrupt protocol and countermand the
call for a formal vote. As Hochopepa raised his bulk off
Tapek's toe, the offended magician had little choice but to
limp off, grumbling, to rejoin his cadre of young bloods.
The Spokesman raised his hand. 'Hear the options, yea or
nay. Shall we order the fighting halted and Mara and Jiro
to the Holy City for accounting before our body?'

Each magician in that vast chamber held up one hand.
Light sprang from their upraised palms, blue indicating

650 Mistress of the Empire

agreement, white abstention, and red disagreement. The
blue glow clearly dominated, and the Spokesman said, 'The
issue is settled. Let the Assembly adjourn for food and rest
and gather again at a later date to decide who should be
sent to deliver word of our summons to the parties, Mara
of the Acoma and Jiro of the Anasati.'

'Brilliant!' exclaimed Shimone, seemingly oblivious to the
black looks shot in his direction by Tapek and Motecha.
All around them, magicians were rising stiffly to their feet,
sighing in anticipation of a meal and a long rest. The session
had stretched out to the point where it might take days
to recapture the enthusiasm to gather another quorum
and see an official spokesman appointed. And when a
matter had been formally voted to resolution by the full
Assembly, individuals like Tapek were denied their option of
independent action. Shimone's ascetically thin lips stretched
in a way that suggested a smile. 'Personally, I think I could
sleep for at least a week.'

'You won't,' Fumita accused. 'You'll be snuggled up with
a bottle of wine and hunched over your scrying crystal, just
like the rest of us.'

Hochopepa sighed deeply and said, 'We have narrowly
averted what would have been perhaps the most destructive
action in all of our long history.' He glanced around to
ascertain that no bystanders were paying undue attention,
then whispered, 'And we have won a few days' "race. I pray
that Mara has some clever plan in play that I don't see, or
that her voyage into Thuril won her some protection that
she can deploy quickly. If not, and we lose her, we fall back
into the atrocities of the Game of the Council for another
span of ages . . .'

Fumita was blunter. 'Chaos.'

Hochopepa stiffened his spine. 'I feel the need for
something wet and soothing for my throat.'

Shimone's deep eyes sparkled. 'I have some of that
Keshian wine you love so much stashed away in my
quarters.'

Hochopepa's brow puckered in abject surprise. 'I didn't
know you had dealings with Midkemian traders!'

'I don't.' Shimone sniffed in reproof. 'There's a shop near
the docks in the Holy City that always seems to stock a
supply. My servant doesn't ask how the proprietor came by
such without imperial tax stamps on each bottle, and who
would argue with what seems a reasonable price . . . ?'

As the three magicians made their way out of the
vast assembly hall, their conversation turned toward the
commonplace, as if light words and camaraderie might
somehow stave off the immensity of the crisis about to
overwhelm their land and culture.

~:

:

.
~.

26

Battle

The camp burned.

Smoke swirled across the battlefield, acrid with the stench
of burned hide and the fine-woven wool of cushions and
hangings that customarily adorned the field tents of Tsurani
Lords and officers. War dogs yapped and snarled, and a
boy runner raced to find a healer to attend to a wounded
officer. Mara blinked watering eyes and turned her back
on the soldiers who picked through the ashes to gather
up corpses and weapons. The raid at dawn had been a
success. Another of Jiro's traditionalist allies had died in
his command tent, while his officers and warriors had rolled
out of their blankets in disarray. Lujan was unsurpassed
at ambush and surprise raids; better than his counterparts
who had never known the hardships of a grey warrior's
existence, he knew how to take advantage of subterfuge
and guile. Most of the fighting had involved minor allies
and vassals of the Acoma and the Anasati; other clashes
had happened between houses that had old blood debts to
settle. And while the magicians would be swift to condemn
a massed attack on a formal plain of war, smaller struggles
such as these had so far passed unpunished.

Such forbearance could not long continue, Mara knew,
as she turned wearily toward the small, unadorned shelter
hastily thrown up on a space of ground untracked by
fighting. Lujan knew it, too; he threw himself into each
skirmish with near-to-fanatical energy, as if he could not
rest until one more enemy was dead.

Hot, tired, and rubbed raw by the unaccustomed weight
of full armor, Mara passed through the flap into the shade
of her personal quarters. Swirls of dust entered with her.
She waved, and a maid scurried out of the dimness to
unlace the straps of her battle sandals. The sumptuous
comforts of the pavilion-sized Acoma command tent had
stayed packed away at the estate, its substitute a simple
tent borrowed from stores that had previously served as
shelter for needra herders. Since her trip to Thuril, Mara's
view of certain Tsurani customs had soured and anyway,
the green-dyed command tent with its silken banners and
trappings and tassels would only serve as announcement
to the magicians of her whereabouts.

The herder's tent was dry hot. It filtered out the direct
sun, and some of the noise, as officers called orders, and
wounded men moaned in the throes of their pain. 'Water,'
Mara requested. She raised a grimy hand and unfastened
the chin strap of her helm.

'Great Lady, let me help.' Kamlio hastened around the
rude flap that divided the structure in half.œ Better schooled
than the maid to answer the needs of men, the buckles of
armor were familiar to her. Expertly she applied herself,
and as the encumbering layers of lacquered platework were

lifted from her mistress, Mara sighed in relief. 'Bless you,'
she murmured, and nodded her thanks to the maid who
handed her a cup of cool water. Never again would she
take such service for granted.

Kamlio freed another buckle and noticed Mara's slight
flinch. 'Blisters, Lady?'

Mara gave a rueful nod. 'Everywhere. I can't seem to
grow calluses fast enough.' The trappings of the Warchief
of Clan Hadama were items she seldom wore, but now,
more than ever, every badge of office and sign of rank
must be displayed. She was on a field of war, commanding
troops, and an alliance of forces not seen in modern history.
They might march under the banners of a hundred minor
houses, or be her own forces masked under the standard of
her clan; but they numbered seventy thousand, fully half
the might of the Empire. Their lives, if not their ultimate
survival, were her responsibility.

This war has come too fast! she raged inwardly while
Kamlio removed greaves and breastplate and finished with
the straps of the braces. War hosts had gathered before
she had been able to settle a single plan of action, nor
even to arrange a consultation between Keyoke and the
cho-ja mages from Chakaha. Ichindar's assassination had
happened while she had all the necessary pieces for victory
within her grasp, but before she had any chance to assess
how best to use them.

Kamlio had just unfastened Mara's breastplate when
footsteps sounded outside the tent. As the heavy, ornate
helm with its bosses and plumes and cheek plates was lifted
off, Mara closed her eyes in weariness. She pushed back
the hair plastered in wet streaks to her forehead and neck.
'Open the tent flap,' she commanded her maid. 'If that's
Lujan, back already, I fear bad news.'

The maid flipped back the needra hide that curtained
the door, while Kamlio rummaged for refreshments and
cups for water. The warriors had been on the field since
daybreak, and whichever officer approached to report, he
would be hungry and thirsty.

A shadow crossed the light, limned in a drift of smoke.
Mara blinked stinging eyes and made out the plumes of
her Force Commander as he saluted, fist over heart. Her
expression must have shown apprehension, for his mouth
split at once in a smile of reassurance, made the more vivid
by the soot that darkened his face.

'Lady, the Zanwai and Sajaio are in full flight. The day
is ours; if one can rejoice over winning a pitiful strip of
ngaggi swamp, the ashes of some tents, and six mongrel
war dogs that are inclined to tear the throat out of anything
that moves - one of the casualties was their handler - then
rejoice. The strike force that attempted to organise a retreat
was quickly routed, mostly because the officer in charge had
little more brains than House Sajaio's dogs.'

Mara regarded a sky fouled grey with smoke, then spoke
with bitterness. 'How much longer are we going to have
to remain here in defensive line to keep the Anasati forces
pinned to the southeast of Sulan-Qu?' It irked her to know
that Jiro had other forces hidden to the north. Any day she
expected word that the Holy City was under siege. With
the Shinzawai army under Hokanu in forced march, but
still several days away from Silmani and the Gagajin, she
had no choice but to rely on the toy maker's plans and
the engineers she had sent to infiltrate Jiro's operation. She
could only lie awake each night and pray that her carefully
planned sabotage would work, and that when Jiro ordered
his great engines to breach the walls, the mechanisms would
misfire and create havoc.

The cho-ja mages could not help in this war. Their magic
must be kept secret until the most desperate moment when
the Assembly at last acted, for with rival factions massing to
descend on Kentosani, full-scale conflict was only a matter
of time. The rival armies could only face off for so long,
abiding skirmishes and small encounters. Neither would be
deterred by the dozen or so smaller armies that jockeyed for
the most advantageous positions from which to pick over
what bones the great houses might leave in their wake of
destruction.

Mara motioned for the Force Commander to enter her
quarter. 'How long? Jiro must make a move soon, either
to break our lines or to order his allies from the west in
siege of the Holy City. How much longer can we hang back
without jeopardising support to Hokanu? If something goes
wrong . . .' Her voice trailed off; she felt beaten down by the
forced agony of waiting, fully armed and at the ready, yet
unable to advance. If she ordered her main army to march
on Kentosani, she left open a way for the Anasati forces
to reach the river or the trade roads, or to attack her from
the rear. As long as the Acoma forces held their lines, Jiro's
Force Commander could not attack and break through to
Sulan-Qu without inciting retribution from the Assembly.

But it pained her to hold firm, knowing that Ichindar's
assassination was but the first step in a complex, linked
plot. Jiro had not spent years building siege engines or paid
lavish bribes and won alliances in the estates surrounding
the Inrodaka for nothing. The threat to Justin would come
from the west, she was sure, and were her enemies to break
through the defences of the Imperial Precinct before she
could get there, her children would lose their lives. The
Imperial Whites were good warriors, but with Ichindar
dead, who would command their loyalty? Ichindar's First
Wife could not even control her own daughter. The Imperial
Force Commander would defend the Imperial Precinct, but
without a clear authority from above, his men would be an
unknown factor. They would fight, but would they defend
with the same dedication and selflessness her own forces
gave to her? Any warrior might be expected to falter, if
the Lord ordering the assault upon the Imperial Precinct
might be the next Emperor. Now, more than ever, Mara
perceived the flaws in the Tsurani order of rule.

'Gods,' she exclaimed in frustration, 'this campaign
would be bloody but straightforward if we could plan
without interference from the Assembly!'
Lujan considered his mistress's restlessness with concern,
experienced as he was-in the frailties of men kept too long
at battle pitch with no fighting. His mistress was stretched
near to breaking with tension. The padded robe she wore
under her armor was wringing wet with sweat. She had
been stubborn, and had overseen the action while standing
directly in the sun. He kept his voice mild as he said, 'You
should take every opportunity you can to sit down and
rest, my Lady.' As example, he pointedly removed his helm
and sank cross-legged on the nearest cushion. 'Action could
break out at moment's notice, and little good you will be
to your people if you are worn out or in a faint from the
heat.' He scratched his chin, unable to fully silence his own
gnawing worry. 'Though it is certainly obvious to everyone
that the magicians are conspicuous by their absence.'

'A bad sign,' Mara allowed. 'Hokanu's guess is that they
deliberate over a united ultimatum. If either Jiro or I engage
our forces directly, they will act, be sure of that.' She let
the maid peel off her underrobe, and gestured for a dry
replacement. 'I'll bathe later, when the smoke has settled
and things have a chance of staying clean.'

Lujan rubbed at a bruised elbow, but broke off the motion
as Kamlio handed him water. He drank deeply, his eyes
turned toward the command map unrolled on the bare
earth beside the table. Stones weighted the corners, and the
middle held whorls and lines of colored tiles that displayed
the disposition of every faction's forces up to the latest
report. The spoiling impatience that ate at his Lady was
shared by every man in the ranks. Action was needed,
Lujan knew, to keep their wits sharp, and to prevent rash
moves born of frustration. Even a small engagement would
serve, focusing attention and discipline to keep the troops
whetted to keenest edge. He considered the map in depth,
then pulled his sword to use as a pointer. 'It's clear that
a group of neutrals has set up a defensive position along
the eastern branch of the river Gagajin, between the fork
north of the Great Swamp and the city of Jamar. They
could march west and harry Jiro's flank, but more likely
they'll be satisfied to wait and declare for the winner at
the last.'

Mara spoke around the efforts of the maid, who sponged
and dried her face, then slipped on her clean robe. 'What
are you thinking? A diversion? If we could stir them up and
make them move around, could we confuse things enough
to hide an advance by a few of our companies?'

'Keyoke suggested we might take them captive, steal
their armor and banners, then slip a company of our men
north under their false identity.' Lujan's mouth quirked in
amusement. 'Not at all honorable, Lady, but there are men
of yours who are loyal enough not to care.' His eyes held
frank admiration for Mara's slim fitness, and for the blisters
she bore without complaint. 'But the question came down
to what forces we could break away to start the skirmish
that would not be obvious to our enemies.'

'I could arrange that, I think,' offered a velvet-toned !
voice. A shadow emerged out of the blown smoke, poised
in the gap of the doorway. As always, Arakasi's appearance
had been silent. Accustomed as Mara was to his unexpected
arrivals, she barely masked her flinch. Kamlio, taken
unawares, spilled the water crock over the map. Counters;
washed awry in the flood, and water pooled ominously in
the hollow that represented Kentosani. Movement in the
tent was arrested as Arakasi caught sight of her for the
first time since she returned from Thuril; his eyes widened
for an instant, showing depths that beseeched. Then he
recovered cool control and his gaze flicked back to the
map. Fast as reflex, he kept talking. 'The spilled water has
nicely summed up the situation we have building. Lady, did
you get my reports?'

'Some of them.' Mara touched Kamlio's hand, and urged
her to leave, or sit down. 'Let the maid take care of mopping
up,' she murmured kindly. Kamlio had never looked more
like a gazen caught vulnerable under thin cover; and yet
Thuril had changed her. She did not turn sullen and stiff,
but gathered her courage and sat.

Arakasi took a quick breath, and his eyebrows twitched
quizzically. Then, all business, he knelt by the table and
laced his hands in plain view on top, as if, with other eyes
watching, he dared himself to fidget or shake. He did not
look tired, Mara judged, but simply harried, and he wore
no disguise beyond a plain black robe edged with white.
Although communications had passed between them since
her return from the South, this was the first chance he
had to make a personal appearance since the Emperor's
assassination. 'Lady, it is as we feared. The Inrodaka and
their two vassals were in league with Jiro; their declarations
of neutrality were feigned. The siege engines were hidden in
the forests, and are now moving toward Kentosani.'

'Where?' Lujan asked crisply.

Arakasi caught the drift of the Force Commander's
concern. 'Southwest of the Holy City.' He summed up
the worst. 'There are traditionalists from Neshka Province
involved as allies, and to the north, the Inrodaka have
sent out flanking troops that will certainly harry Hokanu's
march south. He has better numbers; he will not be stopped,
but will suffer losses and be delayed.'

'Allies from Neshka?' Mara said. 'These we can fight.'
To Lujan, she asked, 'Could the garrison from my estate
by Sulan-Qu march to the west and intercept?'

Arakasi interrupted, uncharacteristically blunt- 'The troops
are too close to Kentosani already. You could only harry the
rear guard, and maybe force them to turn a few companies
to engage us. That would thin out the forces left for the
siege, but not stop them.'

'And the lands of your birthright would be left stripped
too thin to be defended effectively,' Lujan added. He
frowned in furious thought. 'Your original bargain with
the cho-ja Queen gives you two companies of warriors.
They would be adequate to repulse any independent force
who tried looting or raiding, but not Jiro's army if he
chooses to concentrate Anasati effort in that direction.'

'The magicians forbid such a move,' Mara countered,
leaning to one side to allow the maid to pass with towels
to soak up the puddles on the tactical map. 'My estates
by Sulan-Qu should be sacrosanct.' She tapped her fingers
together in painful decision. 'Kentosani must be our first
concern. If Jiro wins the golden throne, all of our causes are
lost. We have only the toy maker's plans to foil him. And if
our plot there is successful, many of the enemy will die when
the siege engines are set into play. That will make numbers
of troops critical. Pare them down, and Jiro might not
have enough men left to scale the walls before Hokanu can
win through. No, the estates by Sulan-Qu must be risked.
The unknown to be feared is the Assembly. What will the
magicians do if we strip the Acoma lands by Sulan-Qu and
engage these traditionalists from Neshka Province?'

'No man can know,' Arakasi allowed. As if he were
not aware of Kamlio watching his every move, he helped
himself from the tray of refreshments brought in when
Mara's maid finished with the cleanup. 'But it is my guess
that there the Lord of the Anasati may have outsmarted
himself He has taken best care that his supporters from
Neshka appear to be acting on their own. If Jiro wins
the throne, and the Assembly accuses him afterward of
overly ambitious action, he has left himself a convenient
appearance of noninvolvement. He can demur, and say
that the alliance was formed out of popular opinion, and
his bid for the imperial crown was not his doing at all,
but one launched by traditionalists in his behalf as the
most worthy candidate.' Between bites of bread, the Spy
Master added, 'Mistress, your opposition to such a move
might be encouraged by the Assembly as a natural balance
of power.'

'The Sulan-Qu property might be sacrificed on such a
supposition,' Lujan warned. He stirred through sopp
counters with his sword, to bare that section of the
map.

Mara's exasperation showed as she said, 'We are like two
duelists who have been told that certain moves will cause
the judge to strike the offender down, yet not told which
moves they are.'
Arakasi set aside his crust to manipulate the pieces into
fresh positions, and under his hands, an ominous clot of
assorted colors fanned out toward Kentosani. 'Jiro may
command the more critical position for assault on the
Imperial Precinct, but we are a larger force with more
resources.'

Mara took up his unfinished thought. 'We have deep
support from Lord Hoppara of the Xacatecas, but he is
mewed up in Kentosani. His office gives him no leave to act
without an Emperor, save to defend, and Isashani in Ontoset
can only send Xacatecas forces to him to catch up with
events.' Mara sighed. 'Politically, we are disadvantaged.
There are more who favor a return to the old Council
than who stand with us. No, this will not be a drawn-out
war. Either we win decisively, and early, or Jiro will gain a
broader base of supporters.'

Lujan fingered his sword edge, as if annoyed by the nicks
that had yet to be sharpened out following the morning's
minor action. 'You fear desertion and betrayal?'

'I do not fear them,' answered Mara, 'but should we
falter, I expect them.' As order was restored to the map,
she chewed her lip, and decided. 'We must threaten the
siege, at any cost. The estates by Sulan-Qu must be risked.
Lujan, how should we proceed?'

The Acoma Force Commander gathered up his sweatdamp
helm. 'We can ask our friend Lord Benshai of the
Chekowara to begin moving northward toward your old
estates, but keep him on the western bank of the river. Let
Jiro wonder if he goes to reinforce our garrison there, or
if he will continue on to the Holy City.'

Mara gave back a smile of fierce satisfaction. 'Tempt
him to commit even a fraction of his Anasati troops to
hamper House Chekowara, and his hand will be tipped
for the Assembly to read.'

'Should Jiro move across the river to intercept him,
Benshai will run like a frightened calley-bird,' Arakasi
said drily. 'His house servants say behind his back that
Benshai mumbles words of cowardice in his sleep.'

Mara sighed. 'If we're lucky, Jiro doesn't know that.'

Now Arakasi spoke, an edge of frustration to his tone.
'Jiro certainly knows. His adviser Chumaka might as well
have his ear by the Lord of the Chekowara's fat mouth,
listening to his every breath. My agents have proof that he
kept Clan Hadama in disarray through the years he served
as Clan Warchief.œ Despite his rich robes and stern-looking
soldiers, he is all appearance and no substance. No, he might
march resolutely up the river, but the first suggestion of
an Anasati attack will send Benshai of the Chekowara
running south. Jiro will know the moment your estates near
Sulan-Qu are unguarded since half of Benshai's courtesans
are Chumaka's spies.'

An underlying vehemence in Arakasi's tone caused
Kamlio to straighten. Almost, she drew breath to address
him, before a flush swept her cheeks. She glanced down in
painful embarrassment.

Mara noticed, slightly ahead of Lujan. She touched her
Force Commander's wrist beneath the table to still the
discussion of weighty matters, and force the cross-current
of tension between Spy Master and ex-courtesan to develop
into reaction.

Arakasi spoke first, a ring like barbarian iron beneath
his soft-spoken manner. 'I don't like the Lord of the
Chekowara's habits.' His distaste was plain as he added,
'Young girls who are spies are a specialty of Chumaka's.
Mara was once nearly killed by such a one. Her name was
Teani.' He paused, his eyebrows tipped upward in inquiry.
'If you want to know anything of my thoughts, on this or
any other subject, you have only to ask. Only, please leave
off staring at me as if I were a book scroll, or a puzzle, or
some sort of talking pet.'

Kamlio started to her feet, confusion on her face. 'I don't
think of you that way.' She seemed breathless, as if she had
been running. She started to bow, her mouth parted to ask
Mara's leave to depart; but the bland expression on her
mistress's face gave her no promise of quarter. She blinked,
raised her chin, and looked at the Spy Master in wide-eyed
vulnerability. 'I don't know what to ask you. I don't know
what to think of you. But you frighten me to the depths of
my heart, there is truth.' Her soft almond eyes filled with
tears. 'I am scared and I don't know why.'

For an instant the Spy Master and the girl confronted
each other in tortured confusion. Lujan stayed riveted, his
hand too tight on his sword.

After an unbearable second, Mara realised she must be
the one to break the tension. 'Kamlio, you fear because at
last you know what it is to have something to lose. Go
now, and find cold water, and wash your face.' As if the
girl had been bound by invisible strings that had been cut,

she bowed in grateful relief and hurried off around the
curtain into privacy. ~ ~

At the wounded look on Arakasi's face, Mara gave a
youthful grin. 'You're winning,' she whispered. 'The girl
has let you see into her feelings.'

Arakasi let his wrists fall limp across his knees. Strained
and transparent with hope, he said, 'You think so?'
Lujan burst into a broad laugh and gave the Spy Master
a comradely clap on the shoulder. 'Man, take my word
for it. Most of us endure this nonsense when we are still
in boyhood, but your youth seems to have arrived later
than most. Lady Mara's right. You'll have the lass in the
blankets if only you're willing to show her a bit of you that
needs her help.'
Arakasi sat with his brows peaked in comic puzzlement
'What?'

'She has to see that you need her,' Mara offered.

When the Spy Master's mystified expression failed to
clear, Lujan said, 'Gods, she's never seen you make a
mistake. You killed tong assassins, and lived; you made
love in her master's bed, and if you sweated, it was in
passion rather than fear. You touched her in ways few
men could, I would wager, which means you were the first
person alive who saw into her feelings. That frightened her
because it meant that her beauty or her training failed, or
that you were too smart to succumb to her allure. A man
in her arms is not supposed to be left with the wits to
think beyond his stiff organ. So she's scared. None of
her skills will avail her where you are concerned. She can
wear no mask for protection. She is offered a man who can
understand her, but whose feelings she can't read in return.
Bedroom pleasures she's bored with, because caring for a
man is outside her experience. She'll have to be led and
shown. But for that, she must lose her awe of you. Try
tripping on a stone and falling at her feet one day, and see
if she doesn't jump down beside you and start doctoring
your skinned knees.'

Mara said, 'For a lout who takes advantage of women,
you can be surprisingly insightful, Lujan.'

While the Force Commander grinned, Arakasi said, 'I'll
think on it.'

'If you think even once with a woman, you're lost.' Lujan
grinned. 'At least, no one I know has ever fallen in love

for logic.'

'Lujan's right,' Mara encouraged, innately aware of the
truth. Hokanu and she shared perfect understanding, a
harmony of body and intellect. But with the headstrong,
outspoken Kevin, who had argued with her, and sometimes
made her scream in frustration, she had known passion
that the years had not dimmed. For a moment her heart
quickened at his memory - until a gust of smoky air swirled
through the tent, reminding her of battle and the weight
of today's problems that demanded immediate attention.
'Send for our Adviser for War,' she said. 'We must make
plans for every contingency and do one thing until matters
come to a head. stay alive.'

The tent fell silent for a moment before anyone moved;
wind carried the noise of an armed camp in the throes of
what could all too soon become a great war, or else a
circle of cinders at a stroke from the Great Ones of the
Assembly.

The squall passed, and the drip of wet trees mingled
with the shouts of officers directing their troops to set
up camp. The armor worn by the warriors was without
marking; and the tents they labored to set, drab brown.
To casual observation, there was nothing to distinguish
this company's encampment from thousands of others in
key locations throughout the Empire; except that this one
appeared to guard no crossroads, bridge or ford, or holding
of significance. Miles removed from the possibility of a
fight, this troop prepared to bed down id the trackless
forests at-four days' march to the northwest of Kentosani.

The discipline was no drill and far from slack as servants
and rank-and-file warriors labored to drive tent pegs and
set ridgepoles. On a slight rise, beneath a stand of sodden
evergreens, one man paced in agitation, while a shorter,
leaner figure swathed in an oiled wool cape hopped at his
heels to keep up.

'How much longer must I wait?' Jiro snapped in exasperation.


A servant crossed his path and bowed. Jiro stepped
around; well accustomed to the master's dicey moods
since the armies had marched, the servant pressed his
face to wet leaf mold. 'Your command tent shall be ready
shortly, my Lord.'

Jiro whirled, eyes narrowed in displeasure. 'I wasn't
speaking to you!' While the wretch so addressed abased
himself headlong in the mud to atone for his master's
displeasure, the Lord of the Anasati switched his glare to
the First Adviser, who just then caught up to him. 'I said,
how much longer?'

Chumaka brushed a water drop off the end of his nose.
He looked smug, despite wet clothes and the day's march
through pathless wilderness. 'Patience, master. A wrong
move now will spoil the planning we have labored for
-years to bring "about.'

'Don't talk circles around my question,' Jiro said, in no
temper to suffer his First Adviser's rhetoric. 'I asked you
how long? We cannot leave siege engines in place around
Kentosani and keep them idle indefinitely. Every day that
passes brings us risk: the Omechan Lord we have left in
charge could grow restless, or pursue his ambitions on
his own. And delay only allows the Shinzawai forces to
march that much closer to the aid of the Imperial Guard.
We dare not presume that the Assembly will not be spying
on our actions. They could intervene, and forbid an attack
at any time! What in the name of the gods, Chumaka, are
we waiting for?'

If the Anasati First Adviser was surprised by this tirade,
he did no more than stop in his tracks.- His leathery features
stayed expressionless, while Jiro kept pacing ahead. Six
energetic steps later, the Lord finally noticed that the
servant he had commanded to answer no longer flanked
him. He restrained himself from snarling a curse. As always,
Chumaka had allowed for every contingency. Either Jiro
must acknowledge his fidgeting by walking back for his
answer, or he must command his First Adviser to return
to his side - and the distance between them was just wide
enough that the master must raise his voice, showing all
within earshot that he needed to assert himself to make a
petty point.

Jiro might have shouted just to vent his spleen, but since
he had an Omechan contingent as guest, he was forced to
capitulate and stride back to Chumaka.

Annoyed as he was for other reasons, this personal setback
left no rancor. In fact, Jiro admired his First Adviser's
finesse. A Lord who displayed nerves and temper had no
inherent dignity; and one who aspired to an Emperor's
crown must learn to set insignificant irritations aside.
Always the instructor, Chumaka was far too masterfully
subtle to issue a reproach before warriors and servants that
might reveal his master's poor self-control.

It was just such traits that would make Chumaka the ideal
imperial adviser, Jiro mused with a curl to his lips that just
missed being a smile. His mood now much improved, he
regarded his adviser, whose habitual stoop was emphasised
by the drag of his wet garments. 'Why should we grant
Mara more time to advance her interests? Your intelligence
confirms that she intends to claim the golden. throne for
Justin.'

Chumaka tapped his cheek with one finger, as though
considering; but by the calculating glint in his eyes, Jiro
knew he was under close observation. 'Master,' Chumaka
said presently, 'your command tent is prepared. I suggest
we discuss this issue inside, in comfort and privacy.'

Jiro laughed. 'You are slipperier than a fresh-caught fish,
Chumaka. Well then, we shall dry off and the servants shall
heat us tea. But after that, no more roundabout talk! By the
gods, I will have my answer from you. And after all these
delays and excuses, it had better be revealing!'

Now Chumaka smiled. He bobbed a quick, self-deprecating
bow. 'Master, have I ever failed to match my actions to your
desires?'
His temper changeable as the wind-blown clouds overhead,
Jiro answered through clenched teeth, 'Mare is still
alive. Bring me her head, and then I will agree that you
have not failed me.'

Not the least discomfited by what another man might
regard as a plain threat from the Lord of the Anasati,
Chumaka said, 'Indeed, master, that is what I am working
myself to achieve.'

'Hah!'Jiro moved through the gloomy woods toward the
largest tent. 'Don't try me, old man. You'd work yourself to
the bone for the sheer love of intrigue.'

Chumaka wrung out the hem of his dripping cloak and
followed his master into the command tent. 'My Lord, it
is a fine point, but if I should do such a thing for its own
sake, that would be vanity. The gods do not love such faults
in a man. Therefore, I work for the glory of your cause,
my Lord, and there the matter ends. I am ever your loyal
servant.

Jiro ended the discussion with a deprecating wave. He
preferred his philosophy out of books, which did not have
Chumaka's irritating tendency to belabor every issue half
to death.

The interior of the command tent was still in the process of
being set up. One lantern had been lit, and servants
bustled about unpacking cushions and hangings. From the
outside, Jiro's quarters might appear plain, but inside, he
insisted on his comforts, his fine silk tapestries, and two
chests of book scrolls. Lately he had been reading up on
obscure issues of law, imperial state functions, and precisely
which ceremonies must be officiated by which priests of the
Twenty Gods to make the crowning of an Emperor proper
in the eyes of heaven.

The reading had been tedious, made worse because the
lanterns attracted bugs and cast poor light. The Lord of
the Anasati snapped his fingers, and a boy body servant
jumped to attend him. 'Remove my armor. See that all
the leather straps are oiled, so they do not dry stiff.' Jiro
waited, statue-still, as he suffered the boy to undo the first
buckles.

Although his high office allowed the attentions of a
servant, Chumaka hated the pretension. He shucked his
damp wool and found a seat. Jiro's silent, efficient house
staff had just brought him a steaming pot of tea when a
buzzing sound cut the air.

'A Great One comes!' he called in warning.

Jiro jerked free of his last bracer and spun around, while
behind him, to a man, his serving staff fell prone upon the
floor. As a gust fanned the tent, and the hangings rippled
from their supporting poles, Chumaka set down the teapot
and faded into the shadows toward the back of the tent.

The magician appeared in the center of the one rug that
had been unrolled from its bundle. His fiery red hair trailed
out from under his hood, and he seemed not to care that he
trod over silk cushions as he approached the Lord of the
Anasati. The eyes beneath his cowl were pale and sharp
as they darted from side to side, and fixed at last on the
Lord who waited with his armor heaped at his feet.

'My Lord of the Anasati,' greeted Tapek of the Assembly
of Magicians. 'I am sent as delegate to command your
presence in the Holy City. Troops have been deployed,
and for the good of the Empire, the Assembly requires an
accounting to avert the outbreak of open war.'

Glad of the wet hair that concealed the fact that he was
sweating, Lord Jiro raised his chin. He gave a perfectly
deferent bow. 'Your will, Great One. It shall not be the

Anasati who break your edict. But I make so bold as to
point out: if I go, who will see that Mara of the Acoma
and her Shinzawai husband keep the edict against armed
conflict?'

Tapek frowned. 'That is not your business, Lord Jiro! Do
not presume to question.' Although the Great One was far
from unsympathetic to the Anasati cause, he disliked the
idea that any Lord dared to voice even token objection.
But as Jiro bent his head in deference, Tapek relented.
'The Lady Mara has been issued a like summons! She is
also commanded to appear in Kentosani. As you are, she
is given ten days' leave in which to do so! The day after
the imperial mourning ends, you will both convene with
members of the Assembly to state your cases.'

Jiro thought rapidly and repressed a smile of satisfaction.
Ten days' fast march would barely be sufficient to allow
Mara to reach the Holy City. His position was closer, not
with his main army to the south as all would suppose, but
in this secret location near Kentosani in preparation for his
planned siege-Mara would need to scramble to meet the
Assembly's demand, while he would have days of leeway
to seek advantage. To cover the bent of his thinking, the
Anasati Lord said, 'These are unstable times, Great One.
Traveling the roads is not safe for any Lord, with every other
ambitious noble stirring about with his army. Mara may
have your sanction against attacking my personal train, but
she has other supporters and sympathisers. Many friends of
the late Emperor have political cause to see me dead for my
leadership of the traditionalist faction.'

'This is true.' Tapek gave a magnanimous gesture. 'You
are permitted to travel with an honor guard to ensure
your safety. When you reach the Holy City, you may take
one hundred warriors within the walls. Since the Imperial
Whites still enforce order inside the city, that number should
be proof against assassins.'

Jiro bowed deeply. 'Your will, Great One.' He held his
deferential pose through the buzzing sound that signaled
Tapek's departure. When he arose, he found Chumaka once
again seated upon the cushions, dusting at the footprints
left by the magician between sips of his tea. His manner
was inscrutable, as if no great visitation had happened;
except that a flush of unholy satisfaction colored the First
Adviser's craggy face.

'Why are you so full of yourself?' Jiro demanded, half
snatching the dry robe brought to him by his servant. The
Lord stepped over his discarded armor and, checking to be
sure no grit sullied his personal cushion, sank cross-legged
across from his adviser.

Chumaka set down his cup, reached for the teapot, and
calmly poured for his master. 'Send your runner to fetch
in the Omechan heir.' The Anasati First Adviser handed
his master the tea, then rubbed his hands together in
bright-eyed anticipation. 'Our plot ripens well, my Lord!
In fact, all unknowing, the Assembly has helped it along!'

Jiro took the cup as if it were filled with foul-tasting
medicine. 'You equivocate again,' he warned; but he knew
better than to stall in sending his runner off on the errand
Chumaka suggested.

As the messenger boy left, Jiro peered at his adviser over
the rim of his teacup, then took a sip. 'We will be inside
the walls of Kentosani in four days with one hundred of
my best fighting men,' he allowed. 'What else do you have
brewing in that head of yours?' -,

'Great deeds, master.' Chumaka raised a hand and ticked
off points on his fingers. 'We will leave this camp and set
off for Kentosani, in strict compliance with the Great Ones'
summons. Next, assuming Mara acts in compliance - that's
safe, since if she doesn't, she's as good as dead by the hand
of the Assembly, and we have won - anyway assuming she
is no fool, while she is still many days' march to the south
of Kentosani, we are inside the walls and covertly prepared
for a raid on the Imperial Precinct.' Chumaka grinned, and
tapped his ring finger. 'The Omechan Force Commander,
meantime, acts on his Lord's orders and begins the siege

of the Holy City, as we have planned all along. But here is
the change for the better, courtesy of the Assembly: you,
my master, are innocent of this attack, being inside the
walls. If the magicians protest the breaking of the imperial
peace, you cannot be implicated. After all, you cannot be
expected to answer for a popular move to set you on the
throne. But alas for the Imperial Whites, the old walls
prove weak indeed. They are breached, and a war host
invades the streets.'

Chumaka's eyes sparkled. Less excitable, ever cynically
cautious, Jiro set down his tea. 'Our allies under Omechan
break into the Imperial Precinct,' he responded. 'Mare's
children suffer an unfortunate accident, and lo, the imperial
mourning ends, and there is a new Emperor upon the golden
throne by the time Lady Mara arrives in Kentosani, and his
name is Jiro.'

Now Jiro's faintly underlying scorn surfaced to outright
irritation. 'First Adviser, your ideas have several flaws, if I
may point them out?'

Chumaka inclined his head, his enthusiasm like banked
coals that at any moment might ignite a bonfire. 'Mara,'
he second:guessed. 'I have not accounted for the Acoma
bitch that you want dead so badly.'

'Yes, Mara!' Tired of his adviser's conversations, which
at times seemed convoluted as his shah tactics, Jiro vented
his annoyance. 'What about her?'

'She will be dead.' Chumaka let a dramatic pause develop
as he shifted his haunches to allow a servant behind him to
spread another carpet on the tent floor. Then he said, 'Do
you think the Assembly would stay its hand if her troops
were to attack your main army by Sulan-Qu?'

This time, Jiro caught his drift. 'The Great Ones will kill
her for me!' He leaned forward, almost slopping the tea on
the table. 'But that's brilliant. You think we can goad her
into attacking?'

Chumaka smiled in satisfaction and poured himself a
second cup of tea. Through the dimness of the tent, his
teeth gleamed. 'I know so,' he allowed. 'Her children's
lives are at stake, and she is a woman. She will risk all
to defend her babies, depend on it. And unless she calls an
attack, your troops in the south will break camp and march
around her lines to support your newly established rule by
controlling the lands outside the walls of Kentosani. This
her clever Spy Master will tell her with absolute certainty,
for it will be the truth.'

Bemused by the implications, Jiro mirrored his First
Adviser's smile. 'The magicians will be busy chastising
Mara, while I seize the golden throne. Of course, we may
lose all of our Anasati army, but that will not ultimately
matter. The Acoma will be obliterated, and I will be left
with the highest honor in all the Empire. Five thousand
Imperial Whites will answer to me then, and all Lords will
bow to my will.'
The tent flap opened, interrupting Jiro's enraptured
speculation. His face went expressionless at once as he
turned to see who entered.

A young man ducked through the doorway, striding
briskly. His armor, also, was unmarked, but his snub nose
and flat cheeks identified him unmistakably as a scion of
the Omechan. 'You called for me, Lord Jiro?' he demanded
in an arrogant alto.

The Lord of the Anasati arose, still slightly flushed with
excitement. 'Yes, Kadamogi. You will return to your father
at speed, and tell him the hour has come. Five days from
now, he will attack Kentosani using the siege engines I have
provided.'

Kadamogi bowed. 'I will tell him. Then you will hold
to the vow you made for our support, my Lord of the
Anasati - when the golden throne is yours, your first act
as Emperor will be to restore the High Council, and to see
an Omechan reclaim the white and gold as Warlord!'
Jiro's lip curled in barely suppressed distaste. 'I am
hardly senile, to have forgotten my promise to your father:
so quickly.' Then, as the young Omechan noble stiffened
with the beginnings of affront, the Anasati Lord added
placatingly, 'We waste time. Take my best litter, and my
fastest bearers to see you on your errand. For myself, I must
consult with my Force Commander to oversee disposition
of my honor guard.'

'Honor guard?' Kadamogi's heavy features darkened in
confusion. 'Why should you need an honor guard?'

In a mercurial change of mood, Jiro laughed. 'I march
also upon Kentosani, and by order of the Assembly. The
Great Ones have summoned me there to offer an accounting
concerning deployment of my troops!'

Kadamogi's face cleared as he gave back a deep-cheated
chuckle. 'That's rich. Very. And our plot to restore the High
Council is nearly a foregone conclusion.'

Now Jiro gestured in animated anticipation. 'Indeed. The
siege will be short, having help from the inside, and the sup"
porters of the Good Servant will be set upon by the Assembly.'
Glee touched his tone as he finished, 'The magicians will kill
Mara for us. Servant of the Empire she may be, but she will
die in magic flames, roasted like a haunch of meat!'

Kadamogi's fat lips stretched into a smile. 'We should:
drink a glass of wine to that ending, before I leave, yes?'

'A fine idea!' Jiro clapped for his servants, and only
noticed in passing that the cushions where Chumaka had
sat were no longer occupied. The empty teacup on the table
was gone also, leaving no sign that the First Adviser had
been there at all.

That man is more devious than the God of Tricks himself,
Jiro thought; and then the wine came, and he settled down
to an evening of camaraderie with the heir to the Omechan
mantle.
Outside the command tent, in the drizzle as evening fell,
a shadowy form moved through the trees. Over one arm,
Chumaka carried the oiled wool cape haste had not allowed
him to don. As he walked briskly toward the tent that
housed the Anasati messenger runners, he appeared to be
counting on his fingers. But it was not sums he muttered
in a monotone under his breath.

'Those leftover warriors who were of the Minwanabi,
and who did not swear to Mara, now - yes, it is time for
them to earn their keep, I think. A precaution, yes, just in
case Mara slips through the grasp of the Assembly. She
is clever. We cannot suppose we know all the details of
her inner council. That time she supposedly spent in the
temple in seclusion has yet to be adequately explained.
How could she be there, then suddenly be upon her own
estates .. . ?'

Chumaka hurried on, not tripping over roots or blundering
into trees, though it was very dark, and the camp was
strange. Preoccupied as he seemed, he stepped cleanly over
guy lines and tent pegs, while he finished formulating his
backup plan. 'Yes, we must have sets of armor lacquered
in Acoma green for these men, and have them insinuate
themselves into the Lady's honor guard - at least, they
will stay in hiding until the last minute, when the Lady

is on the run, and then they will slip in among her
warriors and slaughter her defenders. Posing as loyal
Acoma, they can either capture her and turn her over
to the Black Robes, or take their pleasure and kill her
themselves, in revenge for the Minwanabi master whose
line she obliterated. Yes ... that would be the thing.'
Chumaka reached the compound where the messengers'
tent was set. He startled a sentry as he stepped out
of the gloom, and nearly received a sword thrust to
the chest. /

'Gods save us from our own men!' he exclaimed,
bounding back and throwing up his bundled cloak to
catch the blade. 'It's Chumaka, you blind fool! Now find
me a messenger who is fresh, and quickly, before I decide:
to report your incompetence to the master.'

The soldier bobbed his head in fearful deference, for it
was known that any who displeased the First Adviser came
to unfortunate straits. He ducked into the messengers' tent,
while behind him, in gently falling rain, Chumaka resumes
his.singsong musing.
27

Defiance

The palanquin jolted.

Mara snapped awake at the thump, disoriented by the
close confines, until she remembered.- She was not in her
tent, but on the road, answering the summons by the
Assembly to appear in the Holy City. For two days now
she had been traveling at speed in her most ornate, formal
palanquin, changing the thirty bearers required to lift the
monstrous thing in shifts, and eating on the move. It was
night; she knew not what hour.

Light breeze stirred the curtains, smelling of rain, as
Keyoke, who sat across from her, leaned out. Although
still muddled with the aftereffects of sleep, she could hear
by the tone of her Adviser for War as he exchanged words
with someone outside that a problem had arisen.

She pushed herself upright on her cushions. 'What passes,
Keyoke?'

The old man ducked back inside the palanquin. By the
light cast by the oil lamp hanging from a ring overhead, his
face more than ever seemed chiseled from seamed granite.

'Trouble,' Mara surmised.

Keyoke returned a curt nod. 'A messenger sent by Arakasi
brings ill news.' Then, well aware such detail was no
afterthought, he added, 'The man met us on cho-ja back.'

Mara felt her heart thud in raw fear. 'Gods, what's gone
wrong?'

The elderly campaign veteran knew best how to break the
news cleanly. 'Jiro's location is at last made known. He was
not with the Anasati troops, as we supposed. He is ahead
of us, by now just over one day's march from Kentosani.'

Mara slumped back, crushed by the sudden ebb of hope.
'That leaves him five days in which to wreak mischief
unopposed, since that doddering fool Lord Frasai saw fit
to send Hoppara of the Xacatecas home after the Emperor's
murder.'

'Mistress,' Keyoke interrupted in worried tones, 'that's
not all.'

Distracted by horrible images of possible death for her
children, Mara forced herself to track the immediate issue.
Seeing the grave expression on Keyoke's face, she surmised
the worst: 'Jiro's siege engines.' Her tone was dulled by the
scope of a disaster that seemed to widen by the second.

Keyoke gave back the clipped nod he used during battle
councils. 'The attack on the walls is poised to begin, and
Arakasi has discovered that our efforts at sabotage have
failed. The toy maker's plans we labored to implement were
never set in place. Presumably, the engineers we sent were
apprehended and put to death, and false reports of their
success sent back through your network. Arakasi could say
only that the assault against Kentosani's walls will occur
without mishap, under Omechan colors. Once Jiro is safely;
inside the Imperial Precinct, his hands will seem clean. His coming
bid for the golden throne could legitimately be
justified as an attempt to restore the peace.'

Mara bit her lip hard enough to hurt. 'He's not in the
Imperial Precinct yet?'

Keyoke's expression stayed wooden. 'Not yet. But the
messenger's news is not fresh, and much can have happened
since he rushed south.'

'We are not ready for this!' Mara burst out. 'Gods, how
could we be ready for this?' Her voice shook with despair.
Ever since her return from Thuril, calamitous events seemed
to be trampling over her with unrelenting speed. Fate was
cruel, to thrust her into conflict unprepared, when she had
the means to avert total ruin so nearly within her grasp. If

::

only she had a peaceful interval in which to plan, and set to
use the advantages she held in the presence of the Chakaha
mages!

'Mistress?' Keyoke prompted gently.

Aware her silence had stretched too long, Mara made
herself rally. 'We are already lost, in all likelihood, but I
cannot let go without a fight. If I fail to act, my children
will soon be killed, and without them, my line ends with
me.' Forcing resolution in her voice, she added, 'I would not
see my faithful servants left in heaven's disfavor, without a
mistress, as I go meekly to answer Emperor Jiro's justice.'

'All would rather perish fighting in Acoma service than
linger as grey warriors,' Keyoke allowed.

Mara repressed a violent shiver. 'Then we are agreed
that the circumstances are extreme.' She leaned forward
and whipped back the curtains of the palanquin. 'Lujan!'
she called.

The Acoma Force Commander snapped her a salute,
droplets flying from his plumes. 'Your will, my Lady.'
'Send the bearers off at a distance and order them to
rest,' Mara said crisply. 'When they are settled out of
earshot, deploy my honor guard in defensive circle around
the palanquin. Then I would have Arakasi's messenger, the
cho-ja who bore him, Saric, Incomo, and yourself report
to me. We must hold council at once, and make immediate
decisions.'

Her orders were carried out with dispatch, despite
the darkness and the rain. Mara spent the interval in
furious thought, while Keyoke considerately tied back the
curtains to allow her chosen advisers to gather around

the palanquin. As the sides were opened to the night, the
lantern light pooled on the cushions, fading with distance
as it washed a ring of familiar faces. Beyond them, the dark
was absolute.

Mara regarded each of her officers, from Keyoke, whom
she had known since her girlhood, to Saric, promoted
young man to his post of First Adviser, to Incomo, reprieved.
from an enemy prisoner's fate of death or slavery. All
given her miracles, in their time of service. Now she found
herself forced to ask more, to demand, in fact, that s.
of them lay down their lives. There was no time
recriminations, no moment even to dwell upon sentiment
Expediency was paramount, and so she gave out what she
expected might be her last commands to them in this life
her voice tersely emotionless. To allow her feelings to show
was to invite emotional breakdown.

First she addressed the cho-ja, who was to her imperfectly
educated eye an elderly worker. 'First, and most important,
your Queen has my thanks for the loan of your services.'

The cho^-ja worker inclined its head. 'My services were
purchased, Lady Mara.'

'Your Queen has my gratitude in addition to monetary
payment. Let her know if you have means.' Mara paused
and heard the thin, high-pitched buzzing that signalled
cho-ja communication When the sound ceased, she ask
'Is it meet that I ask questions of you, good worker? ~
may I request of you another labor, without compromising
your body's need of rest?'

Again the cho-ja inclined its head. 'The night air is mild,
Lady Mara. I have no need of rest unless it turns cold. State
your needs.'

Mara sighed in barely perceptible relief. One sn
obstruction less lay before her. 'I require my Force Commander,
Lujan, carried south at speed to rejoin my army
near the city of Sulan-Qu. He must travel in utmost haste.
my line's survival depends upon it.'
'My cPrvir~ is yours. the cho-ja intoned 'I will bear your
officer willingly.'

'Should I survive' the Queen of your hive may demand
debt of me,' Mara said in sincere appreciation. 'I would
also ask that you give my adviser Saric clear instructions
on the location of the cho-ja hive entrance nearest our
present position.' As the Cho-ja worker inclined its head
in acquiescence, Mara added, 'Saric, go with him. Learn
where the hive is; select ten soldiers from my retinue who
can move quickly; and also borrow for me a partial suit
of armor that will let me pass as a warrior in the dark.'

Saric gave a hasty bow and left the circle. One face fewer,
Mara thought; she swallowed hard. -The next order she had
to deliver became the more difficult. 'Lujan?'

Her Force Commander leaned forward, his hair raked in
wet streaks at his temples, and his hand resting upon his
sword. 'Pretty Lady, what is your desire?'

His tone was rakish. Mara suppressed a half-laugh,
half-sob. 'I require the impossible, soldier.' She forced a
smile. 'Though, gods know, you already gave me as much
in the challenge circle in Chakaha.'

Lujan gave a deprecating wave. His eyes also seemed too
bright for the dimness of the lantern light. 'Say on, Lady.
There is no need for hesitation between us - particularly
after Chakaha.'

Mara suppressed a tremor of nerves. 'Force Commander,
I require you to rejoin my army in the south, Should the
Anasati forces attempt to break their lines and move
anywhere, north, east or west, you will commit all of
our companies and engage Lord Jiro's. Fight them to a
standstill; keep them from joining their master in the Holy
City. When the Black Robes arrive to chastise you, forestall
their wrath in any manner that you can.' Now she paused
to gather the force of will to keep control. 'Lujan, I ask
that you dedicate the lives of the Acoma warriors to the
last man before you allow Lord Jiro's army to travel one
step closer to Kentosani.'

Lujan slapped a hand over his heart in salute. 'Lady Mara,
you have my solemn word. Either your army shall prevail,
or I will wage such close war that the Black Robes must
annihilate us all, Anasati and Acoma both.' He bent his
head in a swift bow and straightened. 'For your honor,
my Lady.'

And then he, too, was swallowed up by the night. The
Lady of the Acoma scrubbed her fingers over her face
She felt clammy, whether from mist or sweat she did not
know. If Lujan survives this, and we should meet again,
Mara vowed, I will give him a reward such as his dreams
cannot encompass. But only if Justin sat on the golden
throne could any of them have a prayer of survival. Even
should the Acoma prevail, Lujan might be beyond reward,
for no one who defied the Assembly survived; no one. Mara
raised her chin and phrased the question that had to be
asked. 'Keyoke, ever faithful grandfather of my heart, do
you see any other option?'

He looked at her, hard-bitten from his years on fields of
battle. 'I see none, daughter of my heart. To yield up to your
enemy the life of your innocent son would save nothing. If
Jiro ascends the golden throne, our lives and Acoma honor
are as dust. What matter if the Assembly burns us to ashes
first?' He smiled with the humor only soldiers facing death
can muster. 'Should we die with honor, we shall be known to
history as the only house willing to challenge the Assembly.
That is no mean accomplishment.'

Mara fixed her gaze straight ahead. Alternatives did not
exist. Now she must forge ahead, with the last order;
the hardest of all to deliver. 'Keyoke, Incomo.' Her voice
faltered. She jammed taut hands into her lap and willed
herself to believe in a strength that was all false bravado.
'From here our ways must part. You must go on with
the palanquin and the honor guard. Keep on the road to
Kentosani, and behave as if nothing untoward has occurred
This may seem a small service compared to the deed I have
assigned to Lujan. But I say in deepest truth, your task may
prove the most important. The Black Robes must not guess
that my path has diverged until the latest possible instant.
Your lives are precious to me, and to the continuance of
House Acoma. But no Lady of my rank would journey to
a meeting with magicians in the Holy City without her most
valued senior staff Your presence is essential to keep up
proper appearances. On this the chance of saving Kasuma
and Justin must depend.'

'Mara-anni.' Keyoke used the gentle diminutive of her
childhood. 'Set aside your fear. For myself, I am an old
man. The friends who might remember my youth are
mostly in Turakamu's halls, and if the gods are kind and
grant my dearest wish, I would ask to meet the Red God
many years ahead of you.' Keyoke paused, then, almost
as afterthought, he broke into a fond smile. 'My Lady, I
would have you know this. You have taught me the true
meaning of a warrior's creed. Any man can die fighting
enemies. But the real test of honor for a man is to live and
learn to love himself. In my long life, I have accomplished
many deeds. But it took your gift of an adviser's post to
show me the meaning of my accomplishments.' A suspect
shining adorned Keyoke's eyes as he gave his Lady his final
request. 'Mistress, by your leave, I request permission to
help Saric select the ten warriors who will accompany you
in your flight to Kentosani.'

Beyond words, Mara inclined her head, concealing her
sudden tears as Keyoke delved among the cushions for his
crutch, and arose. He swung himself off into the dark, erect
as he had been in youth, and with the same dedication that
had seen him through a lifetime of wars. When Mara at last
found the courage to raise her head, he was gone from sight;

but she heard his voice demanding the loan of a sword and
helm from the spare supplies.

'Dammit,' he said, borrowing a swearword from
Midkemia when someone suggested he should ride in
the palanquin in dignified comfort. 'I shall go armed,
and on my feet, and any man who dares to suggest otherwise
can cross swords with me and earn himself a

beating!'

Mara sniffed. Only two faces remained of her inner
circle: Arakasi's messenger, who was a virtual stranger,
and Incomo, whom she had scarcely come to know as
well as the others who had worn Acoma colors longer. The
fine-boned, stooped old adviser had seen service with two
houses, and the obliteration of one master at Mara's hand.
And yet he did not seem awkward as he faced the mistress
he had sworn to serve. Though he was a tentative man, his
voice was now unusually strong. 'Lady Mara, know that
I have come to love and respect you. I leave you with all
that I can give: my counsel, poor though it is. I charge you,
for the good of the Empire we both revere, to hold to your
goals. Seize the golden throne ahead of Jiro, and know
absolutely that you do right by this land and its people.'
He smiled shyly. 'I, who once faithfully served your most
bitter enemy, was given more honor and joy in your service
than I could have imagined any man might know. When I
served the Minwanabi, I did so for duty, and the honor of
my house. Had Tasaio been defeated by any other ruler, I
would have died a slave, so I know first hand the value of
your principles. The changes you labor for are just. Make:
Justin Emperor, and rule well and wisely. You have my
devotion and my everlasting gratitude.'

Awkward of body as he was with emotions, Incomo
arose. He gave a deep bow, and another shy smile, then hastened
away to fill Saric's ears with last-minute advice,

whether or not it was wanted.

Mara swallowed past a tightness in her throat. She:
regarded Arakasi's messenger, who seemed weary enough
to fall asleep on the cushions without the bother of lying
down first. 'Can you tell me whether the news you brought ~
has also been sent to my husband?' she asked gently, hating
to disrupt his peace.

The man blinked and roused. 'Mistress, Lord Hokanu
will have heard ahead of you, since he was closer to
Kentosani. Arakasi dispatched other couriers to carry
word to the Shinzawai when the first in our relay was
sent to you.'

Mara longed to know what Hokanu had done when the
ugly news reached his ears. She might never learn; or she
might live to regret the final knowledge. For whether or
not she had made her husband's life forfeit by her orders
to Lujan, which were in blatant disregard of the Assembly's
edict, in her heart she suspected that her husband would
never allow Jiro to reach the sanctuary of Kentosani.
Revenge for his murdered father would not permit, and
in addition, the life of his heir was at stake. Hokanu would
serve his honor and attack, Mara thought, whether or not
he had a prayer of success.

She regarded the exhausted messenger and delivered her
last instruction, which she hoped would give him his
best chance at life. 'You will leave this company,' she
commanded in an iron tone. Instantly the messenger was
alert and listening closely to her commands. 'You will go
at once, and you will swear to me that you will not stop
until you have reached the next courier in your relay. You
must send the following instructions to Arakasi: tell him to
seek out his happiness. He will know where to find it, and
if he demurs, tell him that is my injunction as his mistress,
and his honor requires he obey.'

Fully awake now, the messenger bowed. If he found the
message odd, he simply assumed it was but another clever
code. 'Your will, my Lady.' He arose and stepped off into
the dark.

Alone in the palanquin, Mara released the curtain ties.
The fine silk fell with a sigh of sound, affording her a rare
moment of privacy as she buried her face in her hands. The
reprieve she had won in Chakaha now seemed futile. Had
she died there, the outcome would still be the same: her
son's life sacrificed for Jiro's ambition. She wondered in
self-pity whether fate might have treated her differently if,
so many years past, she had not slighted Jiro by choosing
Buntokapi for her husband.

Was this snarled, vicious political mess the gods' vengeance
for her vanity? Was she being punished for her selfish,
all-consuming drive to keep her family's name and honor,
begun with the sacrifice of a man's life? She had wed
Buntokapi only to see him die as a result of her scheming.
Had he silently cursed the Acoma name, in the moment
he had fallen on his sword? Mara felt a chill course
through her flesh. Perhaps things were all foreordained,:,
and her remaining children would die as Ayaki had, as

pieces sacrificed in the Game of the Council.

Mara's shoulders spasmed as she choked back a sob.
Over the years, each move of the Great Game drove
the stakes higher. Now nothing less than an Emperor's
throne would ensure the safety of her family. To protect
her children, she must change the course of the Empire's
history, and discard long centuries of tradition. She felt
frail and vulnerable, and the feeling of beaten desperation
would not leave her. Then her moment of soul searching
ended; she had no further chance to ponder if she would
survive to greet her children on this side of the Wheel of
Life as Saric returned to the palanquin with an armload of
borrowed armor.

'My Lady?'he queried softly. 'We will need to make haste.
The nearest cho-ja hive is a day and a half distant. If we are
to have a prayer of reaching Kentosani in time enough to
matter, we dare not delay for a second.'

Her Adviser wore armor himself, Mara realised. Observant
almost to a fault, he caught her glance of surprise as he
knelt to help her arm. 'I was a soldier once,' he reminded.
'I can be so again - I've not let my swordwork become
entirely lax. That is all to our advantage. A small company
of fast-marching warriors must perchance draw less notice when
they are not accompanied by a man clad in robes of
high office, don't you think?'

Saric's habit of speaking in questions did have the effect
of drawing the mind away from insoluble problems. Forced
to respond despite her worry, Mara conceded the wisdom
of the disguise.

'Gods preserve us, we may need an extra sword before
all is said and done.' Saric expertly applied himself to the
buckles of Mara's breastplate, while, with false appearance
of normality, the company's water boy made his rounds
with his bucket and dipper, as he would through a natural
pause for rest.

Lujan slid off the cho-ja, his body leaving streaks in the
dust that caked its carapace. He staggered slightly from
stiff muscles, and was caught and steadied by the fast
reactions of the sentry standing guard outside the command
tent. 'Where is Force Leader Irrilandi?' the Acoma Force
Commander croaked through his parched throat. 'I bring
orders from Lady Mara.' ~

The Patrol Leader on day duty arrived breathless, having
seen the cho-ja race in. After one glance at his exhausted
commanding officer, he assisted Lujan to take a seat on
a cushion in the shade. 'Irrilandi is out with the scout
patrol. There has been movement reported among Lord
Jiro's troops. He went to see for himself,' he summed up.

'Send our swiftest runner to fetch him back,' Lujan
commanded. Servants rousted from the command tent
by the day sentry arrived with cool water and towels.
Lujan accepted a drink, then waved them off to undertake
the task of seeing the cho-ja who had carried him made
comfortable. His voice stronger since the dust was washed
from his throat, he added, 'Whatever the creature requires,
see that its needs are promptly met.'

The servants bowed and backed off, to crowd around
the tired cho-ja. Lujan knuckled the aching muscles of his
thighs, speaking fast, and like a swirl in a deep current the
surrounding encampment heaved into motion in response.

While runners dashed off to convene a meeting of officers,
and begin the process of a main muster, Lujan summoned
the highest-ranking warrior at hand and directed at him a
rapid-fire string of questions.

The officer's answers were direct, and as he used his
sword to trace out the deployment of the enemy troops,
Lujan also perceived the emerging pattern that had concerned
Irrilandi.

'Jiro's troops have gathered to march,' he summed up.

'You see that, too,' the officer's worried eyes followed
his Force Commander's hands, which had tightened fiercely
on his sword hilt. 'Though the gods alone know why the
Anasati Lord would issue such a command. His war host
can't attack our holdings or our force without invoking the
wrath of the Black Robes.'

Lujan looked up abruptly. 'I have news. Jiro has started
his bid to take the throne in Kentosani. Though cursed if I
can figure how word traveled so swiftly from his position in
the north to the Anasati Force Commander in the field.'

The scout rubbed sweat from his face. 'That I can answer.
He has birds.'

Lujan raised his eyebrows. 'What?'

'Birds,' the scout insisted. 'Imported from Midkemia.
They are trained to fly to a homing point, with a message
scroll fastened to their leg. They are called pigeons. Our
archers shot two of them down, but others got past.'

'The messages were in cipher?' Lujan asked, then answered
himself 'None of Arakasi's decoding patterns translated?'
The scout leader gave a nod indicating that the Anasati
codes were still unbroken.

Lujan forced his aching body to obey his will, and stand,

and walk. 'Accompany me,' he ordered the scout leader; to
the duty officer he added, 'When Irrilandi arrives, have him
meet me in the command tent over the sand table.'
The dimness inside the pavilion offered no relief; the rain
had ended, and the sun beating down on its hide roof heated
the air to steaming closeness. Lujan unstrapped his helm.
He splashed the dregs of his water cup over his already
sweat-drenched hair. Then, rubbing salty droplets from his
eyelashes, he leaned on the rim of the sand table. 'These
are accurate?' he asked in reference to the rows of colored
silk flags and troop markers.

'Updated this morning,' the scout replied.

Silence fell. From outside, the commotion of warriors
rushing to muster filtered through the tent walls and
hangings; as fine a commander as any in the Empire,
Lujan kept his ears tuned to their activities while his eyes
roved the sand table in swift assessment.

'there,' he announced presently, his dusty hands reaching
and rearranging whole companies of markers at a sweep.
'The Plain of Nashika. That is where we will take him.'

The scout gasped in fear and turned pale. 'We attack
Lord Jiro? Force Commander, what of the Black Robes?'

Lujan never paused as he manipulated markers. 'The
Black Robes shall do as they will. But by our Lady's order,
we attack. If we hesitate, or fail her, every man in this army
will be masterless, grey warriors cursed by the gods.'

The tent flap slapped back, admitting a swirl of dust
and the long-striding figure of Force Leader Irrilandi. Lean
and toughened as cured bark, the older man jerked off his
gauntlets and positioned himself at the sand table opposite
his superior officer. He wasted no word of greeting, but
swept a glance that missed nothing across the changed
deployment of markers. 'We will attack, then,' he surmised,
his typically bitten-off speech animated by a lilt of pleasure.
'Good. At first light, I presume?'

Lujan looked up, a hardness to him that his mistress
had seen only once, and that in the moment before he had
entered the challenge circle in Chakaha. 'Not at first light,'
Lujan corrected. 'Today, immediately after nightfall.'

Irrilandi grinned voraciously. 'Darkness will offer no
cover. You won't deceive any Black Robes.'

'No,' Lujan agreed. 'But we might have the satisfaction
of spilling as much Anasati blood as we can before dawn
comes. Let the Great Ones find out what's happened after
they stir from their sleep and view the result of our night's
activities.'

Irrilandi studied the sand table. 'Plain of Nashika? A good
choice.'
'Tactics?' Lujan queried back tersely. 'I would have your
opinion before we meet with our officers and commit to
engagement.'

Now Irrilandi gave back a chuckle. 'Fight a wide,
sprawling battle, one with many small forces and multiple
vectors of attack. We have enough numbers, and gods know,
we can field dozens upon dozens of messengers to ferry
orders and information back and forth. No single arrow
point of attack this time, with feints and false deployment;
a swarm of arrow points striking at scores of places along
the line!'

Lujan paused in puzzled assessment, then caught his
Force Leader's drift. He threw back his head and laughed
in admiration. 'You crafty old son of a harulth! That's the
best advice I've heard in all my years of service. Create as
much confusion as possible, so maybe we can steal time
and inflict as much damage as possible!'

'If we're going to force the Assembly to incinerate us, let
us take enough of the enemy into the halls of Turakamu

to cause a great song of honor.' Irrilandi looked up with
a deadpan expression that could make Keyoke at his most
unresponsive seem animated. 'Let's hope it works. Gods
pity us, it's a flimsy enough countermeasure to stack against
the aroused might of the magicians.'

The afternoon passed in flurried activity, mostly overseen

by Force Leader Irrilandi as Lujan stole his last chance to

catch up on sleep. Although the orders that were given

amounted to a virtual death sentence, no man among
Mara's thousands shirked his part. To die was Tsurani,
and to meet the Red God in battle, the finest accolade of the

warrior. If the Acoma name continued, and rose in prestige

~and power, the better were a man's chances of earning
higher station on the next turn of the Wheel of Life.

It was ironic, Lujan thought as he rose and ate a hasty
meal at sundown, that the very traditions and beliefs that

lent these warriors incentive were the ones that Mara
would change, should Justin survive to be the Nations'
next Light of Heaven. Some of the officers knew of this

twist of fate; if anything, they worked the harder. If a
warrior had one recurrent nightmare, it was to waken one

day and find himself still alive and taken captive by an
enemy. Officers were traditionally killed, but an unusually

cruel victor might keep them alive to toil as slaves with no
possibility of reprieve. If Mara would discontinue the glory
of bloody death in battle, she would equally eradicate the
degradation of slavery that ground a man down regardless

of his talents or his merit.

Sunset washed the sky gold and copper, then deepened
into starlit night. Mara's warriors assumed their final
formation at the edge of the Plain of Nashika under cover
of darkness. The command to engage the enemy, when the
moment came, was silent.

No horns sounded, drums beat no tattoos, and warriors
did not shout their mistress's name or any other Acoma
battle cry. The start of the greatest conflict of succession to
be fought in Tsuranuanni began without the fanfares that
traditionally accompanied a war.

The only warning that the massed army of the Anasati
had was the thunderous pounding of thousands of feet as
the Acoma forces charged. For once the Anasati were not
served by Chumaka's superior intelligence; he had made
the obvious conclusion: the Acoma war host must be
positioning themselves for a dawn attack.

when the night resounded with the crash of swords, and
the cries of the fatally wounded. The fighting was vicious
and without quarter. Within the first hour, the ground
became churned to muck, watered red by the blood of
the fallen. Lujan and Irrilandi took turns overseeing the
action on a raised hillock, moving counters across the
sand table under a pool of lantern light as messengers
came and went with reports. Orders were dispatched and
formations advanced, or retreated and drew the enemy into
pockets. Ground was won and lost, and won back again
at crippling cost in lives. The dusty floor beneath the table
became littered with counters as Force Leader and Force
Commander cast away colored pins to account for losses,
which were ruinous, as though every man fought with
berserk energy, the better to court the known death by the
sword, rather than risk perishing in magic-born flames.

Each of Mara's two senior commanders rode out in turns
on the cho-ja worker to bolster the morale of the troops, or to
draw sword and lend an arm in the fighting to stiffen a ~
line where needed. . .

The moon rose, bathing the struggle in copper-gold light. ;'
The fighting broke up into knots, where the lines were thin,
with men shouting the names of Mara or Jiro to make their
loyalties known. Armor colors became one in the dark, and
friend was near impossible to distinguish from foe. Swords
grew dark with blood, and a warrior had to rely upon his
training to keep his Stroke true; the eye could not track the
speed of swordplay with every blade dulled by gore.

Dawn came, dUI]e~d by a pall of fog and dust. The ~wide
plain was littered with bodies, trampled by the contention
of the l~nng. Swords cracked under the stress of thrust and
parry, and dead mens blades saw fresh action.

Lujan stood brace" against the sand table, knuckling grit
from his eyes. 'They have lost more than we, but I'd guess
that our dead number scarcely three hundred fewer than the
Anasati'. Aware of a stinging wrist, but not remembering the
swordcut that had Parted the skin, Lujan focused with an
effort on the sand table. If the troops were pared down by
losses, the fighting PatternS had, if anything, grown more
complex through the last hours.

To Irrilandi he Concluded, 'If the cho-ja is willing to
undertake another errand, have it bear you to our western
line. Pull off half a Company and use it to relieve the pressure
on companieS under Strike Leader Kanaziro.' He pointed
to the center of the line, where the bloodiest fighting had
taken place.

Irrilandi snapped øoff a salute and departed to speak with
the cho-ja; after a few words, the creature scuttled away
with the Force Leader on its back. ~

Lujan leaned tiredly against the sand table. He wondered
where Mara was: whether she had reached the cho-ja
tunnels in safety, or if not, whether the Black Robes
would overtake her without his knowing. Justin could
have inherited the Acoma mantle already, with none of
the Acoma senior Staff aware of a change in succession.
The end might already have come, while on the Plain of
Nashika men fought and died in futility.

Such thinking was Poisonous, the product of stress and

fatigue; Lujan forced himself to attend to the markers on
the chart table, and to listen to yet another scout reporting
in with word of still another change in the lines. Jiro's army
had lost ground this time. Five minutes later, the hillock in
question would be lost again, as it had been in turns through
a seemingly endless night. Lujan realised by the shadow that
pooled under his hand that the sun was now fully risen and
climbing higher in the sky.

He felt a breeze against his neck, and almost as afterthought,
realised that the buzzing noise in his ears was no
natural effect of exertion on too little sleep. Turning, he
saw three men in black robes materialise a few feet away.

The youngest stepped briskly forward, his thin, highcheekboned
face solemn. 'Force Commander,' he announced,
'I seek your mistress.'
Lujan sank into a bow, awe mixed with fear on his face.
Clearing his throat of dust, he spoke the simple truth. 'My
mistress is absent.'

The magician advanced. His feet were clad in slippers,
Lujan noticed, laced in front, and soled in soft hide
unsuited for outdoor wear. That stray fact caused him
an inward shudder. This magician expected complete and
immediate obedience, without any need to exert himself
beyond walking a few steps.

Aware of his frantic heartbeat and his face dripping
nervous sweat, Lujan forced himself to reason. These are
powerful men, but only men, he reminded himself. He
licked dry lips, recalling a judgment he had been forced
to carry out as a grey warrior: he had needed to put
a man to death for a crime against the camp company.
His own sword arm had performed the execution, and
he remembered clearly how difficult it had been to strike
down the condemned. Lujan could only hope that even a
Great One might hesitate before taking a life.

The Acoma Force Commander held still, though his
muscles betrayed him and trembled; the urge to rise up
and face threat or to give in to weakness and flee was
torment.
The magician tapped one pointed, curled-back slipper
toe. 'Not here?' he said in acerbic reference to Mara. 'At
the moment of her triumph?'

Lujan held his chin to the earth and awkwardly offered
a shrug. Knowing that each second stolen here might gain
his mistress an infinitesimal improvement in her chance to
survive, he spoke slowly. 'The victory is not yet won, Great
One.' He paused, coughing slightly. The raspy sound lent
credence to his need to stop and clear his throat once more.
'And it is not my place to question my mistress, Great One.
She alone would know what matters demand her presence
elsewhere, and so she gave over command of this battle
into my poor hands.'

'Curse this rhetoric, Akani,' snapped another voice.
Lujan was aware of a second set of feet before his face,
this pair wearing Midkemian-style boots studded with
wooden nails. The redheaded magician, he identified,
who was tallest of the three delegates, and obviously
the one most inclined to inflamed thinking. 'We waste
time, I say. We know that Mara is bound north toward
Kentosani in her litter, and a fool can see from this hilltop
that a war is in progress, between Acoma and Anasati
forces. We have been defied! Immediate punishment must
follow.'

The Black Robe addressed as Akani replied in more
modulated tones. 'Now, Tapek, calm down. We must not
draw hasty conclusions. These forces are fighting, all too
true, but since none of us saw the battle start, we do not
know which side was the aggressor.'

'That point is moot!' Tapek said through clenched teeth.
'They fight, and our edict forbade armed conflict between
the Acoma and the Anasati!'

After a short silence, through which glares were exchanged
between the magicians, Akani once again addressed
Lujan. 'Tell me what passed here.'
Lujan raised his head from the dirt just enough to squint
through the dust that drifted in curtains upon the air. 'The
battle is close, Great One. The enemy holds a stronger
position perhaps, but the Acoma have superior numbers.
At times I think we shall prevail, while at other times I
despair and compose prayers for the Red God.'

'This warrior treats us like fools,' Tapek objected to
Akani. 'He speaks in circles like a merchant trying to sell
shoddy goods.' One studded boot lifted and prodded Lujan
in the shoulder. 'How did this battle begin, warrior? That's
what we asked to determine.'

'For that, you must inquire of my mistress,' Lujan
insisted, casting himself prone with his forehead pressed
to the earth. Although he skirted open defiance of the
most powerful men in the Empire, he interpreted-Tapek's
question in the broadest way possible; Mara had never
discussed the ancient roots of the rivalry between House
Acoma and House Anasati after all; that sort of history
was more in Saric's province. Keeping up his posture of
loyal servant Lujan prayed no magician would reformulate
the question to ask who ordered the first attack.

Risking a peek upward, Lujan studied the Black Robes
with the same eye he would apply to any new recruit: he
dared to assess them as men, and determined that while
Akani was intelligent, and certainly no fool, he was not
predisposed to wish Mara or the Acoma forces harm. The
redhead Tapek would take extreme action at little thought;
he was the dangerous one. The third in the party seemed a
bystander, watching the exchange as a factor might, who
had little ambition and no stake in the outcome. He did
not seem distressed.

Tapek nudged again with his boot. 'Force Commander?'

Aware he would be instantly dead if he replied directly
to Tapek's query, Lujan tossed caution to the winds. He
acted as if strain had upset his wits and disrupted his
train of thought. In a tone of awed reverence, he said,

'Great One?'

Tapek's fair skin flushed. On the point of an explosion
of temper, he was checked by a touch from Akani, who
smoothly intervened. 'Force Commander Lujan, withdraw
the Acoma forces and end this battle.'

Lujan's eyes widened. 'Great One?' he repeated, as if the
order astonished him.

Tapek shook off Akani's restraint and bellowed, 'You
heard me! Order the Acoma forces to retreat, and end this
battle!'

Lujan threw himself prone on the earth in a show of
abject prostration. He prolonged his obeisance until just
shy of the ridiculous, then said unctuously, 'Your will,
Great One. Of course I will order a retreat.' He paused,
allowed his brow to furrow, then added, 'Would you
permit me to arrange the retreat in a manner that will
minimise harm to my warriors? If the object is to spare
further bloodshed . . .'

Akani waved his hand. 'I would not see needless death.
Arrange the withdrawal in any manner that pleases you.'

Lujan willed himself not to sigh in relief as he straightened
as far as his knees. He beckoned to a nearby runner and
said swiftly, 'Orders to the Lord of the Tuscalora. [have him
withdraw his soldiers to the south, then hold and support
for those who shall be following him' - he flashed a glance
at the Black Robes, and received a tiny nod from Akani,
a fuming glare from Tapek, and vague intentness from the
third in the magician's party - 'to protect their retreat, you
see,' he ended in a rush.

The messenger was half petrified with fright. He took
a moment to notice dismissal. As he hastened off, Lujan
waved over another runner, and gave a long-winded set
of instructions that involved two flanking maneuvers and
what to an outside ear was impenetrable military jargon.
As this messenger hastened off, he bowed again to the party
of magicians. 'May I offer you refreshment, Great Ones?'

'Some juice would cut the day's heat,' the bystanding
Black Robe agreed. 'These robes are not comfortable in
full sunlight.'

While Tapek began to shift weight and tap his foot
in irritation, Lujan clapped for servants and made a
production of debating which wine should be sent, and
what sort of camp rations were fit to be served to visitors
of great rank. The wrangling threatened to go on for
some time, until Tapek snapped that no delicacies were
expected; plain jomach and water would serve the needs
of his colleagues nicely.

'Dear me,' Akani objected in a voice of lighthearted
reason, 'I personally thought the imported Midkemian
wine sounded delightful.'

'You stay and sip drinks with this half-wit who calls
himself a Force Commander,' Tapek nearly shouted. 'Some
of us have more important matters to attend to, and I
think that in the interests of the council that delegated
us as emissaries, one of us should observe to be certain
that the war hosts on the battlefield are indeed breaking
off the engagement.'

Akani gave the younger magician a look of reprimand.
'The Force Commander obeyed without question and
ordered his troops to withdraw. Do you question his
word of honor?'

'I need not,' Tapek nearly snarled.

At this point the third magician, who had been staring
vaguely off in the direction of the distantly moving armies,
said, 'Actually, Tapek may have a point. From a seer's
vantage, I see no sign of any lessening of the struggle.'

To Lujan's astonishment, Akani gave back a bland wave.
'As I understand it, these things take time.' Glancing
keenly at the Acoma Force Commander, he stroked his
chin. 'Something about one vassal holding in support
while another company retreats ... was that it, Force
Commander?'

Lujan smothered a start of revelation. Some of the
awe left him as he realised: these were but men! They
had factions just as did contending Ruling Lords in the
Game of the Council. By all appearances, the Black Robe
Akani was tactfully trying to aid Mara's cause without
overt disregard of the Assembly's edict. Lujan stifled an
unjustified countersurge of confidence and said, 'Absolutely
so, Great One. The Lord of the Tuscalora-'

'Oh, don't bore us with the details!' Tapek interjected.
'Just tell us why Mara of the Acoma dared to believe she
could order this attack and pass unscathed, when she has
been expressly forbidden to do battle with Jiro of the
Anasati by our order.'

Lujan licked his lips, his nervousness unfeigned. 'I cannot
know that.' The gritty dirt under his knees ground into his

flesh, and the unaccustomed pose strained his back. Worse
torture visited his mind. He could cause Mara's death
through a wrong choice of words. By the gods, he was well
trained to fight, but Saric's turn for statesmanship was no
talent of his. He floundered, seeking a way around direct
truth. 'My orders from her were to prevent the army of the
traditionalists from marching north toward Kentosani. As
you have said, she is en route to the Holy City, also by
order of the Assembly.'
'Ah hah! So she is.' Tapek folded his arms and stroked his
sleeves in satisfaction. 'Now we will hear the truth. What
route has she taken to get there? No sly words! On pain
of death, tell me directly.' At this, Tapek raised one finger,
and a blossom of flame flared up, searing the air with a
hiss. 'Now answer!'

Lujan arose to full height. If he was going to be killed,
or spoil Mara's chances, he would do so as a man and
a warrior, on his feet. 'Your will, Great One. My Lady
planned to travel by back roads, with her honor guard lest
she encounter trouble.'

The quietest magician of the three, Kerolo, said, 'And if
she were to encounter trouble?'

Lujan swallowed and found his throat paper-dry. He
coughed and forced himself to find his voice, which now,
at the last pass, was even and strong, as he willed it to be.
'She would seek refuge in the nearest cho-ja hive.'

The magicians Kerolo and Tapek exchanged disturbed
glances and, as one, moved to activate their transport
devices. A buzzing filled the air, slicing through the lessening
cries of battle and the distant clash of swords. Then a
breeze parted the pall of dust, and the pair were gone,
leaving Akani studying Lujan in dearly troubled silence.
A moment passed. Lujan stayed stifffly correct as any recruit
might while enduring the inspection of a senior officer.
An understanding seemed to pass between the two men,
different though their stations in life were. Akani's regard
turned shrewd.

He said, 'No more guile. Your mistress has, if not allies,
then sympathetic ears in the Assembly, but even they will
stand aside before open defiance. What cause has Mara to
count upon cho-ja aid?'

Lujan shed any attempt at subterfuge. With this Black
Robe, further ploys would earn short shrift. Still, afraid to
reveal too much, he selected his words with extreme care.
'She has long been friends with the cho-ja Queen upon her
natal estates. She has over the years bought favors from the
hive, many of them in the cause of Acoma defence.'

Akani frowned, his expression the more terrifying for the
fact it was understated. 'The cho-ja beyond the borders of
her estates willingly take up her cause?'

Lujan raised spread palms to the sky in the traditional
Tsurani shrug. 'That I cannot say, Great One. Only the
Lady herself knows what bargains may or may not have
been struck.'

Akani's gaze turned piercing, seeming to turn the Force
Commander's thoughts inside out and expose them to
blinding light. Chills chased across Lujan's flesh, and he
trembled. And then the sensation passed.

ùYou speak the truth,' Akani allowed. 'But be warned,
the Assembly will get to the bottom of this issue. It sadly
may prove that we might have to part company in our
cause, Acoma Force Commander.' With a nod that could
have conferred respect, Akani activated his transportation
device and departed in a blast of disturbed air.

Lujan reached out and caught the edge of the sand table to
keep from folding at the knees. Mara, he thought in despair;
what would become of her? For while Jiro's army would
by the grace of the Assembly be forbidden to advance to
Kentosani, the true foe was awakened. While Lujan had

seen his Lady achieve the impossible before, and while
he had boundless faith in her genius for improvising the
unpredictable, even a Servant of the Empire could not long
defy the Assembly and survive.


28
Retribution

The litter was heavy.

Eight bearers were needed to carry its weight of fine
hardwoods, inlaid with corcara shell and bossed with
rare studs of iron. If the costly silk hangings, heavily
embroidered and fitted with fringes and tassels, were
designed to dazzle any onlooker, the admission of light
and air was forfeit to splendor. Since dawn had brightened
enough to allow reading, Lord Jiro of the Anasati had
commanded his servants to pull back the curtains and
bundle them under leather ties.

The effect might not have been as elegant as when the
drapes were lowered, but Jiro was unconcerned. There was
no one of importance to notice.

The forest road that led southeast toward Kentosani
held no caravans or other nobles. Save for an occasional
bonded messenger, it was empty of all but refugees,
common folk fleeing the cities; food was scarce, and
families in the poorest quarters were first to starve. These
were ragged people, covered with sores, clothed in tatters.
They cradled wailing infants or towed older children who
stumbled and tripped, weak from malnutrition. Beloved
grandparents were borne upon the backs of younger men.
The countryside offered a slim chance of game to be caught
or nuts and berries to be foraged.

Jiro paid such wretched folk no heed: their poverty was
as the gods willed. The soldiers in his vanguard cleared
the way for his retinue to pass, and except for the crying
of the children, through the dust, they seemed little more
than groveling shadows.
While his bearers sweated under the strain of forced
march, the Anasati Lord sat at ease on piled cushions, with
layer upon layer of scrolls Lying opened across his knees.
The heap was caught back from spilling over his ankles
by the braced pommel of his sword, pinched between his
armor-dad knees.

Long and lean as a hunting hound, First Adviser Chumaka
kept pace at the litter's side. As toughened as any warrior,
he seemed unfazed by exertion as he answered his master's
questions, which were few and infrequent, and widely
divergent in subject from the lengthy, tedious treatises on
imperial law expounded in the scrolls.

'I don't trust the Shinzawai,' Jiro snapped, seemingly
without provocation. 'His brother Kasumi spent years
fighting on the barbarian world, as part of the Blue Wheel
plot to undermine the Warlord, and the honorless, crafty
ways of the Midkemians have also influenced Hokanu.'

Chumaka bent an intent gaze upon his master and said
nothing for a comfortless interval. And as if the man
held power to read thoughts, Jiro knew: his First Adviser
understood he was remembering Tasaio of the Minwanabi,
a brilliant field general whose army had been humbled by
Mara's through an unanticipated tactic brought about by
advice from a Midkemian slave. That House Minwanabi no
longer existed did not bear mention. Nervous fears needed
no fanning for their spark to blossom into flame. Just short
of reprimand, Chumaka said, 'My Lord, all that the hands
and the minds of men may achieve has been done to ensure
your success. Now fate, luck, and the will of the gods must
have their way. You will sit on the golden throne, or not, as
they allow.'

Jiro leaned against his cushions, shifting in discomfort at
the bite of his armor. Not a vain man, he well understood
the power of appearance. As specific in his dress as any
artist, he would have preferred a light silk robe in Anasati
red with gaganjan flowers embroidered at the cuffs. But
since Ichindar's assassination, no noble dared to travel the
public roads unarmed. It further irked Jiro that Chumaka
was right; just how right, the Lord was unwilling to
repeat. He had heard every report; he had presided over
council meetings. He knew what they told of the enemy's
movements.

And the news held good.

Hokanu of the Shinzawai was still at least two days'
march north of Kentosani, while the Lord of the Anasati's
cortege would be through the-grand gates by late afternoon,
most certainly by sundown. Over and over, Jiro listed the
reassurances to himself: he would reach the Holy City
uncontested by Mara's allies; when the Shinzawai arrived,
they would be exhausted; the magicians had been given
insult by the^Acoma when Mara's forces engaged the
Anasati army to the south. The magicians had their
full attention turned toward Mara, and were ignoring
the Lord of the Anasati, who gave every semblance of
perfect obedience to their commands.

Jiro's hands tightened over the book scrolls in his lap.
Startled by a crackle of dry leaves, he cursed, annoyed
that any distraction should cause him to mishandle old
records. With frowning concentration, he straightened
the crumple from aged, ink-faded hide; while yet again
Chumaka seemed to interpret his private thoughts.

~You interpreted the message brought in by pigeon last
evening,' the First Adviser assured in what seemed casual
comment. Jiro saw better. The man's shrewd eyes were
locked on the road ahead, as if he could read past the dust
kicked up by the feet of the advance company of the Anasati
honor guard. The First Adviser might seem absorbed by the
march, but in shrewd choice of words, he added, 'Mare's
Force Commander initiated an unprovoked attack. By now
the Assembly will have acted. Think on that.'
Jiro's lips twitched, just missing a smile. His imagination
supplied detailed images of Mara roasted by magic. But
every contemplated torment that might befall his enemy
brought him no comfort. He wished to see the corpse of the
woman who had spurned him spitted on steel; he longed to
have the skulls of her children, ones she had deigned to have
other men sire, broken like eggshells at his feet. He could
tread on their brains, and be sure of his triumph. And yet:
the luck of a Servant of the Empire was legendary, more than
superstition. Mara's title bestowed a divine blessing no man
might easily dismiss. More than once Jiro had presumed her
days over, only to see her somehow triumph.

The worm of uneasiness continued to gnaw at him. All
unnoticed, his hands clenched again over parchment. Brittle
skin cracked, and bits of rare gilt caked away and stuck to
his sweating palms.

'You will not feel secure until you sit on the golden
throne,' Chumaka summed up crisply. 'When the priests
of the Twenty Greater Gods all bow at your feet and
endorse your right of succession, when the masses hail
you in prostration as their Light of Heaven, then your
nerves will cease clamoring.'

Jiro heard, but could not help but scan the road ahead
to the Holy City. Inwardly he repeated the logic that
insisted he had an open path between himself and final
victory. The Assembly would not hinder him, once Mara
was dead. Indeed, they must endorse his cause, if only to
avert the chaos and anarchy that had ravaged the peace of
the Nations since Lojawa assassinated Ichindar. That Jiro
had been behind that act no one suspected; the plot had
been engineered covertly, over years of careful planning.
Culpability could not be traced beyond the Omechan,
and not even torture might wring out the truth. With
the Warlordship promised to their line, they would be ill
served to reveal the conspiracy. Jiro shifted thought. It did

706

Mistress of the Empire

not unduly grieve him that the army bequeathed to him
with the Anasati mantle must of necessity destroy itself
to hold Mara's warriors in place and turn the Assembly's
wrath against her. Their death would be honor, as it would
serve to raise their Lord above all others in the Empire.
Their spirits would be welcomed to the Red God's halls
in triumph as Jiro's enemies were forced to acknowledge
him supreme.

The Lord of the Anasati closed his eyes, suffused with
anticipation. First to prostrate himself before the imperial
seat would be Hoppara of the Xacatecas. That upstart
puppy had tagged after Mara's skirts since the first, and
his meddling mother had done nothing! For all her much
vaunted appreciation of male ways, Isashani had never
encouraged her firstborn to strike off on his own, as
a man should. Because of the dowager Lady and her
lap-hugging son, more than one plot to shame the Acoma
had gone astray! Jiro sweated, remembering how many
times Hoppara had stiffened the spine of old Frasai of
the Tonmargu to the point where he had supported the
interests of the late Emperor over those of his own Ionani
Clan brothers!

Jiro's temper heated as he reviewed the list of slights.
To him, forgiveness was weakness. He was not a man to
forget where his plans had been crossed.

A frown marred his forehead as he considered which
enemy he would humble next. If the magicians were
magnanimous in their punishment of Mara's disobedience,
Hokanu might also survive to kiss the floor before the dais
of the golden throne.

Jiro stifled a chuckle. The unquestioned sovereignty
Mara's supporters had labored to give Ichindar would
fall to him, an Anasati, as legacy! He would wield such
omnipotence well, oh yes; he would reinstate the High
Council, and the Warlordship, and then preside over all,

Retribution

707
including the temples, in unprecedented primacy. His
powers would be godlike, and there would be no woman
born within the Empire who would not prostrate herself
before his glory. He could fill his bed with whatever maiden
he wished, and none would refuse his favors! That Mara
of the Acoma once had spurned him would forever more
cease to matter, for her line would be as dust. He, Jiro,
ninety-two times Emperor, would be remembered as the
man who had seen a Servant of the Empire shamed and
brought down. His deed would stand as a memorial in
the eyes of the gods: unprecedented, the perfect coup in
the Game of the Council, for no Lord could dare a greater
enemy than one beloved by the masses.

Someone shouted from the woods. Snapped out of
reverie, Jiro straightened. Parchments and scroll cases
cascaded around his feet. He forgot to pay heed, fixed as
he was on the movement that erupted among his soldiers.
'What passes?' he demanded in clipped tones, only to
discover that Chumaka was no longer at the litter's side.

The man had an inconvenient independence about him.
Jiro fumed as he spotted his First Adviser's greying head
bent close to the plumed helm of Force Commander
Omelo.

Jiro's annoyance lapsed as he read concern in the officer's
expression. 'What passes?' he demanded more loudly.

Omelo straightened into the bearing expected of a
commander of armies. He strode to the litter, with Chumaka
tagging bright-eyed at his heels. 'One of our scouts found his
partner, who had been detailed to investigate our flank.'

Jiro's frown redoubled. 'The man was shirking duty?'

Omelo's face shifted not a hairsbreadth. 'No, Lord. The
contrary. He was dead. Killed.' Concise with bad news, he
finished, 'An arrow, in the back.'

All but in breach of protocol, Chumaka broke in. 'Had
he been standing, or running?'

708 Mistress of the Empire

Omelo half spun, eyes narrowed. Always a stickler for
protocol, he turned back to his master, and replied as if
it had been Jiro who had addressed him. 'My Lord, our
man was shot down while running. The scout read the
tracks.' He gave a brisk salute, fist over heart, and a bow.
'With my Lord's leave? We would be advised to array our
warriors into a tighter formation. Whatever news our slain
scout wished to convey back to you, someone did murder
to silence him. And the arrow had an unmarked shaft.'

'Bandits? Or some ally of the Acoma? You think there's
danger?' Jiro fired back, then remembered himself Delay of
any sort might prove fatal; regaining his dignity, he waved
his Force Commander to resume his duty and rounded on
his First Adviser. Chumaka's face was never what one
expected. Now he showed reflective interest, as if he were
confronted by some delightful twist in a puzzle.

'You don't seem worried,' Jiro observed, sarcastically
dry.
'
Fools worry.' Chumaka gave a shrug. 'The wise man
strives for awareness. What will happen will happen,
and worry will not serve, but anticipation might provide
survival.'

Through the bustle as his warriors closed ranks, Jiro
studied the road. No refugees littered the verges. That
in itself cried warning, since, like birds, they were timid
creatures who were apt to fly from trouble. The way
ahead stretched empty, sunlit under drifting scarves of
dust. By contrast, impenetrable shadow beneath the trees
seemed like night. Forward, past a gentle curve, the road
dipped, then crossed a glen where light and shade spread
in dappled patches. Insects zipped through, flecked by
light, but nothing warm-blooded made a sound. Jiro
hushed his tone in nervousness. 'I see nothing to beware
of'

But still, some nameless uneasiness drove him to finger

:~
:~

,

l

;


~
l
Retributior,
709

his sword hilt. Despite his smooth words, Chumaka also

seemed tense.

Only a fool would not worry, Jiro avowed silently. He
wrestled to hold back impatience. The stakes he bid to win
were enormous, the highest in history. He could not expect
to take the imperial seat unopposed. He loosened a damp
hand from his weapon and tugged to loosen the thong
around his neck that fastened a document bag beneath
his armor. On the parchment, in concise words of state,
were all the official points of law that must be included in
his contract of marriage to Jehilia.

He stroked the leather like a talisman. There would be
no mistakes made, no details omitted, once the gates of
Kentosani were passed. No page had been left unread in
the libraries; Chumaka and Jiro between them had perused
every legal record on every dynasty that existed, and only
the imperial chop, affixed by Ichindar's First Wife, Tamara,
remained to be secured to seal into record Jiro's fitness as
royal suitor. Ascension to the throne would perforce follow.
No court litigator or house First Adviser, no legal mind in
the Empire, could dispute the Anasati claim in the face of
those documents. There might be other nobles with claims
as good as Jiro's, but none better - once Justin of the

Acoma lay dead - and none of those would dare challenge
the Anasati right.

A shout caused Jiro to look toward the woodline. His
hand whitened on his sword. Did something move, just
beyond his vision? Jiro kicked his feet free of the book
scrolls, striving to peer into the gloom of the deep forest.
A faint thunder carried on the still air. The warriors shifted,
crouched in their already strained state of readiness.

One of the older campaigners stiffened. 'Force Commander,'
he ventured, 'I know that sound.'

Omelo said, 'What is it?'

Jiro turned, to identify the man who had spoken as one of
the survivors of the honor guard once sent with his brother
to attend Ichindar's treaty delegation to the barbarian world
of Midkemia; the peacemaking had ended in slaughter, with
the blood of a thousand firstborn Tsurani soaking the field
Halesko of the Anasati had fallen in the first attack; only;
one of his honor guard survived to win back through the rift,
carrying, with three other men, the unconscious body of the
Emperor. In honor for saving the Light of Heaven, the man
had been given a place in Jiro's bodyguard. He spoke now
with urgency. 'I heard this sound fighting the barbarians,
Lord.' As a rumbling dosed in from the direction of the
forest, he raised his voice. 'The enemy is mounted! Horses!
They ride horses!'

The next moment, chaos exploded from the trees.

A line of blueclad warriors, each astride a four-legged
barbarian beast, charged headlong toward the company.
Omelo screamed commands; he had studied the reports
of soldiers who had faced cavalry before upon Midkemia.
Only one tactic had a prayer of success for warriors on
foot. The warriors that accompanied their Lord were
the flower of the Anasati forces. They obeyed without
hesitation, spreading out to avoid being trampled where
men who had never experienced a charge might in error
have stayed rooted and been run down. Jiro's bearers
reversed in awkward fear and fell back, setting as many
of his inner guard as possible to stand between their master
and the onrushing Shinzawai cavalry.

Jiro swallowed back panic. The Shinzawai were not two
days' distance from the Holy City, they were here! The
beasts were fast! And heavy! Their hooves chewed up
gouts of turf and shook the earth. The litter bearers
faltered, uncertain in their step. Rocked ungently into a
post,-Jiro barely noticed. The horses came on in a wave,
the lances of the riders gleaming in sunlight.

The foremost ranks of warriors met the charge. Brave,
steady, determined, they never had a chance. The lances
impaled them, screaming, or hooves scythed them down
like hwaet. The most nimble managed to duck aside, only
to perish on the swords of blue-armored riders. Only the
veteran of the Midkemian wars won free. His swift stroke
hamstrung a beast from behind, and it collapsed in a kicking
heap. The rider rolled clear, cursing over his mount's
strangely human-sounding scream. Sword met sword, the
victor of the dash lost in the other rise of dust.

The second rank fared little better. One man stabbed a
horse in the chest, before he was overrun. The riders spitted
most of the defenders, but their lances were then useless,
as those not broken or rammed into human flesh were too
long to counter foemen now inside their reach.

Jiro felt sweat trickle inside his armor. His teeth showed
in a snarl of oaths. He could die here! And the waste of
it: to go as Halesko had in the mess of battle! To perish
by the sword, as any unread fool could, blinded by lust
for honor! Jiro rejected such a death. He would see Mara
humbled first!

He kicked clear of his cushions and sprang from his litter,
vicious as a cornered sarcat. ~

Omelo was still on his feet, shouting orders. The initial
rush of the charge was blunted, the following ranks in
ragged order as the mounts of the Shinzawai swerved to
avoid the fallen. Lances had taken one man in two. Now
mounted swordsmen whirled in pirouette; as one with
their hellish beasts, they skirmished with foot warriors
who coughed in the dust. The Anasati warriors never
flinched. They stood ground with valiant courage, and
sliced at disadvantage against foes who battled higher than
their heads.

Tsurani swordsmanship was weakest against blows from

above. The best fell, their helms cloven, and their blood
soaking the dry road.
And still the riders came on. They converged upon the
litter and the dose-ranked inner guard of Jiro's warriors.
Last and most staunch in his defence, these screamed
defiance. Even the most brash could see: they were not
going to be enough.

Omelo shrieked a blasphemy. Chumaka seemed nowhere
to be found. Swords whined through air; some slammed
blade to blade in parries, and were deflected. Too many
bit deep into red armor, spilling more precious red blood.

Hokanu's cavalry trampled on over the fallen. Another
horse went down, thrashing, and a warrior too close was
felled by a kick from flying hooves. Jiro swallowed a
rolling surge of nausea. He raised his blade. war was not
his strength; but fight he must, or die.

The cries of the mortally wounded set his teeth on edge.
He braced for his first blow, dizzied and overwhelmed by
the brutal reality of battle. Only family pride held him
upright.

A horse reached his lines, and reared up, black against
the hot sky as its hooves cut the air. Teeth flashed white
in a face shadowed by a helm bearing Lord's plumes. Jiro
knew: the rider was Hokanu.

The Lord of the Anasati looked up into eyes that held
no pity: eyes that were dKamatsu'smatsu's set and stamp,
that stripped Jiro to his living spirit and knew him for a
craven murderer.

In them, Jiro saw his end.

He met the first sword stroke evenly, as he had been
taught. He managed to parry the second. A warrior was
dying under his feet; he stepped on him, and almost tripped.
Bile stung his throat. He had no strength. And Hokanu bore
down, his mount sidling like a demon, his sword a slash in
sunlight.

Jiro stumbled back. No! This was not happening! He,
who had prided himself on reason, would be butchered
wholesale by a sword! Numbed through his vitals with
dread, he spun and ran.

Any concept of dishonor was driven from him by the
horror of what thundered at his heels. Jiro's breath labored.
His sinews screamed with exertion, all unnoticed. He must
reach the woods. Cleverness could prevail over the sword,
but only if he survived the next five minutes. He was the
last of his father's sons. It was not shame, but only reason,
to survive, whatever the cost, so that Mara, curse her name,
should die ahead of him. Then the gods could do with him
as they would.
The sound of fighting dwindled, punctuated by the
jarring thud of hooves pounding dry ground. Jiro's breath
rasped in his throat as he reached the trees and scrambled
up a small stone outcropping to gain what he recognised
as safety.

The breath of the horse no longer blew past his ears.
It had stopped; the forest deterred it. Jiro blinked to
clear his vision. Shadow seemed to blur his eyes, after
the dazzle of noon. He flung himself, panting, against a
tree bole.

'Turn and fight,' snapped a voice, a half-pace from
his heels.

He spun. Hokanu had dismounted. He waited, sword
raised, faceless in shadow as any executioner.

Jiro bit back a whimper. He was betrayed! Chumaka
had erred, and erred badly, and now this was the end. Red
anger washed away panic. The Lord of the Anasati raised

his weapon and charged.

Hokanu flicked Jiro's sword aside as if it were a toy. A
veteran of war, he had a stroke of iron. Jiro felt blade meet
blade in a vibrating shock of pain. The sting shocked his
nerves, loosened his grip. His weapon flashed, spinning,
from his grip. He did not hear the thrash of its fall into
the undergrowth.

'Omelo!' he screamed in white panic. Somebody, anybody,
even one warrior of his honor guard must be alive
to heed his cry. He must be saved!

His wits stumbled to function. 'Dishonor to you, who
would kill an unarmed enemy.'

Hokanu bared teeth in what was not a smile. 'As my
father was unarmed? Dead in his bed of a poisoned dart?
I know the assassin was yours.' Jiro began to deny it, and
Hokanu shouted, 'I have the tong's accounts!' The Lord of
the Shinzawai looked like terror incarnate as he lowered his
blade, then, with a turn of his wrist, slammed it point down
into earth, leaving it vibrating as he released the hilt. 'You
are dirt, no - less than dirt, to whine of honor to me!'

He advanced.

Jiro crouched, prepared to wrestle. Good! he thought.
Wits were going to triumph after all! He had convinced
the honorable',,fool of a Shinzawai to take him on hand to
hand! Though the Anasati Lord knew he was no champion
wrestler, death would be slower than the downswing of a
sword stroke. He had bought time, perhaps, for one of his
honor guard to win through and save him.
Still playing for delay, Jiro stepped back. He was too
slow. Hokanu was hunter quick, and driven by revenge.
Rough hands grabbed at Jiro's shoulders. He raised an
arm to shove free, and felt his wrist caught and twisted.
Pitiless strength forced it back and back, until bone and
tendon quivered in protest.

Jiro hissed through his teeth. Tears blurred his eyes.
The cruel hold only tightened. Blinking his vision dear,
Jiro looked up. Hokanu loomed over above him, a sparkling
shower of reflection on his helm from the partially
blocked sun.

Jiro strove to speak. His mouth worked, but no intelligent
words came forth. Never in his pampered adult life had he
endured pain, and its kiss stole his reason.

. ._

::

~:

As a man might handle a puppy, Hokanu jerked him up
with one hand. His eyes were mad; he looked like a demon
who would not be sated with only blood. His fingers were
claws, tearing away Jiro's ornate helm with a snap that
wrenched his neck.

Jiro's sweat ran to ice. He gasped in recognition.

And Hokanu, murderously, laughed. 'Thought I would
wrestle, did you? Fool! I set aside my blade because you do
not deserve a warrior's honor; you who bought my father's
assassination deserve a dog's death.'

Jiro choked in a rattling breath. As he groped for a plea
for mercy, Hokanu shook him. In a whisper near to a sob,
only one thought found voice: 'He was an old man.'

'He was beloved,' Hokanu blazed back. 'He was my
father. And your life defiles the world that he lived in.'

Hokanu wrenched Jiro off his knees, shaking loose the
pouch of documents. The Shinzawai Lord shifted one hand
to seize the thong. Jiro jerked back, graceless in his terror.
'You would not sully yourself with my death, if I am so
wretched a creature.'

'Wouldn't I?' The words were a snarl as the strap twisted
tight. Jiro felt the bite of a strangler's garrote around
his neck.

He thrashed and clawed. His nails broke on blue armor.
Hokanu pulled the strap tighter. Jiro's throat closed. His
head pounded. Spittle leaked from his working lips, and
his eyes bulged. The dishonor of his death confronted him,
and he twitched and kicked in frantic desperation as his

face went scarlet.

Yet Hokanu was a battle-seasoned soldier who had never
let his training lag. He bore down upon Jiro with a hate
that knew no end, but drove his blood to fury as reasonless
as the flood of sea tide. For their lost child and his dead
father, Hokanu twisted the strap as Jiro's color deepened
to dark red, purple, and then blue. He kept on until long
after Jiro had fallen limp. Leather bit deep, through skin
and trachea and flesh. Weeping, shivering in the release of
reaction, Hokanu kept twisting, until a Shinzawai Strike
Leader found his Lord over the fallen foe. It took strong
hands to separate master from corpse.

Empty-handed, Hokanu subsided on his haunches in the
leaf mold. He covered his face with bloodied fingers. 'It is
done, my father,' he said in a voice hoarse with emotion.
'And by my hand alone. The dog has been strangled.'

The blue-plumed Strike Leader waited in patience. He
had seen long years of service and knew his master well.
Spying the document pouch that twisted around Jiro's
throat, he removed its contents, assuming them to be
something hi. master might wish to review when his wits
resumed.

After a moment Hokanu stopped shaking. He arose, still
looking at his hands. His expression was blank. Then,
as if the mess on his knuckles were nothing more than
clean dirt, and the dead thing sprawled wretchedly in
its red armor nothing more than killed game, he fumed
and walked away.

The Strike Leader strode after his Lord. To his companions
who fought tight skirmishes in the roadway, he
shouted, 'Call to the field! Jiro of the Anasati is dead! The
day is ours! Shinzawai!'

Like fire in a dry field, the word of Jiro's fall spread
through the fray. Standing next to the overturned litter,
Chumaka, too, heard the call: 'The Anasati Lord is fallen!
Jiro is slain!'

For a moment, the Anasati First Adviser regarded the
spilled scrolls at his feet and thought about the other
document Jiro had worn next to his skin. What would
happen when that was found? He sighed. 'Fool boy,'
Chumaka murmured. 'Coward enough to run, but not to
hide.' Then he shrugged. Omelo was rising from his knees,

Retribution
';

a scalp cut running blood down his cheek. He looked ready
enough to kill, as proud as ever save that something in his
eyes had gone flat. He looked to the Anasati First Adviser
and said, 'What is left?'

Chumaka considered the broken remains of Jiro's honor
guard, both the living and the dead. Out of one hundred,
scarcely twenty were still standing. Honorable numbers
against horses, he thought analytically. He resisted a strong
wish to sit down; mourn he could not. He was no creature
driven by love. Duty was duty, and his pride had been
outwitting Anasati enemies; that, now, was ended. He
glanced at the Shinzawai horsemen who were closing in,
a ring of impenetrable flesh.

Chumaka hissed through his teeth. To the Force Commander
he had known since earliest childhood he said,
'Omelo, my friend, while I respect you as a soldier, you
are a traditionalist. If you wish to fall upon your sword, I
suggest you do so before we are disarmed. I urge you not
to. For myself, I would order our survivors to put down
their arms, and hope that Mara is as forgiving now as she
has been in the past.' Almost too softly to be heard, lest
his hope shine too bright, he added, 'And pray that she has
some post left unfilled that we are suited for.'

Omelo shouted orders for all swords to be put down.
Then, as blade after blade fell from stunned fingers, and
the beaten Anasati warriors watched withburning eyes,
he regarded the seamed, enigmatic features of Chumaka.
Neither man heard the noise as Shinzawai warriors invaded
their ranks and made formal the Anasati surrender. Omelo
licked dry lips. 'You have such hopes?'

And both men knew: he did not refer to Mara's past
record of clemency. The Lady upon whose mercy their
lives, if not their freedom, henceforward must depend
was one marked for death. If by the gods' miracle she
could survive the Assembly's ire, there was still the last,
most bitter cohort of Minwanabi warriors who had been
armed in Acoma green and sent out. Their orders were
Chumaka's, and as near to their hearts' desire as life and-~
breath: to kill her by any means, and see Jiro's purpose

complete.

Chumaka's eyes darted, then kindled as a gambler's
might. 'She is Servant of the Empire. With our help, she
might survive the Assembly yet.'

Omelo spat and turned his back. 'No woman born owns
such luck.' His shoulders hunched as a needra bull's might,
before the goad that lashed it into obedience. 'For myself,
you are correct: I am a traditionalist. These new things are
not for one such as I. We all must die sometime, and better
free than a slave.' He looked at the sky above, then said,
'Today is a good day to greet the Red God.'

Chumaka was not quite quick enough to avert his face
before Omelo lunged forward and fell in final embrace
against the blade of his own sword.

While the blood welled red out of the old campaigner's
mouth, and the Shinzawai Lord hurried with a cry toward
this, the last Anasati man to fall, Chumaka bent down,
shaken at last. He rested a withered hand against Omelo's
cheek, and heard the Force Commander's final whispered
words.

'See my warriors safe, and free, if Mara lives. If she does
not, tell them: I will meet them at ... the door to ...
Turakamu's halls.'

Thunder boomed in full sunlight. The reverberations
slammed across dear sky and shook the forest trees to
their roots. Two magicians manifested, hovering in midair
like a pair of ancient gods. Black robes fluttered and snapped
in the breeze of their passage as they skimmed above the
wood, seeking.

The red-haired one used his mystic arts to rise yet
higher. A speck like a circling hawk, he soared above the
countryside, scanning the road that dipped and meandered
through hills and glens on its northward course toward
Kentosani. Tapek's magic might grant him the vantage and
the vision to equal any bird of prey; yet the shadows still
obscured, leaves and branches mantling the ground. He
frowned, his curse flying with him on the wind. They were
here, and he would find them.

The corner of his eye caught movement. He spun, easy
in his flight as a mythical spirit of air, and studied. Brown
flecks, all moving: a herd of speckled gatania - six-legged
deer- not horses.

He resumed his course in peevish irritation, back, down
the length of the road. And there it was: an upset litter lacquered
red, and shiny in sunlight with interlaced whorls of
corcara shell. Costly work, fit for only the highest-ranking
Lord, and with curtains in the colors of the Anasati.

Tapek swooped downward, nearly diving like a raptor.

Less intent on the chase, still Kerolo was not caught off

guard. He spotted his fellow mage's descent, and hastened
his progress to overtake.

His lip curled in what seemed contempt, the red-haired
mage pointed to a cloud of settling dust farther up the
roadway. 'There. Do you see?'

Kerolo took a studied look at the aftermath of tragedy
that milled in the roadway: horses, lathered still
from a charge. Warriors in Shinzawai blue, dismounted
now, with the huddled remnants of Lord Jiro's honor
guard held at swordpoint. Omelo dead inside the circle,
sprawled on the blade of his own sword; Chumaka beside
the fallen officer, shocked past cleverness for once. The
Anasati First Adviser stooped low with his hands over
his face, as near to tears as he had ever been since his
boyhood.

'The Lord is not with his men,' Tapek observed in his

72~) Mistress of the Empire

iciest tone. All the while, his eyes flicked up and down the road,
taking stock of the fallen.

'He is not with his warriors,' Kerolo said softly, almost
sadly in comparison. 'Nor would a commander as staunch
as Omelo fall upon his own sword for no reason.'

'Jiro's dead, you think?' Tapek returned, a wildness akin
to joy lighting his rest!.ess eyes. Then he stiffened, as if he
stood on firm earth. 'Look. Under the trees.'

More slowly, Kerolo responded. After a moment he,
too, saw what lay beneath a small rise in the ground
not ten paces distant from Hokanu's abandoned sword,
left standing upright in the earth, still dean.

Before Kerolo could sigh, or utter any word to express
his wish that vengeance must continually run to bloodshed,
Tapek snapped out, 'He was strangled! In dishonor Lord
Jiro died. We have been defied again!'

Kerolo gave a Tsurani shrug, regret in his mild expression.
We were too late to prevent killing. But none may
dispute that Lord Hokanu deserved the traditional right
of reprisal. It is known who was responsible for his father's
assassination.'

Tapek seemed not to hear. 'This is Mara's doing. Her
husband has ever clung to her hem. Does she believe we ;
will permit this bloodshed just because her hands seem to

be clean?'

Kerolo tucked his fingers in his voluminous cuffs, unconvinced. '
That's supposition, particularly since the Assembly
already must decide what action to take over her army's
engagement on the Plain of Nashika.'

'Decide?' Tapek's brows climbed in affront. 'You cannot
be thinking of reconvening the council! Our debate and
delay have already cost the Empire one great house.'

'Hardly that extremity.' Kerolo's mildness assumed a
fragile edge, like a sword blade ground too long at the
whetstone. 'There are cousins left who bear descent from
the Anasati: a half-dozen young women consigned to the
temple who have not yet taken binding vows of service.'

Tapek was not to be placated. 'what? Set power in the
hands of yet another untried female? You amaze me! Either
a hapless girl who will watch her inheritance destroyed
before she is Ruling Lady for a year, or another Mara! That
choice twenty years ago is precisely the same circumstance
that spawned this difficulty in the first place.'

'The Assembly will appoint an Anasati successor after we
resolve the issue between the Shinzawai and the Acoma,'
Kerolo insisted. 'We must go to the City of the Magicians.
Now. This news should be heard promptly.'

At this Tapek's eyes narrowed. 'Fool! We can take her
now, in her guilt!'

Kerolo kept to himself his suspicion of possible cho-ja
collusion. He did not repeat his inward fear: that already
Mara might have won herself a greater ally than any mortal
Emperor. 'Jiro is already dead,' he argued gently. 'What use
undue haste now? There will be no further conflict. With
Jiro dead, what need is there?'

Tapek almost shouted. 'Do you think that Jiro was my
reason for stringent opposition of Mara? She threatens
us, you fool! She has greater ambitions than merely a
rival's death.'

Unhappy at the reminder, Kerolo still strove for calm.
'I am neither blind nor always the slave of protocol. But

I must insist, brother. With our edict still in force, even
were Mara as bloody-minded as some other Lords of our
acquaintance, none of the Anasati claimants may be hunted
down. We must decide which of them is fittest to assume
the Anasati mantle. Come; the matter is too weighty for
us to act unilaterally. We must consult the wishes of our
brethren.'

'They are idiots, or worse, accomplices!' Tapek fumed
back. He paced over air, spun, and whipped back to stab

Mistress ofthe Empire

a finger at his companion. 'I will not stand idle through
this crisis! I must act, for the Good of the Empire!'

Kerolo bowed in stiff-faced opposition to the invocation
of the ritual phrase. 'My place is to inform the others.' His
hand dropped to his pocket, and his teleportation device
buzzed like the whine of an angry insect.

'Fool!' Tapek spat at the empty air, his word half
whirled away by the suck of air left at his brother mage's
departure.

Tapek looked down. Below, under cloudless noon, Anasati
and Shinzawai completed the time-honored, paired
dance of victor and vanquished. ~

Then, as if their actions were of no more consequence '7,)
to him than the buildings and the battles of insects, they
were abandoned to their own devices as he, too, reached for
his device and departed.


29

Destruction

The air snapped.

Tapek materialised fifty feet up in the air in a new
location, many miles to the south of Jiro's death site. Th.
magician's expression was vexed. His hunt to pin down
the location of Mara's litter promised difficulty, since she.
unlike Jiro, had chosen her route for subterfuge. Her Force
Commander had admitted as much, when he confessed her
choice of back roads. Tapek shook a stray lock of hair
from his eyes and gazed intently down on the landscape.
Hwaet fields stretched below, gold turning brown, for
the harvest was neglected. A dusty road wound parallel to
a creek bed, dry once more in keeping with the season.
Nothing moved but a needra bull, pacing the confines of
his pen. His herd boy lay under a tree, twitChing off flies
in the steamy heat. Since he had no reason to glance up, he
failed to notice the magician hovering directly overhead.

To Tapek's outlook, the slave boy had as little consequence
as the flies. The magician crossed his arms and
drummed his fingers against his sleeves. A Search by line
of sight was not going to be effective: the territory where
Mara was likely to be was simply too large. (Urgency ate
at him. Kerolo had left something of significance unsaid,
the red-haired mage was convinced of it. Why else should
anyone of his arcane abilities feel the need to rush like a
child to report to the Assembly?

What was Mara plotting, that she should have dared give
attack orders to her troops on the Plain of Nashika ? Tapek
licked his lips, brooding. The woman was devious. Even if
Jiro s death was not her doing, but solely the province of

724 Mistress of the Empire
Hokanu, still, someone representing the Assembly should
seek her out, if only to make apprehending her easier
when fat windbags like Hochopepa were finally forced
to acknowledge her transgression. The Assembly would
move from words to punitive action, Tapek had no doubt.
Nothing else could come of the fact that their absolute
authority had been compromised.

A spell of finding should suffice to track the Lady,
Tapek resolved. His midair stance unnecessary for such a
conjuring, he let himself settle slowly toward the ground.
As his feet touched earth, the needra bull winded a snort
of alarm, curled up his tail, and bolted. Its herd boy roused
with a start. He saw the magician as he scrambled to his
feet. With a cry of fear, he flattened himself in terrified
obeisance, belly to the earth.

The needra bull thundered on toward the far fence,
turned, and circled. Its hooves chewed up good grass. But
in the fearful presence of a Black Robe, the slave feared to
rise and calm it.

Which was proper, Tapek reasoned; the populace should
feel nothing but awe toward those of his rank. Tapek
ignored both boy and beast. Self-absorbed, he stood by
the trembling slave and murmured an incantation.

He touched his palms together to dose his gathered
power, shut his eyes, and released. Tendrils of invisible
force extended from his person. They emanated across the
countryside, searching. Where they touched roads or back
thoroughfares, even the most rudimentary trails used by
farmers to cart produce from the fields, the magical sensors
brightened. They turned and followed the byways. As
invisible threads, they coursed even the smallest footpaths.
Within minutes, Tapek stood at the center of an outflung
array of magic strands. His probes became an extension of
himself, an expanding net that was sensitised to detect the
presence of movement. Like a spider in a web, he waited.

Destruction

725

A twitch at his nerves brought his attention to bear on
a shaded lane where two servants loitered at love. The
magician let that strand slip and turned his focus on others.
Here passed a small band of grey warriors, hunting for an
unguarded needra herd; hunger drove them into lands that
normally were populated and defended. They were not
the only such band; thieves had grown bold during the
Empire-wide unrest. But Tapek stayed detached. These
wretched folk at their lawlessness were no concern of his.
He dismissed the grey warriors' presence, seeking another
company; less predatory, perhaps, and better armed, but
moving just as furtively. He identified two small honor
guards belonging to minor nobles; these warriors were
simply hurrying with their masters to shelter under the
protection of stronger benefactors.

His probes twined across wooded lands and fields left
untended. He crossed an expanse of dried thyza paddies,
the dead shoots stuck up through cracked earth like serried
ranks of brown quills. Birds pecked and squabbled over the
heads of shriveled grain.

And yet the movements of scavengers were not all that
disturbed this sector. Past the arid fields, under cover of a
copse of ulo saplings, Tapek's snare sensed something else:
a half-glimpsed flash of green armor, and the rapid tramp
of feet. His lips twitched. Now, at last, he touched upon a
larger force, all of one hundred strong. This was hers: his
quarry.

Tapek focused his mind upon the site, and power defined
its image. A dark-lacquered litter with shatra-bird hangings
moved rapidly down a back road. The bearers were picked
for strength and speed, and around them, in a sun-caught
blaze of green armor, marched Mara's honor company of
warriors. They were fighting fit, and armored as much for
battle as for ceremony. What set them apart from all other
retinues was the presence of a mantled adviser who wore a

726 Mistress of the Empire

soldier's helm, and who swung along briskly on a crutch.
The rich fall of his robes could not quite hide the fact that
he had lost his left leg.

Keyoke, Tapek identified, his smile a flash of white teeth.
No house in the Empire but Mara's kept a cripple in high
office. The old man yet kept his pride, not letting his
infirmity slow the pace. Yet his presence further indicated
Mara's culpability, Tapek guessed. The venerable former
Force Commander would not be set at risk in the field
unless the Lady felt great need for reassurance. Quietly the
magician concluded his surveillance. Another grey head was
also in Mara's company: Incomo, a senior adviser whom
the Lady had learned to value since her acquisition of his
service from her vanquished Minwanabi enemies.

Incomo was never one to endorse outright innovation.
Such was the allure of the Lady's charisma that even her
onetime foes were moved to support her in conspiracy.
Tapek felt a flicker of ire. That this mere woman thought
that she could move outside the law, and even by implication
lay claim to the rights reserved for the Assembly,
was dangerous. Her actions made her anathema. The gods
themselves must know outrage.

Tapek gauged the distance between himself and the
fleeing retinue. His dosed eyes twitched with tension as he
collapsed his net of power. The single tendril that connected
him with Mara's location he kept. A sudden fey giddiness
passed through him as he shifted the balance of his powers
and touched them to that strand. He disappeared from his
vantage point by the pasture silently, leaving the stupefied
slave still groveling, and the needra bull to settle its discord
unattended.

The magician reappeared on a lane miles distant, under
dappled shade, slightly to the rear of Mara's column.

His arrival was accomplished without fanfare. Still, his
presence might have been expected, so swiftly did the rear

Destruction

727

ranks of Acoma soldiers stop short and whirl in place to
face him. Their swords were ready, if not yet drawn, as
if he, a Black Robe, presented the menace of a common
bandit.

The moment passed when his dark cloth should have been
recognised for what it represented: a magician's robe could
never be mistaken for the rags worn by a masterless thief
of the road. Despite this, Mara's warriors did not bow or
ease their stance. The two advisers stood silent.

Here was impudence! Tapek fumed. The issue could no
longer be disputed. Irked that the Assembly should yet
be wasting itself with council and talk, Tapek hissed an
involuntary breath in anger. Mara's entourage showed
disrespect of the first order, to face him as if he could be
threatened by weapons of war!

Their boldness must go no further, Tapek resolved.

He assumed a fearful mien.

Despite a curt order to hold from Keyoke, the servants
and slaves who marched at the core of Mara's retinue
scattered and fled through the ranks of her guard. The
bearers who held the litter trembled visibly, but a woman's
voice from behind the curtains stayed their panic. At some
second, unseen signal, they started forward at a run, the
litter swaying and rocking in time to their ungainly race.

Thunderstruck with astonishment, Tapek stood rooted.
Obstinance was one thing; but this! That Mara's servants
should dare to display anything other than instant obeisance
in his presence was unthinkable!

Then the Strike Leader of Mara's honor guard shouted,
'Come no closer, Great One.'
Tapek shivered with affront. No one who was not a
magician had raised his voice against him since he was a
boy with talent yet undiscovered. Such insolence shocked
the mage to fury after years of unquestioned obedience.
Ready to spit with revulsion, or lash the very air with

728

Mistress of the Empire

wild power, he shouted, 'My words are as law, and your
mistress has transgressed our edict! Stand away or die!'

The Acoma officer might be trembling, but his words held
nothing of compliance. 'Then we will perish defending our
Lady and enter the halls of the Red God as honored Acoma
warriors!' He snapped a signal to his men. As one body,
the green-armored company fanned out, blocking the Black
Robe's path.

The escaping litter gained ground. Keyoke exchanged a
word with the officer. Tapek recognised Sujanra, one of the
two Acoma Senior Force Leaders. The officer gave Keyoke a
curt nod. A crutch saluted, signaling decision. Then Keyoke
spun on his good leg, and ha!f hopped, half swung after his
retreating mistress.

Incensed by the inconceivable effrontery of this futile,
armed resistance, to be faced by Tsurani with anything but
abject servility, Tapek's anger manifested as pure power.

He raised his hands. Energy crackled and gathered
around his forearms. It poised above his palms, brightening
into a corona too fierce for human vision.

Mara's warriors might be dazzled blind, but they answered
by drawing their swords. Tapek heard the hiss of blade
leaving sheath even over the buzz of the arcane forces he
gathered. His rage stopped thought. One with the surge of
his magic, he knotted his killing fury into a concentrated
ball. The magic coalesced within his hand to a rainbow play
of colors that flashed and melded, heated to searing red.

'See what your mistress's folly has brought you!' Tapek
screamed as he hurled his bolt of power at the honor guard.
The ball of searing light leaped out, expanding with a
crackle that shook the earth. The warriors nearest to Tapek
were overtaken, and violent, flaming death erupted among
their ranks. Leaping like a thing alive, the spell-wrought
flame sprang from man to man, and in an instant living
flesh flared up as a torch. The fires brought agony without
relief. Men screamed, though the intake of breath scorched
their lungs, and sucked the spell into their bodies to ravage
their inner tissues. No matter how brave and resolute, the
stricken warriors crumpled to their knees, then writhed in
mindless suffering on the ground. Green armor blackened
and blistered. The torment was hideous, beyond mortal
endurance; except that the watching magician regarded
them and did endure, stone-hearted. His red hair blew and
tangled in drifts of smoke, and his nostrils pinched at the
acrid stench of scorched hair and hide.

The spell was not recalled. Tapek let the minutes pass

until the flames at last quenched, their fuel spent. No bone
and sinew remained to be burned. Only skeletons were
left; charred, smoking fingers clenched blackened weapons.
Sparks still danced in the eye sockets of the skulls, as if
life lingered yet inside, still feeling, still howling in silent
torment. The mouths gaped, forever frozen into screams.

Tapek relished his satisfaction. Before him stood only
the inner core of warriors, the last rank left alive to
guard the road before the vanishing litter; and beyond
these, their higher officers, Force Leader Sujanra and the
adviser Incomo. All stood fast, confronting death as true
soldiers of the Acoma; even the palsied old adviser.

Tapek stepped forward, stiff with disbelief Drained
beyond anger or amazement, and light-headed from the
potency of his magic, he struggled to muster his wits. 'What
is this? Are you blind? Fools? You saw what became of
your companions!' He gestured toward the ashes of what
lately had been living men, and his voice rose to a shriek,
magic-enhanced. 'Why are you not on your bellies, crying

~mercy?'

None of Mara's surviving honor guard moved. Her senior
officers kept a grim facade and said nothing.

Tapek took another step ahead. The slowest of the fleeing
slaves had fallen prone, overcome by the display of a Black
Robe's unrestrained wrath. They lay in the ditches a dozen
paces back from the roadside, weeping and shivering,
their foreheads pressed to earth. Tapek ignored these as
if they were faceless, of less import than winnowed grass
underfoot. Wind-blown cinders stung his eyes as he crossed
the seared ranks of the dead. Blistered bits of armor and
finger bones crunched under his feet. Closer he came, and
closer still; Mara's retinue held fast.

Down the road, curtains flying awry, the green-lacquered
litter bounced as its bearers raced with their burden. Keyoke
had caught up to them, despite the encumbrance of his
crutch.

Tapek regarded their futile flight with contempt as he
addressed the warriors before him. 'What does your loyalty
matter in the end? Your mistress will never survive to
escape.'
The Lady's defenders refused speech. The plumes on
Sujanra's helm twisted and quivered, yet that detail gave
no satisfaction. The movement was no part of cowardice,
but only the influence of the wind. The Force Leader's
will was rock, his resolve unbending. Incomo stood like
a priest in the holy ground of a temple, his face revealing
an expression of profound acceptance.

Tapek gazed upon each of these warriors who had
witnessed his wrath, and still could not be made to fear.
One thing remained that might hurt them, might yet shatter
their front of solidarity and defiance.

His anger burning again, Tapek gauged the distance
between himself and the site where Mara's litter had
retreated around a bend. He marked a lightning-torn
tree. With a flexing of his will, his magic relocated him
to that spot.

As the Black Robe appeared, Keyoke whirled and
stopped. Braced on his crutch, he assumed guard stance
between the mage and his mistress's litter.
'Tell your Lady's bearers to halt!' Tapek demanded.

'Let my Lady command her slaves as she will.' Keyoke
slipped his crutch from under his arm. He gripped it with
both hands and twisted, releasing a hidden catch. The
smoothed wood parted with the dean, dear hiss that
signaled a blade being drawn from a scabbard concealed
inside. His voice was not an old man's, but rang like that
of a field general as he said, 'Neither will I stand aside,
unless my Lady so orders.'

Tapek was beyond astonishment. He glared, but saw no
yielding. Keyoke's face was weathered leather, scribed with
too many lines and too many years of hard living to alter
its set and show weakness. His eyes might not be so dear
of late, but they burned with the surety of his self-worth.
He had faced the worst a warrior could imagine, to survive
and overcome the shame of living maimed. Death, his
steady gaze seemed to say, held no secrets, but only final
quiet rest.

'No need, old man,' the magician snapped. He moved
toward the thicket where the bearers had scurried, dragging
Mara's litter to shelter.

Keyoke moved with surprising speed. The magician
found himself targeted by the lunge of a sword's point,
wielded by a cripple.

The speed of the attack confounded Tapek, and just
barely, he dodged aside. 'You dare!' he shouted.

For all that had gone before, that any man alive should
attempt violence against him was beyond Tapek's imagination.
Keyoke not only dared, he repeated the act. His
sword whined down, snapping a rip in black cloth. Tapek
hopped away, his movements less graceful than those
of the one-legged swordsman as he barely escaped the
deadly blow. The blade flicked, cut, and forced him back
yet again. Harried almost off balance, Tapek could not
summon concentration. To focus his will and access magic

732 Mistress of the Empire

was impossible as he ducked and sidestepped and backed
away from the old man's attack. 'Stop! Stop at once!' cried
the magician. Unaccustomed to physical exertion, it was all
he could do not to pant.

Mockery tinged Keyoke's next feint. 'What, you cannot
outrun even me?'

Forced to teleport out of reach, Tapek reappeared,
breathing hard. Tsurani enough to burn with shame for
his retreat, and half choking in throttled rage, he drew
himself up with as much majesty as he could muster. From
a deep pit of black wrath, he summoned power. Magic
gathered in him and made the air crackle with ozone.
Blue energies discharged around him, as if he centered a
small-scale lightning storm.

Still Keyoke admitted no fear. As he leaned on the blade
he had carried in his crutch, his normally impassive mien
gave way to a thin-edged scorn. He observed, 'My mistress
is right. Your kind are nothing but men, no wiser or nobler
than other men.' Seeing his words sting the magician, who
now stood trembling, he added, 'And fearful, childish men
at that.'

From behind, amid the standing handful of Acoma honor
guard, a warrior snickered.

Tapek roared in mindless fury. His focused might
unleashed. His hand fell in a cutting motion, and a
shadowy shape swooped out of empty air. The apparition
reared up, then towered, a darkness like a well of moonless
night. It poised for only a heartbeat, then spun in a rush
toward Keyoke.

On reflex, the old man raised his blade to parry. Fast as a
more youthful man, he met the thing edge on. But his foe this
time was nothing solid. His weapon passed unobstructed
through inky darkness. He did not twist aside in attempted
flight, even as the spell cut inside his guard. Because Keyoke
met the spell unflinching, it struck him full in the chest.

Destruction

733
Armor might have slowed it; the shimmering, silk of his
adviser's garb daunted the dark not at all. Its fell touch
shriveled the fabric. After that, Keyoke's voluntary control
was sundered. The proud old warrior who had candled
Mara in childhood stiffened. His fingers loosened. His
sword fell from his hand as the shadow bit into him. His eyes
lost their determination, widened in agony and terror.

And yet at the last, the fighter had the victory. His tired
heart could not withstand the shock and the pain that a
younger man would have endured; his spirit, its term long
served, had in late years kept a light hold on life. Keyoke
tottered, his chin tipped toward the sky as if in salute to
his gods. Then he collapsed in a heap, his body as dead as
the stones beneath him, and his face relaxed in peace.

Tapek's rage remained unquenched. He had wanted the
old man to scream and beg, to howl in animal misery,
that Mara, cowering in her litter, might know her beloved
Adviser for War had suffered as a dog might, expressly at the
whim of its master. Tapek cursed. Regret goaded his temper
to new heights. He had wanted Mara dead before her old
warrior's life flickered its last, so that Keyoke would see her
sent to Turakamu before him, and die knowing his lifework
was wasted. Consumed by white fury, the magician lunged
after the litter, abandoned now by its bearers and sitting
forlorn in the thicket. Tapek muttered incantations and
snapped harsh spells out of air. He bit off his words
and spiked each breath with gestures. His conjury raised
a duster of silvery disks that hovered, spinning, above his
hands. Their edges were keener than knives, and the breeze
carved by their passage gave off a dissonant hum. 'Go!' the
mage commanded.

The death disks whirled away faster than sight, and
carved through the thicket. Their touch sucked life. Green

plants and saplings withered, shriveled in a moment to
dry twigs. No object held power to stop them; no barrier

734 Mistress of the Empire

could slow their course. They crossed stone as if through
shadow, and sliced through the litter curtains without
rending a thread. As they converged inside, a woman's
choked-off scream rang through the glade. Then came
silence, unbroken by the rustle of songbirds.

Every wild creature had long since fled.

The warriors at Tapek's back remained. Whipped to
outrage by the attack on their mistress's litter, their Strike
Leader called them to charge.

Tapek loosed a maniacal laugh as he pivoted to face
them. The swords in their hands looked foolish, and the
battle lust in their faces the grimace of rank fools. The
magician amplified his spell. He waved his hands, sending
disk after disk spinning into the ranks that rushed him.

Men fell. they did not scream, having no moment t o
draw breath. One instant they lived and ran, shouting
Acoma battle cries. The next second, cut by the mage's
killer disks, they withered. Their legs folded, spilling them
like stick figures onto dry earth. Tapek's fury remained in
full flood. As if determined to scorch and kill everything
in sight, he continued to hurl magic. Flash after flash left
his hands shaped as spells of destruction. The air chimed
and sang off the edges of his spinning projectiles long
after the last of Mara's warriors had fallen dead, Incomo
sprawled among them in a crumple of silk robes like some
incongruous trodden flower.

Tapek's strength ebbed suddenly.

Exhausted, dizzy and fighting spinning vision, the magician
had no choice but to pause and catch his breath. He
did not gloat. Resentment still smoldered within him, that
mere men had defied him. He did not regret their demise at
his hand, but that he had been goaded into killing Mara too
quickly. Her end had deserved to be painful and prolonged,
for the trouble she had caused the Assembly.

Tapek shrugged his robe straight, then picked his way

Destruction

735

between carcasses toward what once had been a green
thicket. A scattering of slaves and servants cowered whimpering,
their faces pressed to earth. The death spells had
winnowed their numbers, and what few were left were
half mad. Tapek stalked past and pushed through dry
sticks and blackened branches toward the dead patch of
earth surrounding the Acoma litter. Dried leaves and brittle
twigs crumbled to dust at his passage.

Only the litter's bright lacquer was undimmed; spared
the effects of life-draining magic, it seemed almost artificial
in the brilliance of untrammeled sunlight. Tapek stepped
ahead and swept aside the curtains with their embroidered
blazon of shatra birds.

A lifeless woman reclined on the cushions, staring with
eyes frozen wide in astonishment. Her limbs were clothed
in the robes of a great Lady, but her features were not
Mara's.

Tapek's curse rang out over the ruin in the roadway.
He had accomplished nothing but the execution of some
maid wearing Mara's robes. He had been duped! He, a mage
of the Assembly, had been lulled by the presence of Keyoke
and a handful of officers and soldiers into the belief that he
had overtaken the Lady. Instead, she had counted a victory
upon him, anticipating his hot temper. The soldiers had all
known, before they died, that she had bested a Great One
of the Assembly; as had the old man. Keyoke had played
along with the ruse, no doubt to his fullest amusement
before he died.

Tapek glared through the woods in frustration. Except
for a cowering handful of slaves, his spells had cut down

all life. Any in the Acoma retinue of high enough station to
know the Lady's whereabouts were now slaughtered, and
no satisfaction could be gained by questioning or torture
of witless slaves.

Tapek found curses insufficient vindication. Neither

736

Mistress of the Empire

could he subside and meekly swallow the irony of Mara's
triumph. He snapped up his hand, creating a vortex of
scintillating colors above his head. Faster and faster he
whipped the energies, then, with a flick of a wrist, cast
the deadly rainbow toward the woods. The energies struck
the trees and undergrowth. Magic raised a crack and a
shimmer that exploded in alien blue-white light. The singed
air give off a stench of cooked metal, and living matter was
immolated. Where the slaves had been, there was nothing,
not bones, not shadows, but only a scouring of uncanny
spellcraft.

The coruscation dimmed, then flicked out. Sweat-drenched,
Tapek stood panting. His eyes swept back and forth,
examining the scope of his handiwork. Before his feet
yawned a crater stripped of soil. The rock of the earth
stood bare to view and above it, for yards in each direction,
nothing crawled or flew. Revealed also were the Acoma
servants who had managed to flee the farthest. No longer
sheltered by brush, they lay writhing in the aftermath of
the magic that had lashed them. Their faces and skin
were blistered, blackened leather; their hands were seared
fingerless. These few still twitched, dying in lingering agony
that could find no voice even to scream.

'Splendid,' said a voice out of air.

Tapek started, turned, and saw Akani, lately arrived
from the City of the Magicians. He wore a shield spell
against arcane attack, that sparkled like a bubble in the
afternoon sun.
Too spent to offer greeting, Tapek sagged. His strength
was at lowest ebb, but he took heart at the possibility
of swift reinforcement. 'Good. You are needed. I am
exhausted. Find -'

Akani interrupted in annoyed acerbity. 'I will do none of
your bidding. In fact, I was sent to find you. Kerolo sent
word that you were acting rashly.' With cold eyes and a

.\

Destruction

737

study for detail, Akani reviewed the ravaged countryside.
'I judge the case was understated. You've been played for a
fool, Tapek. A child could be expected to react to taunts, but
a full-trained mage of the Assembly? Your excesses speak ill
of us all.'

Tapek's features turned thunderous. 'Do not mock me,
Akani. Mara set a clever trap to defy us!'

The litigator turned magician said in contempt, 'No
need. You do an exceptional job of aiding her cause by
yourself.'

'What? I am no ally of hers!' Tapek tottered forward,
fiercely irked that his powers were spent.

Akani dispensed with his defences, a subtle insult to
emphasise the plain fact that his fellow mage was reduced
to helpless fuming. With a regard to the last twitching
bodies of Mara's servants, he said, 'You realise that if
Lady Mara fled her litter in disguise, you have left not a
face intact to tell.'

Tapek responded with pique. 'Then engage your strength
to find her! Mine has been fully exhausted in this cause.'

'Wasted, more like. Nor will I act on this further.' Akani
advanced on his colleague. 'I was dispatched by the Assembly
to fetch you back. You have acted without, warrant
on a matter that is under discussion; that is a shameful
breach of our covenant, and matters are far graver than you
know. You were exhorted to use prudence, yet you let your
passions rule you. If the Good Servant is not already dead,

you have destroyed the very officers we had at hand who
might have revealed the extent of her plot against us.'

Tapek frowned. 'Plot? Against the Assembly? You mean
she's done more than defy us?'
Akani sighed. His youthful face looked tired. Moved by
his background in law to examine all sides of an issue, he
admitted, 'We drove her to it. But yes, Lady Mara may have
in mind to disrupt our treaty with the cho-ja.'

738 Mistress of the Empire

'She'd never dare!' Tapek exploded, but the memory of
Keyoke's brazen challenge contradicted that presumption.
There was nothing that gods-accursed Acoma bitch would
not try. Nothing.

'The Lords of the Nations never expected her to survive
the might of the Minwanabi, let alone destroy them,' Akani
qualified drily. 'Our kind have long been inured to struggle
by dint of our exalted position. We have forgotten to
guard against contention, and our past complacence brings
us peel.

Then, as he saw aggression kindle in his colleague's eyes,
the ex-litigator added, 'Your part in this matter is finished,
Tapek, by the Assembly's decree. Now come with me.'
Taking his teleportation device in hand, Akani activated
it, then firmly gripped Tapek's shoulder. The two magicians
vanished in an inrush of air that sucked eddies in the drifting
smoke, and wafted fresh air over the last, jerking spasms of
dying Acoma servants.

The Lady's boldness had saved her. Tapek, in his impromptu
search, had never thought to look off the roads, in the
deepest, thickest undergrowth. He perceived no deeper
than Mara's outer trappings as a pampered noble Lady,
and could never have imagined how profoundly her foray
into Thuril had changed her. Besides her bold strike into
rough country, the direction Mara had taken when she left
her litter and main company was not northward toward
Kentosani. Instead, she had cut due southwest, in direct
line toward the nearest cho-ja tunnels.

She and the warriors with her traveled without rest
through two nights. Now, near sundown of the second
day, the Lady stumbled on her feet. Saric walked at her
shoulder, his touch at her elbow holding her upright, though
he was scarcely more able himself.

The one scout who still maintained alertness raised a

Destruction

739

hand. Only when Mara had been restrained gently to a
stop did she realise the reason for his signal.

The birds in the high, dense canopy of ulo trees had
stopped singing.
She motioned for her rear guard to halt and said,
'What is it?'

Saric poised, listening. The Strike Leader on point quietly
urged his warriors to search the treetops.

'Are we in danger from ambush?' Mara asked in a
whisper.

The scout who had first given warning shook his head.
'Hardly here. Even thieves would starve if they staked out
this area of the forest. No trafffic to keep them supplied.' He
cocked his head, and was fastest to note the approaching
noise of armed men. 'A patrol, I chink, my Lady.'

'None of ours,' Saric concluded. He glanced at Strike
Leader Azawari, who nodded, while the small band of
hand-picked warriors drew swords. To the scout the
Acoma adviser said urgency, 'How far are we from the
tunnel entrance?'

'A mile at best,' came the answer; too far to run in this
company's exhausted state, even if they were not to be
harried from the rear.

Saric stepped before his Lady, who sweated under her
layers of borrowed armor. She had carried the added
weight well enough, but her skin was chafed raw from the
unaccustomed motion of walking. Still, pluckily, she kept
up appearances and reached for the sword at her side.

Saric clamped her hand in a freezing grip, his penchant

for questions lost to urgency. 'No. If we are attacked, you
must flee and seek to hide. Save the sword for yourself, to
fall on if need be, should you be taken. But to try to hold
here would be folly.' More kindly he added, 'You have no
training, mistress. The first stroke you met would cut you
down.'

aa740 . Mistress of the Empire

Mara looked him sternly in the eyes. 'If I must run, you
will follow suit. Nacoya did not school you for your office
only to see you wasted in armed combat.'

Saric managed a half-flippant shrug. 'A sword thrust
would be kinder than a magician's spell.' For he had no
illusions. Their small, fast-moving party might have
escaped notice from the Assembly, but not for long. Yet
to remain beyond reach of arcane retribution, his Lady
must live to find refuge in the Cho-ja tunnels.

Mara noted her adviser's sharp silence; she tried not to
think, as he did, of the Great Ones. To open her thoughts
to such fears, she must surely collapse and weep: for
Lujan and Irrilandi, perhaps dead with all of her armies;
for Keyoke, Force Leader Sujanra, and Incomo, who
were all that remained,of her old guard, and who had
been set out as bait with her litter, their lives her
diversion, and their sacrifice her last hope for Justin.

Where Hokanu was, the gods only knew. That he also
might be most hideously lost did not bear imagining.
Worst of all, Mara shied off from the question that
gnawed at the edges of her mind: that Justin might indeed
survive to claim heirship to the golden throne, but at the
cost of every other life that was beloved to her.

Mara bit her lip. Poised with Saric on the edge of flight,
she firmed her will to keep from trembling.

The sounds of snapping twigs and marching men drew
closer. Her party's trail was plain to read, since they had
taken no care to hide their tracks, as they had passed far
enough from the road that their presence was unlikely to
draw notice. Once in the deep wilds, speed had been
deemed of the essence. ~

Or so her reduced council of officers had decided, and
they paid for that misjudgment now.

Strike Leader Azawari sorted his options and chose.
'Fan gut,' he murmured to his warriors. 'Give them no
solid rank
to charge on. Let it be man to man, and confusing, `0 trite
our Lady's escape for as long as we can.'

Saric's fingers tightened over Mara's hand. 'Come,, he
whispered in her ear. 'Let us be off'

She resisted him, rooted and stubborn.

Then the rear rank scout straightened up and gave a
glad shout. 'They're ours!' He laughed in stark relief and
~pointed to the glimpse of green armor that came and
went between the trees.

Men who had begun to scatter pulled back in-to one
main body. Swords slid into scabbards, and grins flashed
in the deep-woods shadow. Somebody hammered
some-One else's armored shoulder, and words passed
around Of a wager. 'Ten to one that old Keyoke
prevailed, and sent us reinforcements!'

'Hush!' rapped their Strike Leader. 'Form rankS and be
quiet.'

Azawari's sternness reminded: there was grave danger
still. The new arrivals might only be bearers of bad news.
Now the ranks of the warriors appeared, striding briskly
through the forest. They seemed fresh. Their armOr was
correct, if bearing scrapes in the high-gloss finish from
forced march through close brush. Mara fought the need
to sit down, to steal a moment of rest while her two
forces exchanged tidings and regrouped.

Only Saric's iron grip kept her propped on bliStered,

aching feet. 'Something's not right,' he murmured that
armor. The details are wrong.'

Mara stiffened. Like him, she sharpened her gaze to
search faces. Threat of peril prickled the hair on her neck
The men were all strange, and that distressed her. Too
often her people were not known by sight, since her
armieS had grown vast over the years.

It was Saric, first earmarked for his station because he

742 Mistress of the Empire

never forgot a face, who hissed, 'I know them. They were
once Minwanabi.'

The approaching force numbered thirty, and it closed in
relentless formation. The Force Leader at the fore raised a
hand in friendly salute, and called the Strike Leader with,
Mara by name.

Unobtrusive in her warrior's garb, Mara stared at
Saric. Her face had paled. Even her lips were white.
'Minwanabi!'

Saric nodded fractionally. 'Renegades. These were ones
that never swore to your natami. That dark-haired man
with the scarred cheek: him I cannot mistake.'

One soft hearted moment of pity, Mara recalled, and
now she had treachery in payment for the demeng that
had prompted her to let these foemen go free. She had only
a split second to judge her call; for these warriors in another
five steps would be among her ranks, dangerous as adders
were they turn-coats.

It tore her inside, to chink they might be loyal; but Saric's
memory was impeccable. Keyoke and Lujan had sworn by
it She sucked in a shaky breach and snapped a nod to her
first Adviser.

Saric raised the alarm, that her woman's voice might not
give her away. 'Enemies! Azawari, call the charge!'

The Strike Leader's order bellowed over chaos as the
lead ranks of traitors discarded appearance, drew swords,
and leaned into a fighting run.
Mara felt her arm half jerked from its socket as Saric
spun her from the ranks, and behind him. 'Go!' he half
screamed; even under pressure his adviser's tendency to
seek subterfuge remained. 'Run and send word to the
others!' he shouted, as if she were a younger soldier
dispatched away as messenger.

The first swords dashed as the pair of green-armored

companies closed in combat. Men grunted, cursed, or
shouted the battle cries of the Acoma. They blinked
sweat-stung eyes, and engaged, and prayed to their gods for
the judgment to enable them to separate friend from foe.

For all were armored alike in Mara's green.

Strike Leader Azawari called encouragement, then reached
and jerked Saric from the fray. Years of training made him
sarcat-quick, and he interposed himself in the adviser's
place, parrying the stroke of the foeman already engaged.
'Guard our messenger,' he snapped. 'You know where he
needs to be!'

Saric's features twisted in frustration. He had been a
warrior before he was an adviser; he could be so once
again. Where better the need? But the teaching of old
Nacoya forced him to review all options. There was
his Lady, running hard through the trees, tripping over
roots in her ill-fitting armor. She was no swordsman. She
should not be stripped of all protection, or counsel, and
Saric's split-second knack for sound reason showed him
the wisdom of Azawari's choice.

'Tear out the hearts of these dogs!' he grated hoarsely.
'I'll see that our messenger reaches the main column. We'll
be back before you have time to kill them all!'

Then he ran in a white heat of fury. Of course, no advance
column existed. The guards who defended were all here, and
outnumbered three to one. That his Lady had come this far,
had traveled into perils in Thuril and sacrificed her most
beloved servants, for this! A petty bit of treachery, no doubt
the handiwork of the Anasati Lord. Such a plot could not-no,
would not! - bring down the honored Servant of the
Empire. She might risk all to preserve her children, but
Saric understood this race was for higher stakes than the
lives of a boy and a girl, no matter how dear to him.

He raced ahead, no longer torn in his desires, but stung
to greater effort by the outmatched struggles of his fellows.
From behind came the rattle and crunch of swords striking

744 Mistress of the Empire

armor. Screams sounded between grunts of human effort
The false soldiers chewed into the ranks of loyal Acoma
with devastating steadiness. They were Minwanabi on a
long-anticipated vengeance raid. They did not care how
they fell.

Mara's men had more weighty matters on their mind
as they strove to stem the enemy's rush. They did not
do battle simply to preserve their Lady's honor. They
killed when they could, harried when they could not, and
painstakingly kept themselves alive to draw out the fight
as long as possible.

Their fierceness did not pass unnoticed.

In bare minutes, one of the attackers recalled the messenger
sent away to report. He shouted to his officer about the
unlikely escort commanded by a Strike Leader who could
ill spare the loss of any one available sword.

'Hah!' cried the Minwanabi officer in his stolen Acoma
colors. Satisfaction thickened his tone. 'You are no rear
guard! Your Lady does not ride in a litter under better
protection up ahead, eh?'

Azawari had no answer but the fury of swordplay. He
slammed his blade down on the helm of a foeman, and
stepped back as the enemy crumpled. 'Find out,' he
invited grimly.

'Why should we?' Another Minwanabi dog was grinning
'Men!' he commanded. 'Disengage and pursue that messenger!'


Saric heard the cry as he raced after Mara. He cursed,
and slammed through an interlaced hammock of branches
that his slighter mistress had slipped through. Shouts burst
through the foliage at his back. False guardsmen now raced
in chase at his heels. No Acoma could win free to stop them.
Every loyal sword was already engaged, and the enemy's
numbers were greater.

Saric blinked sweat from his eyes. 'Go, go on,' he

Destruction

745

urged Mara. It made him ache to see how she stumbled.
Her endurance was steel that she should still be on her
feet at all.

He must buy her time! For soon she must rest. If he
slowed the rush of her pursuers, perhaps she could find a
cranny to hide, at least until her true warriors could reduce
the numbers against her.
Saric ran. He reached Mara's side, caught her elbow, and
sent her in a flying boost over a fallen tree trunk. 'Run!' he
gasped. 'Don't stop until you hear no sounds of pursuit.
Then hide. Sneak on at nightfall.'

She landed on her feet, staggered sideways, and fended off
a branch, still running. Saric had spent his last moment to
watch out for her. The pursuing Minwanabi were on him.

He whirled. Three swords came at him. He parried the
one that mattered, and let the dead tree entangle the others.
One Minwanabi stumbled back, gagging on blood, his chest
pierced.

Saric jerked his blade dear, twisting to avoid a cut from
the side. A branch bashed his ribs, the same that a moment
ago had spared him. He raised his bloodied blade and lashed
downward. Met by a solid parry, he let his momentum
spend itself on the enemy sword, then snapped his elbow
at an angle. His stroke sliced past the foeman's guard and
killed him. To himself, the former officer fumed adviser
gasped, 'Not so bad. Haven't lost too much.'

The soldier left alive sought to dodge past, to extricate
himself from the windfall's weave of branches and close

upon the boyish form he now suspected must be Lady Mara.
Saric lunged to intercept. A searing slash along the back of
the adviser's left shoulder warned of his mistake. Another
guard had rushed him. Pinned in place against the downed
tree, Saric spun and lashed out, taking his attacker in the
throat. The first soldier had by now won free and passed
- by running hard. Saric muttered an irreverent prayer. His

746

Mistress of the Empsre

path was clear. He had only to keep on. Fatigue brought
agony as he punished tired sinews into motion. He raced,
moaning in his need for air..He overhauled the warrior in
false colors, and slammed into him from the rear. Armor
deflected his stroke. He found himself engaged, while yet
another foe slipped past and around, running after Mara's
fleeing form.

Saric fought, hampered by his useless shoulder. Blood ran
dowp his arm and spattered the ground under his feet. His
sandals slipped on slicked leaves. He could barely defend
himself Weakness seemed to travel in waves through his
sinews. His enemy was grinning, a bad sign. In a moment his
efforts would end in grief. Then a soldier called his name.

Saric stretched his lips in joyless recognition. Azawari still
lived. As the Acoma Strike Leader raced to the adviser's
relief, and more Minwanabi in false armor converged in a
knot to prevent him, Saric managed a brief contact of eyes
between strokes.

Each man knew his fate. Each smiled, welcoming the
certainty, the final relief that mortal flesh could no longer
deny. Saric was struck upon the side. The blow made him
stagger, tearing a gasp from his throat. The Acoma Strike
Leader faced three more opponents. He was shouting in
what seemed defiant rage, but Saric recognised cold purpose
behind his insults. 'Come, Anasati puppets!' Azawari
danced and brandished his sword. 'You may tell your
children you sent Azawari, Strike Leader to the Servant
of the Empire, to the Red God's halls! If you live to have
children! If they can admit to fathers who shame them
by wearing honored colors not their own. Die for your
insolence, Minwanabi dogs!'

But the warriors were not goaded into striking; instead,
they measured their distance. The middle one leaped at
Azawari, while the others dodged to each side, resuming
the chase after Mara. Azawari flung sideways. The warrior

.

ll
l

;~
.
:~

~.

Destructso~s

747

who lunged at him missed his stroke, and the one who ran
left screamed as a sword slid between his ribs. The one who
dodged right checked his rush, uncertain. Azawari held no
such hesitation. He flung himself after, not caring whether
a sword whined between. He took a blow to the flank, but
brought down the runner in a lunge.

Saric saw the green-plumed helm fall. He blinked back
furious tears, aware that the gallant Strike Leader had
bought Mara precious seconds, for the last of the treacherous
trio had to stop his rush and stab his fallen body
twice to ensure his death was certain.

The First Adviser raised his blade; too slow, for his
muscles were spent. He missed the stroke. Pain slashed
hot across his neck, and the brightness of the world seemed
suddenly dull and distant. Saric tottered and fell. The last
thing he knew before darkness swallowed his senses was
the rich smell of moss and the sound of enemy soldiers
leaving the site of bloody victory to pursue one last running
form: Mara. Saric struggled to say a prayer for the Good
Servant, but words would not come. He had no breath,
and no more speech in him, after all. His final thought,
as death took him, was of Nacoya, who had trained him.
The indomitable harridan would be shrill when he met her

in Turakamu's halls, and found him fallen to a warrior's
honor despite her best efforts to raise him to higher station.
More than eager to cross words with his touchy Acoma
predecessor, for his mind was far from ready to quit the
fight, Saric almost smiled.

/

Pursuit

30

Pursuit

Mara ran.

Brush hooked her ankles, and her breach burned her
throat. She fought her way forward, gasping. Long past
the point where her body needed rest, she knew if she
stopped, she was dead. Enemies pursued her relentlessly
As she ducked under branches, she caught glimpses of them
figures in green running after.

There was something profoundly evil in the sight of men
wearing her house colors chasing behind with murderous
purpose. Mara thrashed through a strand of creeper, drive n
by more than fear. That green armor had always represented
chose willing to die for her, willing to protect her at any cost,
and enemies wearing Acoma colors brought her to the edge
of despair.

How many had died of this last conjoined treachery of
Minwanabi and Anasati? Saric and Azawari, two of her
finest younger officers, ones she had determined to spare
The soldiers with her had been fit, tough men chosen for
their dependability in an emergency. But with their eyes
upon the Assembly of Magicians, who among them hat
guessed that the trap to overtake them so near to their goal
would be so mundane, yet so murderous?

The cho-ja tunnels were just a short march distant.

Always a healthy woman, Mara was nevertheless not the
girl she had been when she had assumed the Acoma mantle
The wrestling matches and foot races with her brother were
thirty years behind her, and her breath tore now from her
chest. She could not continue; yet she must.

The soldiers behind were closing on her. Encumbered
749

by heavier armor, they had marched some distance before
the encounter; the race for a time had been even. Now
it was not. Mara's next step became a stumble. Her
foemen neared. For torturous minutes, the only sound
she acknowledged was the pounding of sandal-clad feet
upon the earth and her own labored breaching.

Mara could not speak for breach and for sorrow. There
were two at her heels, one just a pace behind, and the other
a bare half stride more, and coming hard. Almost she could
sense the raised blade at her back. Any instant she expected
the shock of the thrust, followed by pain and a spiraling fall
into darkness.

To die by the blade was honor, she thought wildly. But
she felt only black rage. All in life she had striven for would
become wasted because of a warrior's narrow-minded
hatred and revenge. She could do nothing; only punish
her body forward in what might be the last step she took.
So would a gazen die, nailed in flight by the mailed claws
of the sarcat who hunted for meat.

The ground began to rise. Mara threw herself into the
grade and tripped. She fell hard. A sword cut the air where
her body had been, and a warrior grufffly cursed.

She rolled through dry leaves. Her armor hampered her,
and the sword at her side she had not thought to toss away
hooked on a root and trapped her.

She looked up to a dizzy impression of greenery and
flecks of bright sky. Across these reared an enemy face
in a nightmare of friendly colors. Mara saw the sword
rise to slash down and take her. She had no breach to cry
out, but could only fall back, thrashing, in a futile effort
to escape.

The warrior who raced one pace behind reached the
scene at that instant. His blade rose and fell a bit taster,
by a fraction; and the flesh he hewed down was the

enemy's.

750 Mistress of the Empire

Sobbing in exhausted reaction, Mara did not realise until
after the dying man slammed in a heap across her legs that
not all green armor held traitors. One familiar face had
survived, bleeding from a cut cheek. 'Xanomu,' she cried.
'Bless the gods.'

He heaved off the corpse, jerked her up, and shoved her
stumbling away from him. 'Go, mistress,' he gasped out.
His voice was cramped by pain, due to worse wounds in
his body. 'Find the cho-ja. I will delay your enemies.'

Mara wanted to praise him, to let him know her gratitude
for his valor. She could not catch her wind.

Xanomu saw her struggle. 'My Lady, go! There are more
comma, and only I to hold them.'

Mara whirled, tears half blinding her. Xanomu's dream
of seeing her safe to the cho-ja was false hope: the insectoids
would not fight. They were bound by the Assembly's treaty,
and surely by now they knew of her defiance of the Great
Ones' edict.

She ran anyway. The alternative was to be butchered
where she stood, as two hulking warriors smashed out of
the undergrowth and sprang, with only Xanomu's failing
strength to delay them.

The struggle was brief, barely a half-dozen sword strokes
before the gurgling moan of a man cut through the neck.
Xanomu had fallen, his life sold to gain his mistress a few
more yards through the forest. The trees were thinning,
Mara thought; or maybe her eyesight had begun to fail,
dazzled by the beginnings of a faint.

She blinked away tears or maybe sweat, and darkness
rose up like a black wall to swallow her.

She flung out a hand, as if to break a fall, and her
fingernails scraped across chitin.

Cho-ja! She had reached the mound. Black bodies closed
m on her, pressing her upright on all sides. Mara gasped,
panting, a helpless prisoner. These were not warriors but
workers, a tight-knit band of foragers who seemed to be
headed back to their hive.

She knew better than to believe she was safe. Between
gasps, she said, 'You ... are bound to obey ... the
Assembly's . . . edict! You must . . . not fight!'

The cho-ja ignored her. They could not do battle in
any event, being workers unspecialised for combat. No
weapons or tools were carried among them. But as they
knotted tighter around Mara, and her pursuers sprinted
out of the trees, she realised: the insectoids could not fight,
but only die.

The lead warrior screamed to his companions, and in a
rush, they charged. Swords flashed in late-day sunlight as
they hewed down a worker marching in procession with
its fellows.

It fell without sound, kicking and rolling in its pain. As
if only now cognisant of their threat, the workers left living
clashed together into a single body, with Mara wedged at
their center. She was pressed too dose to fall to the ground;
neither could she shove her way against the current as the
insectoids simultaneously thrust forward in a teeth-rattling

sprint. Like flotsam caught in a current, she was carried
along. She could not see for the dust and the dack of
chitin-covered bodies. Turf ripped at her feet. She lost a
sandal. Then the mound of the hive rose up, suddenly, and
they descended into darkness.

The Minwanabi in false armor shouted and raced after
them into the tunnel.

Mara gave up the distraction of thought. Borne along
with the workers, and blind in a morass of unfamiliar
smells and sounds, she made no effort to analyse. Her
eyes adjusted slowly, and she twisted her head to make
sense of the commotion and clamoring behind her. For
a long moment she did not identify the strange, scraping
rattle of blades striking unprotected chitin.

752 Mistress of the Empire

Cho-Ja bodies littered the tunnel floor, and still the false
warriors came on. The cho-ja about Mara slackened pace
with a jerk, and a high-pitched buzzing stung her ears.

The next instant, a dark tide eclipsed the last light from the
entrance. She knew that cho-ja workers were inserting
themselves in the path of flight and that the pursuing:
soldiers could do nothing to reach her unless they hacked

themselves a path though living bodies.

Mara felt too pummeled with weariness to weep for
grief or relief Her mind was punished with the recognition
that, even though this hive was under attack, its warrior
defenders dared not risk a response for fear that the
Assembly might charge its denizens with breaking the treaty
Although she knew that the cho-ja counted individual-lives -
workers in particular - as expendable at need,
she knew regret that any such life should be sacrificed to
save her.

The last faint daylight vanished, as the cho-ja rounded
a corner. Mara was conducted in total darkness. Aware as
she was since her trip to Chakaha in Thuril that cho-ja were
by nature day creatures, she perceived strategy in the lack
of illumination. Her escorting party of workers was leading
her ever deeper into the hive, past countless twistings and
turnings of the way. The Minwanabi were being lured
into following. Doom awaited them. They would never
come alive out of this maze. The cho-ja need not trouble
themselves with killing. Humans who lost themselves in the
tunnels beneath the earth would wander until they perished,
wasted from thirst and hunger

'Convey my thanks to your Queen,' Mara murmured.

The worker cho-ja deigned not to reply. It might have
been the treaty that held them silent, or it might have been
sorrow for their fallen fellows. Mara felt the touch of their s
bodies against her, no longer crushing, but as tender as if she
were cradled within a giant fist. It occurred to her belatedly

that she had been caught up to the point of blindness by her
personal concern for Justin. These cho-ja were doing her
no favor but perhaps in their way lending her aid for the
sake of their own cause, since she had brought back cho-Ja
mages for the purpose of defeating the Assembly.

These beings saw their freedom in her survival.

Mara realised that the slavelike workers might be forbidden
to communicate. But the possibility existed that

Their Queen was not acting from strict neutrality but, in

her covert way, as an ally to Mara's human cause.

The workers were going somewhere quickly. They
showed no sign of spacing their bodies apart to let her fall
by the wayside. What if they had been sent on an 'errand'
that by design was meant to coincide with the direction she
desired to go? Or worse, what if they went mindlessly on
about their hive's purpose, and she was carried in a direction
she did not care to go? Time, above all, was of the essence.
Her children's survival depended upon swift action.

Mara gulped a breath. Her legs were spent. Even had
she wanted to, she could not achieve so much as one
step unassisted. Neither could she stay safely wedged
between the carapaces of a dozen fast-moving bodies
whose destination was unknown. .r'

If she dared to presume, she might ask to ride.

The effrontery of that supposition might get her killed should
she slip while trying to climb on a moving Cho-ja,
encumbered as she was by her armor, the cho-ja continuing
to ignore her as they trampled her fallen body.

Worker Cho-ja had no appreciation of the Tsurani concept
of dignity. Still, Mara could not bring herself to think of
them as mere beasts of burden, and that bias, along with

her recovering strength, kept her silent. She recalled Lujan's
expression on that long-past day in Dustari when the slave
Kevin had made the preposterous suggestion that had led
her armies to victory on the backs of cho-ja warriors.
Pursuit

753

754 Mistress of the Empire

Tears flooded her eyes at the memory. Lujan had looked
pale and side as he stared at the broad, blade body he was
expected to mount. Yet he had done so, and gone on to

win a great war.   l

Who was she, to risk such as he on the Plain of Nashika,
and yet not dare the same heights?

Her heart faltered at the prospect. Yet she was lost if
she did not find a way to unite the Cho-ja in rebellion
against their oppressors, and rejoin the Chakaha mages
who waited in hiding in burrows bade at her estates; her
son and daughter would be dead, at the hand of the first
rival claimant to the golden throne. If the pretender was
not to be Jiro, there would be others equally merciless.

And the Assembly of Magicians would never while she
breached forgive her slight to their omnipotence.

There remained her last card left to play, the final
desperate plan she had outlined during her last council
before war had broken out. For that, she must reach the
Queen of this hive and be received for audience.

She did not feel bold, and had to force courage. Her
voice sounded shaky, when at last she summoned nerve to
try speech. 'Take me to your Queen,' she requested.

The workers did not respond. 'I must have words with
your ruler,' Mara insisted louder.

The workers did not answer, but they stopped. The
sudden jolt into stillness all but spilled Mara from her
feet. 'I have to see your Queen,' she cried, shouting now,
and raising a storm of echoes.

Light bloomed down a side corridor. Mara turned that

way and, over the humped carapaces of the worker
party, saw an approaching band of warriors. These were
Tsurani-bred- cho-ja, helmed as men would be, with a
Strike Leader wearing plumes at the fore. He reached the
juncture of the tunnels and turned eyes like onyx upon the
disheveled woman amid the workers. 'I am Tax'ka. I have

Pursuit

7SS
come to grant your request and conduct you to this hive's
Queen.'

Mara forgot weariness in a great wash of relief. As the
workers parted to clear her way, she stepped forward, and
came as near as a breath to howling frustration as her fickle
knees gave way.

The cho-ja Strike Leader knelt. 'You may ride,' it intoned.

'Our Queen is not minded to wait upon your weariness.'

Mara was too tired to bridle at a remark that from a
human would have been taken for insult. She struggled
back to her feet and accepted a worker's assistance to help
her mount on the Strike Leader's midsection. She settled
astride, insecure upon the black and slippery carapace. Her
sweating hands found no grip that seemed trustworthy, and
the cho-ja in its silence seemed unwilling to spare concern
for her human discomfort.

'Go,' she said, resolved. 'Take me to your Queen with
all haste.'

The cho-ja's stride as it surged forward was startling for
its smoothness. Mara clung without further worry, leaning
forward, so that she might grip tight to the warrior's
chitinous neck. She had no clue how far the cavern of the
Queen might lie from this outlying tunnel. Some hives were
so vast she could be riding cho-ja back for hours to cross
them. The spice-scented air of the tunnel fanned her face.
Her sweat dried, and her breathing returned to normal.

She had leisure to notice smaller discomforts: the cramp
of overtaxed muscles, and the maddening sting of blisters
beneath her armor. The passages the Strike Leader and his
company traversed were unlighted. Lacking any sense of
vision, Mara was reduced to clinging blindly while her
escort sped on its errand.

The journey was the strangest in her memory. The darkness
was unrelenting, never giving way to the chiaroscuro
of blacks and greys found in the stormiest night upon the

756

M#tress of the Empire

surface. As she was jostled and jarred, Mara could only
wait for vision to return. Yet every expectant moment was
followed by another, until she had to clamp her teeth to
stifle a rising scream.

At some point in the journey, Tax'ka inquired after her
well-being. Mara gave back vague reassurance, though she
felt none within; the rapid travel in utter darkness became a
timeless voyage through contemplation. Fatigue and tension
ruled her mind, providing sights where light and nature did
not: imagined movements glimpsed at the edge of her vision
caused her heart to pound and her breathing to become
rapid and shallow. In time she shut her eyes, to make the
darkness seem less menacing. The measure was a stopgap,
and gave no sense of security. Each time she forgot herself
and tried to see again, only blackness met her efforts. Her
terror returned redoubled.

At last she sought calm in silent meditative chants.

An interminable interval later, a voice called her name.

Mara opened her eyes. She blinked at the surge of light,
for not only were cho-ja globes glowing blue all about her,
but oil lanterns burned hot-white with flame.

She awkwardly dismounted.

The Force Leader who had carried her saluted, and said,
'At your command, mistress. Our ruler awaits.'

Mara glanced across the cavern. Ahead of her rose a
half-familiar shape, a dais fashioned of banked earth. The
cho-ja Queen reclined upon it, the enormous mass of her
body screened from view behind rich hangings. As Mara
met the gaze of the being who towered above her, her knees
did not tremble only from fatigue.

The cho-ja Queen watched with eyes like black ice as her
human visitor arose from her bow. Before Mara could utter
even the most basic polite greeting, the ruler spoke.

'We cannot help you, Lady Mara. You have by your

Pursuit

,

,
.

757

actions set the Assembly of Magicians against you, and
we are forbidden to aid any they call foe.'

Mara forced her back straight. She removed her helm and
raked back the damp coils of her hair. Letting the useless
helmet hang by its strap from her hand, she nodded. She
had no choice now but to take the boldest course she had
ever dared attempt. 'Lady Queen,' she said as steadily as
her state of nerves would allow, 'I beg to differ. You must
help me. The choice has been taken from you, for the terms
of your treaty with the Assembly are already broken.'

Silence fell with the abruptness of a blow. The Queen
reared back. 'You speak from ignorance, Lady Mara.'

Never more aware of her danger, Mara dosed her eyes
and swallowed. She struggled against an irrational instinct
to flee: she was underground, very deep. To run would avail
nothing. She was at these cho-ja's mercy, and if they could
not be made to help her, all causes were lost.

Mara called back. 'Not as ignorant as you think.'

The Queen stayed neutral. She did not settle to recline
on her dais. 'Speak on, Lady Mara.'

Mara chanced fate. 'Your treaty has been violated,' she

ventured. 'Not by your kind, good Queen. By me.' The
silence in the chamber was like deafness, it was so complete.
Mara swallowed fear and resumed. 'I broke your treaty,
which by any unbiased judgment was unfair. I went to
Chakaha. I spoke with your kind, and saw them as they
were meant to live, free, and aboveground. I presumed,
good Queen. I made a judgment, for the good of your race
as well as my own people. I dared to ask alliance, and when
I returned to the Empire's shores, I brought with me two
cho-ja mages sent to aid your cause.'

The hush became more profound at this news. Mara
felt as if she raised her voice against a crushing weight of
unspoken disapproval. 'These mages shelter in an unused
burrow within the hive near my estates. The Assembly will

758 M`stress of the Emptre

not pause to distinguish whether your kind are innocent
of their harboring They will act as if all cho-ja are
conspirators. Therefore the treaty is broken already, by
my hand, for the betterment of this Empire, for which the
cho-ja must now fight to reclaim their rightful free share.'

The heavy silence became prolonged; 'Have you anything
more to say?' The Queen's tone was like the ring of struck
crystal.

For reply, Mara bowed deeply. 'My word to you is
complete.'

The Queen expelled a hiss of air. She swayed back and
forth once, twice, then subsided onto her dais. Her eyes
glittered. 'Lady, still we cannot aid you.'

'What?' The expostulation left Mara's lips before she
could think. She remedied her lapse with another bow, this
one low enough to be counted almost subservient. 'The
treaty's terms are broken. Will you not rise to opportunity
and bid to recover your freedom and reclaim your rightful
destiny?'

The cho-ja Queen seemed sad as she gathered herself
to answer. 'Lady, we cannot. Our word was given. The
breaking of the treaty was your doing, your treachery. You
do not truly know our ways. It is not possible for us to
violate an oath.'

Mara frowned. This interview was not proceeding as
she had pictured. Driven by a raw fear, she said, 'I don't
understand.'

'The breaking of promises is a human trait,' the Queen;
stated without rebuke.

Still puzzled, Mara struggled for comprehension. 'I
know that your kind never forget a memory,' she mused,;
attempting to unravel this impasse.

The Queen voluntarily qualified. 'Our given word cannot
be broken. That is why humans over the years continually
had the better of us. Each war ended in a treaty that we were
,.

,;~


Pursutt

759

compelled by our nature to abide by. Humans have no such
instinctive restraints. They break honor, and do not die of
it. We recognise this odd behavior, but we cannot-'

'Die!' Mara interrupted in shock. 'Do you mean that you
cannot survive the breaking of a promise?'

The Queen inclined her head in affirmation. 'Just so.
Our given word is binding upon us, inextricably linked
with the hive mind that itself is sanity and life. To us, a
promise is as confining as walls and chains would be to
a human - no, more. We cannot rebel against the tenets
of our ancestors without calling madness upon the hive,
a madness that brings death, for we would cease to feed,
to breed, to defend ourselves. For us, to think is to act,
and to act is to think. You have no words to embrace the
concept.'

Mara gave in to the weakness in her knees. She sat
abruptly upon the bare earth, her armor creaking in the
stillness. Her voice was small, as close as she had ever come
to sounding mollified. 'I didn't know.'
The Queen said nothing to exonerate Mara. 'That is a
common response by humans who at last perceive their
error. Yet it changes nothing. You did not swear to the
terms of the Forbidden. You cannot break what does not
bind you. Only the cho-ja or the Assembly can violate this
ancient pact.'

Mara cursed herself for pride and vanity. She had dared to
think herself different from her fellow Ruling Lords; she had
presumed to know her cho-ja friends, and had been guilty
of an atrocity as great as any that her kind had perpetrated
against the insectoid race in the past.

The Chakaha council had trusted her: wrongly, it would
seem. She shrank from the association that eventually the
mages she had cozened into coming to the Empire must
know how poorly she had judged.

How many times had Ichindar, on his seat of power,

760 Mfstress of the Emp~re

suffered for his human follies when they hat come to
adversely affect the people he hat been set by fate to
rule? Mara felt diminished with shame. She had aspired
to set her son on the golden throne; to save his life, she
believed.

How little she had reckoned the ramifications at the
time, to set a weight of responsibility not when she could
encompass upon the untried shoulders of a boy.

Mara set her face in her hands, burdened with something
worse than mere despair. She contemplated the finality of
death, that she had stubbornly named a waste of resource;
now she was no longer sure. The gist of her philosophy had
altered under her, until no course of action felt sure.

'The magicians will seek reprisal against your kind,' Mara
ventured at las,t. She looked up humbly at the Queen. 'What
will you do?'

The massive insectoid regarded her with an expression
no human could interpret. 'Some of us will die,' she replied
with the implacable honesty of her kind. 'This hive will
very Likely be first, since you were permitted an entry and
an audience.'

'Can you not flee?' Mara badly wanted to hear one word
of hope or encouragement, that all was not lost for these
creatures whose friendship had sustained her through a
lifetime of trial and difficulty.

The Queen twitched a forelimb, perhaps in the cho-ja
equivalent of a shrug. 'I am already within the deepest
chamber of this hive. It is not possible to move me anywhere
else. Once our Queens mature enough to lay eggs, we lose
our mobility. Here, at least, I will survive until the last.
Your Great Ones may destroy my body, but the hive mind
will preserve my memory, and the record of all that passes
here. Another hive will protect our mind, and when a new
Queen is spawned, the mind will renew with her.'

Small comfort, Mara thought, not to be forgotten for
eternity. She did not speak of the foreboding in her heart,
that worse might happen: there might indeed be an end
without memory for the cho-ja nation held captive in the
Empire. Her brashness might have bought their permanent
extermination. She recalled the trust she had won from the
Chakaha council, and her need to weep became painful.

She was given no chance to dwell upon guilt or misgiving.
The next instant the Queen cocked her head to one side as if
listening.

A rapid-fire, high-pitched buzzing was exchanged between
ruler and her servants. The communication ceased as if cut
off. Workers and warriors departed, and the Queen tilted
her head toward her human guest.

'What is it?' Mara asked, dreading to hear the answer.

'Great Ones have come,' replied the Queen. 'A delegation
thirty strong has surrounded the entrance of my hive. They
accuse us falsely of oath-breaking, and they demand that
your person be surrendered.'

'I will go out to them,' Mara said, the trembling in her
knees redoubled. She wondered if she could force her
sore body to stand. 'I would cause your kind no more
trouble.'

The cho-ja Queen jerked a forelimb in an unmistakable
gesture of negation. 'You are not our prisoner.' We have
broken no oaths. It was you who brought mages over the
borders, and there is no statute in the treaty that forbids
us to give you audience. You may go. You may stay. Or the
Black Robes may come and fetch you out. Neither option
is any of our affair.'

Mara's eyebrows rose in shock. She held her speech,
striving to avoid any more errors of assumption. Carefully
she weighed her next words. 'If I choose not to surrender my
person, you must know that the Assembly will misinterpret.
They will believe in your complicity, and seek retribution.'

The Queen seemed less serene than hard as polished

762

Mistress of thc Empire
obsidian. 'They will believe wrongly, if what you postulate
is accurate.'

Mara swallowed. She felt as if the firmness of the earth
might at any moment crumble beneath her feet. 'Your
people could be harmed by such a misunderstanding.'

The Queen did not relent. 'Then they would be harmed.
That does not make the Black Robes' misjudgment any
closer to truth. We have kept to the terms of our treaty,
as our kind must. If they, as humans, act in error, then the
error is theirs, as are the consequences.'

Mara frowned, pondering upon the meaning that might
lie beneath the Queen's words. The Lady of the Acoma
had skirted proscribed issues once before, seeking clues
concerning the Forbidden. Now, unable to suppress the
hope that sparked in her, she wondered whether these wily
cho-ja in fact sought to provoke a misjudgment.

As she drew breath to give voice to this thought a sudden
terror gripped her. The air in the chamber grew too thick,
as if a great pressure wave rushed through the tunnels to
crush her. Covering her ears as pain stabbed them, Mara
gasped in shock. An explosion shook the earth, tossing her
down. She struck earth on her side. A cry exploded from
her, as the chamber around her became laced with lightning
and fire.

Over the concussion of air struck to thunder, the Queen
shrieked in agony and what may have been pure cho-ja
rage.

'The magicians attack! Our hive is destroyed! The treaty
that binds us is broken!' Then language was abandoned.
The Queen's voice rose to painful dissonance as she buzzed
her last communication to her kind.

Mara choked on burning air. Her eyes streamed tears,
and her skin scorched in the beginnings of searing torment.
Justin, she thought, Kasuma: I have failed you
both

j

PUTSHit

763

Her eyes were blinded by a dazzling flash of light, then
smothered in all-consuming darkness.

She screamed. The world she knew upended. No earth
pressed against her body, and no sense of gravity bound
her down. From heat, her flesh shriveled in the bite of a
cold like frost.
And then there was only darkness that extended beyond
eternity.

;

.,

Kentosani'

31

Kentosani

Awareness returned.

Mara blinked, her reemerging senses confused. She
struggled to orient herself, but her consciousness refused
to resolve more than the rudiments of cohesive impression.
Her body reclined on what felt like cushions. Warm air
surrounded her, and gentle illumination. She could make
out nothing else, no solid detail of chamber or setting. The
burning, agonising nightmare of sorcery and destruction
seemed banished as a nightmare would be upon waking.

'Where am I?' she murmured. ~

'Safe,' said a voice. By its ringing, disembodied tone,
Mara knew: a miracle had occurred. Spared the wrath
of the Assembly by the narrowest margin, she must be
in the presence of the Cho-ja mages. In Chakaha, they
had demonstrated their ability to move her from place
to place by magic. So they must have done now, pulling
her out of the ruins of the hive even as the Black Robes
achieved its destruction. The knowledge that cho-ja had
suffered strangely brought her no distress. Alarmed, Mara
pushed herself upright.

Her concern immediately dissipated, slipped from her
like water might. She made out the shadowy forms of the
Cho-ja mages, crouched on either side of her. They had been
busy in her absence. The burrow they inhabited was now
adorned by furnishings created by their craft. The peace that
Mara now experienced was also due to their influence. 'You
practice your arts already, spellcasters?'

One mage returned a gesture of reassurance, forearms
turned so that the sharp edges were averted from chance

765

accident. 'Your aura was tinged with fear and anger. If I
presumed to ease your mind, forgive me, but the time is
now for clear-headedness, yes?'

Mara swallowed. 'The hive was destroyed by the Assembly.
I am sorry.'

The second mage shifted with a rustle of wings. 'Necessary
sacrifice,' it intoned in emotionless brevity. 'The
Queen's memory is preserved intact, and the unjust treaty
has been broken at last. Cho-ja warriors are freed to
march within the Empire. They will now support your
cause, Servant of the Empire.'

Her cause! Mara felt cold at the words. She had wished
to secure her children's safety' and to expunge stagnation
and cruelty from her people's culture. But an entire Cho-ja
hive had just been sacrificed to save her, and now she was
being called to fullest account for her pledge to the council
in Chakaha. The Empire's Queens held out the expectation
that she would go on to win freedom for their race.

'Yes,' the Cho-ja mage to her left intoned in response to
her thought. 'The imperial seal with temple endorsements
on a document that restores Cho-ja to full citizenship should
be sufficient to revoke the Assembly's unfair judgment.'

Mara gathered her inner strength. 'First, the great Ones
must be defeated,' she warned. The prospect of outright
confrontation with the magicians terrified her.

The mages inclined their heads in what seemed maddening
serenity. 'The meanS are at hand. But time grows
short.'

The speed at which events were overtaking the Lady
of the Acoma carried its own weight of care. Mara
fought off overwhelming despair. She had lost her advisers.
Arakasi was gods alone knew where. Lujan's fate
was unknown to her. The Acoma armies might now
be ashes, and her husband could have been obliterated

by the Assembly in the moment when they declared

766 Mistress of the Empire

her its enemy. Jiro of the Anasati might already be in
the Holy City, and her children dead. And even if by
miracle the Imperial Precinct was still secure and under
the protection of the Imperial Whites, there remained the
armies of the Anasati and the Omechan poised outside the
city walls.

Mara chided herself. Listing every possible ramification
of misfortune served nothing, but would only cancel what
slender advantage the Chakaha mages had won for her.
She saw death at every turn, whether she acted or not.
Better to fight, and take matters in hand as best she could.
Whether Justin and Kasuma were well or not, or whether
an Omechan or an Anasati pretender had already assumed
the golden throne, she owed the cho-ja who had spared her
an honorable best effort.

'I need information,' she urged, rising immediately to her
feet. Her whole body ached. She ignored its twinges, and
briskly turned toward the Chakaha mages. 'Your aid will
be necessary. Once I understand the array of the forces laid
against us, I will need to reach the Holy City more swiftly
than the wind.'

The Chakaha mages straightened from their crouch. They
bowed to her and then flanked her. 'Your will is as our
command, Lady Mara,' said one. 'Ask us what you would
know. We will engage our arts to show you.'

Filled with trepidation for the losses she now had no
choice but to count Mara forced herself to bear up. 'My
husband, Hokanu,' she opened, the tremble in her voice
scarcely controlled. 'Where is he?'

'Close your eyes,' bade the Chakaha mages.

Mara obeyed, foreboding in her heart. An energy tingled
through her: magic. She beheld more than darkness behind
her lids: caught by a sensation akin to dizziness, she saw
Hokanu bending over a tactical map of the Holy City. He
gestured to rows of white pins on the walls, his helm cradled

Kentosani

767

in his hand, and his face worried. He looked as though he
had not slept in a fortnight.

The sight of him was more than Mara could bear. 'He
is alive!' she cried, near tears in her relief. Her joy and
thanksgiving to the gods for this turn of fortune left
her weak. Then she set aside wonderment to consider
the practical. The mages informed her that Hokanu and
his company of swift cavalry had crossed the city gates
ahead of the siege. The Shinzawai infantry companies still
marched from the North, but they would be of no use as
relief forces, Mara saw, as her cho-ja mages showed her
Black Robes forbidding the ranks of blue-clad warriors
access to the Holy City.

Mara had been declared enemy, and her allies were
forbidden to give aid. Without orders to defy the Great
Ones, Tsurani training came to the fore and Hokanu's
warriors obeyed.

'The Imperial Whites,' Mara mused. 'They will defend.
Who beside Hokanu might command them?'

For answer, she was given a second view of the chamber
where the council discussed tactics. Mara identified the figures
who clustered about the Shinzawai Lord whose beams
matched her own: Arakasi was present, quiet as a shadow,
and looking grim. Near him was theShinz'awai First
Adviser, Dogondi, his face implacable, as he conducted animated
discussion with another that Mara recognised with
a start for Chumaka, who was the Anasati First Adviser.

Unthinking, she questioned aloud. 'What does Chumaka
do here?'

For answer, the mages showed her more images: a glade

in a forest where Hokanu twisted and twisted a leather
thong, choking the life out of Jiro. The faded color and
rippling quality of the vision identified the seeing as a past
event. Mara saw Jiro go limp in Hokanu's grip. The Lord
of the Anasati was dead!

768 Msstress of the Emp~re

And yet, based upon her husband's current activity,
Kentosani suffered under siege. 'Who directs the attack
on the Holy City?' she demanded to know.

The scene behind her eyes spun and shifted focus.
She beheld armies and wooden engines, and a Force
Commander in Omechan colors. The outer walls had
crumbled and been breached. The Imperial Precinct itself
was under attack, and the plumes on the walls showed
several factions defending: Imperial White, and another.
In amazement Mara made out the purple and yellow of
Xacatecas. 'Hoppara is in Kentosani?'

'Sent by his mother, Isashani,' one Chakaha mage
intoned. 'He whom you name Hoppara reached Kentosani
ahead of the attack, and organised the Imperial Whites to
defend. The Omechan Lord knows of Jiro's death, but he
dreams of seizing the Anasati plot as his own. You still
have a foe who wishes to rule upon the bodies of your
children.'

Mara bit her lip. Her own armies - if they had escaped
destruction, and if the magicians had not already forbidden
them movement - would be too far south to attack the force
menacing the Imperial Precinct. Her other allies appeared to
have fled, or were stalling elsewhere, fearful of transferring
the aroused wrath of the Assembly against themselves.

Her dismay must have been evident. 'Lady,' one of the
mages broke in. 'You are not without an army. Every cho-ja
warrior in the Nations is yours to command.'

'How can they be?' Mara's tone was bleak. 'The Queen
of the hive that was sacrificed inferred that cho-ja can never
break a promise. The warriors you offer to my cause are
already sworn to answer to other Ruling Lords. Your people
have contracts of service that span generations.'

The mages buzzed in what Mara had come to interpret
as cho-ja laughter. 'No longer,' said one. 'Close your eyes,'
the second directed. 'Let us show you.'

Kentosani,

769

Infused with a growing wonderment, Mara did so. She
beheld a dry field upon which the armies of two minor
nobles engaged in battle. A fat young man in Ekamchi
colors was exhorting one of his Strike Leaders. 'But they
can't quit the field,' he shouted, his sword arm waving
dangerously near the face of his senior adviser. The servant
jumped back in vexation as his master ranted on. 'These
cho-ja owe me and my father their allegiance.'

The Strike Leader shook his head, stiff-faced. 'They say
not, master.'

'How?'The Ekamchi son reddened under his battle helm.
'Their kind are as slaves! They never break an alliance!'

'They do now.' The Strike Leader turned from his
commander and watched with stony eyes as rank after rank
of cho-ja warriors disengaged from combat and marched in
swift order from the field.

'This cannot be!' shrieked the Ekamchi son. He ran
forward and planted himself in the path of the ranking
cho-ja Strike Leader. 'You are traitors,' he accused. 'You
break oath.'

The cho-ja officer returned a click that showed scorn.
'Three thousand centis in metal and gems have been
delivered to your father's treasury. Such was the price
that bought our service. All past bargains and; alliances
are ended; all payments are refunded.'

The Ekamchi boy spluttered, but as the cho-ja officer
crouched into a posture that threatened attack, he was
forced to give ground.

Mara opened her eyes, shaking with unbridled laughter.

'What a surprise to most Ruling Lords that the cho-ja were
something more, or perhaps less, than loyal mercenaries.'

'Humans have much to learn concerning our kind,'
the Chakaha mages agreed tactfully. 'Old ways have
changed. Not even the Assembly could wring from our
people another treaty like the one that endured in such

770
Msstress of the Empsre

misery through thousands of years. When the war of the
mages was lost, our magic was not developed for defensive
purposes. Be sure that such weakness has been remedied in
those lands beyond the Empire.'

Mara beheld the perilous glitter in the eyes of the
Chakaha mages, and her blood ran cold in her body.
Traditions were broken, and danger was in the wind, and
now was her moment to seize advantage if she would, to
secure the next age's peace. She mastered her inner trepidation
and opened. 'Messages must be sent, and actions
taken to enforce Justin's claim to the golden throne before
the Assembly can interfere. Here is what must be done.'

Mara waited, suppressing the deep quiver of fear. Her
hair was piled high on her head, elaborately looped and
braided, and fixed with precious metal pins. Golden pins,
she thought, and the arrogance of her presumption, to
put on imperial gold, made her feel the more small and
uncertain. And yet there could be no half measures, if the
Empire as a Nation was to survive.

Her head swam with recollection of the orders she had
given between her bath and her robing. She drew a deep 'breath.
To the cho-ja Force Commander, who crouched at

her elbow, she said, 'Where are we exactly?'

Like his counterparts in free Chakaha, this warrior
eschewed the trappings of human commanders. His jet-dark
carapace had begun to show a faint turquoise stripe,
perhaps a decoration, perhaps a mark of rank. Mara looked
forward to the chance to study such distinctions, if the gods
saw fit to grant her victory. Then she dismissed speculation
as the warrior pointed upward and said, 'Directly above is
the imperial antechamber. The ones you requested should
gather for a legal coronation ceremony already await inside
the audience hall. All preparations are in order, and your
people anticipate your arrival.'
Mara braced herself. She waved away the maid called in
from the Imperial Palace, who had edged between the ranks
of the warriors for one last adjustment of her dress. The
gown she wore could not possibly hang without wrinkles,
taken as it had been from attic storage. It had belonged to
the last dowager Empress, a larger woman than Mara, but
it was the closest to Acoma green that could be found, so it
would have to do. Hasty stitches had gathered in the waist,
and pins nipped up the long hem. Mara felt encased in layers
like a needle cushion. The heavy fabrics chafed the sores left
from her armor, and rice powder could never conceal all the
scrapes and scratches she had sustained in her flight though
the forest.
Feeling every inch the hoyden bundled under a disguising
mass of finery, she said, 'When you cut through to the
outside from this tunnel, the Black Robes will know
something is afoot.'

The mages inclined their heads. 'We are prepared for
them, as best we can be.'

Mara took a grip on her nerve, which seemed by the
minute to ebb. 'Then send me Arakasi. I would confer
with him before we start the final move.'

It was still disconcerting to the Lady how swiftly the
mages could translate her merest wish into command. She
had no sooner finished speaking than her Spy Master was
delivered into her presence, as disgruntled as anyone had
ever observed him.

Arakasi arose from where he had been dumped by the
spell, face down upon the earthen floor. Unlike the imperial
maids who had been summoned earlier by magic to attend
to Mara's robing, the Spy Master did not lose his wits.
His raised brows settled into a frown that immediately
smoothed as he glanced about and identified the presence
of cho-ja. Next he fixed upon his mistress, who was almost
unrecognisable in imperial robes of state.
Then he was on his knees, bowing. 'My Lady.' Where
once his voice would have been expressionless, now there
was a tremulous note of joy. 'I am glad to see you well.'

'Rise,' Mara commanded. She came as near as her
nervousness would allow to laughter. 'Justin wears no
crown as yet, and I am due no such obeisance. It is a
custom I would see dispensed with, if our plans succeed as
we hope.' She peered through the gloom at the long-missed
person of her Spy Master, and, abashed by the intentness
of her scrutiny, Arakasi bent his head, chagrined.

'You wear the clothes of a cleaning drudge!' Mara
exclaimed.

Her Spy Master gave back a broad chuckle. 'How better
to spy upon one's superiors without drawing undue notice,
my Lady?' His nose wrinkled. 'Though I would prefer to
attend Justin's wedding and coronation in garments that
were not caked with scouring sand.'

Both Lady and Spy Master quieted as the pressure of
events forced sobriety. 'The priests of all the orders are
gathered,' Arakasi affirmed. 'Some may be a little shy
of perfect in their robing, since a few were summoned
directly from their beds. Once we had their honorable
selves all present in the great audience hall, those who
complained could not be permitted to leave. According
to Chumaka's study of the law, Justin's claim could be
disputed if even one High Priest failed to be in attendance.
Getting the Sisterhood of Sibi to come was the most difficult
task - not even the High Priest of Turakamu was willing to
contact them.'

'How did you manage?' Mara asked.

'Without alternative, I simply went into the temple
myself. I was allowed to live long enough to tell them
why I did what few men have dared.' Arakasi smiled
slightly at his memory. He was perhaps the only petitioner
in centuries to enter the Temple of Sibi uninvited, awl

Kentosani

773

certainly the only one allowed to leave. 'The temples
support your cause at this time, since the alternative
would set them the more firmly under the heel of the
Assembly. But sentiments could change, if civil order is
not swiftly restored. We'll get no second chance. Great
Ones are out in force in the city. More than a dozen
watch the entrances to the palace, as they are certain
you'll somehow try to mask your arrival in the confusion.'


Mara's frown was instinctive. 'They've entered a city
under threat of civil war, and done nothing to repress the
Omechan siege?'

Arakasi looked grim. 'Indeed not. My best impression
is that they have forsaken their insistence on peace in
favor of their own concerns.' He looked hard at the
diminutive woman who seemed half-smothered under the
weight of her imperial overrobes. 'I don't know what you've
accomplished in the South, but I would hazard a guess,
my Lady, that the Black Robes have learned to be afraid
of you.'

'Not of me,' Mara corrected, embarrassed. 'Of these.'
Her gesture encompassed the cho-ja mages who stood like
sentinels to either side.

Arakasi regarded her alien companions, his eyes widening
at the splendor of their many-colored wings. 'I never
knew your kind could be so beautiful,' he said in awed
reverence.

The Chakaha mages brushed aside the human praise
without awkwardness. The left-hand one addressed Mara.
'Good Servant, danger grows as we speak. Human warriors
are entering the tunnels by the Great Ones' command,

searching for word of your hiding.'

'Where?' Mara demanded, the memory of the burned-out
hive that she had so narrowly escaped all too recent a horror.
'Has there been bloodshed?'

774

Mistress of the Emp~re

'Not yet,' the second mage replied. 'The warriors obey
the restraint of the Assembly not to fight unless they meet
opposition. And the cho-ja will not embrace conflict until
they are confronted without alternative. For now, they
abandon the hives that are invaded, leaving many empty
galleries and tunnels to be searched in profitless darkness.
The human armies make poor progress. This moment they
concentrate their sweep to the south, near the estates of
your birth. But the search will be widened, very soon. Your
Great Ones are not fools.'

'Then the hour is come,' Mara said, startling all present
with what seemed an indomitable strength. 'We will go
forward.'

At her word, the cho-ja mages gave a signal. A task
force of workers marched to the fore of the tunnel ant
began to burrow upward. Dirt pattered down, ant then
chunks of mortar and tile. Light pierced the gloom, yellow
and clear, from the domed skylight over the imperial
antechamber.

A cho-ja stuck his head through the opening. He buzzes
back a brief communication, and the mage to Mara's left
salt, 'The antechamber is dear of enemies. Your husband
and son await.' Then it pauses, as if in hesitation. 'Lady,'
it intoned, 'we wish you luck and brave fortune. But move
swiftly. Our spells cannot stay the Black Robes' attack
indefinitely. You will have a short time to achieve all that
you must, and then there will be chaos and a devastating
backlash of thwarted energies. We wish you to know, if
you fail, or if we fail you, that it was for this battle that
we were sent from Chakaha. We are more than your
defense, Goot Servant; we are an embassy to bring in a
new order.'

Mara looked upward into the mages' alien visages, which
reared above her with expressions no human alive court
fully know. It did not escape her that both had unfurled

Kentosani

7~75

their wings into fighting stance, as they prepared to stand
down the might of a unified Assembly. Their courage
moved her to tears. 'Let it be known, good friends, that
so long as I live, I will not fail you. we will triumph or
die together.'
She turned and faced forward at once, lest the fullness of
her courage collapse under the weight of the dangers that
threatened. Straight, stiff-backed under her gold-studded
robes, the Servant of the Empire started forward toward
the opening.

Mara made her way with unsteady steps over the fallen
earth and the dumps of tile and mortar. Unobtrusively,
Arakasi moved to steady her elbow. She flashed him a
grateful smile, glad for his human touch after the company
of so many Cho-ja.

And then she was out, dazzled by late-day sunlight, and
by the flash of a magnificence of gold armor.

She caught her breath. Red hair pushed out from beneath
the helm of imperial gold; Justin's red hair, she realised
with a great thump of her heart. He did not look like
a boy anymore, armored in the finery of an Emperor.
Mara shook to realise that this was the hour of his
wedding. -,i ~

She faltered in her step as the boy bowed to her, son to
mother, as was proper. All that brilliance of goldwork felt
wrong; as though she should be bowing to the floor, as she
once had to Ichindar.

Then the boy straightened and gave a undignified whoop.
'Mother!' he cried and ran forward.

Mara forgot her finery and reached. Her son rushed into
her arms, taller, heavier now, fully and impressively coming
closer to manhood. As his arms locked around her neck,
she realised she did not have to bend down anymore to
embrace him. His shoulders had started to broaden in a
way that felt all too familiar. He was all Kevin's, Mara

776 Mistrcss ofthc Emp~rc

realised; he would have his father's great height. The jolt
of thee restored her to dignity.

As her son stepped back from her embrace, he regarded
her levelly with eyes that were the image of his barbarian
father's. 'I am ready, Good Servant. The Princess Jehilia
awaits.'

Mara's voice failed her. She had lost two children already,
Ayaki, and the little one poisoned before his birth. Now her
only living son stood resolutely ready to give his life for her
honor. The moment was more than she could endure.

Then Justin's face broke into a grin of such insouciance,
she was again recalled to past days, and to Kevin's irrepressible
humor. 'We'd better hurry,' her son admonished.
'The late Emperor's First Wife keeps having hysterics, and
all of her makeup is going to run.'

Mara rallied. 'What of Jehilia? Did she have hysterics,
too?'

Justin gave back a boy's shrug. 'She shouted a lot. She
locked herself in her room. Then somebody asked her if
she would rather wed an Omechan with a paunch and grey
hair, and she let the maids in to get her dressed.'

The girl had sense, Mara thought, as she took her place
at Justin's side and prepared to enter the great audience
hall. Arakasi stood by her, to steady her other side, ant
no one seemed to notice that he yet wore the robes of
a drudge as the iron-studded doors swung open and the
musicians began the fanfare that announced the arrival of
the groom.

Mara stepped resolutely ahead, aware of her own hand,
sweating, where she gripped Justin's. She wondered as
she passed through the ranked columns of the Priests
of the Twenty Higher Orders whether the gods would
strike her down for pride, and for the sheer arrogance
of presumption that caused her to dare set her son on
the throne as the next Light of Heaven, the ninety-second

Kcntosan~

77/

Emperor of Tsuranuanni. But the representative of the
Temple of Juran, God of Justice, did not look displeased,
and the High Priest of Turakamu gave her a small smile
of encouragement. Apart from the rest, behind the Red
God's priest, stood three shrouded figures in black, the
Sisters of Sibi, Goddess of Death. Even those chilling
aspects seemed to reassure Mara with a slight inclination
of their heads. The High Priest of Jastur, the God of
War, slammed his gloved fist against his chest in salute,
as Mara passed, his blow ringing on the precious iron of
his breastplate.

Mara took another step, and another, her inner confidence
rebounding. As she passed, the priests of the
higher and lower orders began to arrange themselves
before the dais, in pairs by their nature, the priests of
Lashima, Goddess of Wisdom, falling in beside those
of Salana, Mother of Truth. The Priest of Turakamu
partnered the Sister of Sibi, while the High Priest of
Jastur was joined by the High Priest of Baracan, the Lord
of Swords.

Ahead, on the imperial dais, waited a small, blond-haired
girl in a sparkling veil of gold tissue. Jehilia, Mara identified,
as her maids drew back her headdress; the girl still had
freckles, from too much time playing truant in the imperial
gardens. And if she looked pale beneath the paint and
powder of her makeup, she saw the Good Servant, and
grinned.

'Let the doors be closed, and the ceremonial matrimony
begin!' intoned the priest of Chochocan, the Good
God, in ritual opening. Behind him and to his right
the High Priest of Tomachca, Lover of Children, began
silent prayer. Mara stared at him a lingering moment,

remembering that the lesser brother of Chochocan was
also known as the Bringer of Peace. She prayed he would
be so today.

778 Mistress of the Empire

Justin's fingers gave Mara's a last squeeze as she let him
loose to take his place at his Princess's side. Mara moved
to where Hokanu waited and as the ceremony began, she
slipped her hand into his.

The Imperial Palace was bustling. Messengers hurried by,
and servants moved purposefully across the courtyards in
an anxious rush to complete errands. Perched on an elbow
by ? windowsill, Shimone of the Assembly watched their
industry with deep, unreadable eyes. His face was more
than usually austere, and if anything, he was yet more spare
with words. He moved his head slightly, calling attention to
the unusual level of activity.

The gesture was noted by Hochopepa, who sat upon
cushions before a low table and a tray of half-consumed
sugared fruits. The stout magician acknowledged with a
nod and spoke softly so that only Shimone could hear.
'Something more than everyday business is afoot. I've
counted five priests hidden under cowls, and by the smell
on the air, the kitchens are baking a banquet. Odd fare, for
a city under attack.'

As if to punctuate his observation, a large rock fired from
a siege engine sailed down from the air and shattered in a
courtyard nearby. A stray dog fled, yelping. Hochopepa
gazed through the cracked screen with narrowed eyes.
'Those damned things are starting to irritate me. Another
stone this close and I'll go out and . . .' His threat was cut
off as he was distracted by another band of oddly dressed
nobles hurrying past the window. 'We expected an influx
of Ruling Lords to convene in the old council chambers,
but this seems something more.'

Shimone stirred, standing straighter. 'It is much more.
Motecha will not be stayed much longer from taking
action.

Hochopepa regarded the remains of his snack with
Kentosani

779

wistful regret. 'I will not be stayed much longer from taking
action,' he corrected in faint reproof 'I think the Lady is
here already, and that we waste our time in this vigil.'

Shimone said nothing, but his eyebrows raises, and he
pushed himself away from the window. Not to be left
behind as the taller, slenderer mage stalked from the
chamber, Hochopepa lumbered up from his cushions and
hurried after.

Servants engaged in nameless activities fled or prostrated
themselves in fear as the pair made their way down the
passage. If the palace corridors were a maze of constructions
added one on top of another over the centuries, the Black
Robes needed no directions. They proceeded without error
to a red-painted door emblazoned with an enameled seal.
They did not knock, but entered the office of the Imperial
Chancellor.

Dajalo of the Keda stood resplendent in his regalia of
office, red and black robes cut in layers, with gold trim
flashing at collar and cuffs. His massive headdress was
straight. He looked composed, if pale. His staff members
seemed less poised. The secretary at his elbow trembled,
half-sick with fear, while the runner slave by the outer
screen cowered. The reason for so much nervous unrest
was obvious: the cushions left out for audience with
petitioners were all taken, occupied by a half-dozen Great
Ones. Motecha was pacing. Looking far from pleased, he
glanced up as his two colleagues entered, but continued the
interrogation he had in progress. 'Any word of her?'

The subject of his reference needed no qualifier. 'None,
Great One.' Dajalo bowed to the new arrivals and, adroitly
as any skilled courtier, used the movement to unobtrusively
blot running sweat from his brow. He straightened up,
stiffly formal in appearance. If as Imperial Chancellor he
felt uneasy in the presence of so many Black Robes, he

contrived to hide it well.

780

Mistress of the Empire

Hochopepa crossed behind the imposing desk, plucked
the chancellor's own seat cushion from the floor, and
removed it to the embrasure beneath the window, where
a breeze refreshed the air; the room had been crowded
throughout the morning, and the servants too timid to
venture in and open the screens. Hochopepa sat down. He
plucked a sweetmeat from a pottery urn left for guests and
chewed, looking dangerously intent for a man with a round,
merry face. 'Oh, she will be here, certainly,' he murmured
around his mouthful. 'The High Council is reconvening at
this moment, and the Lady of the Acoma wouldn't miss
it. Never has there been one to play the Great Game
like Mara.'

'Quite,' Motecha snapped irritably. 'She would die first.
As she will, the second we discover her location.'

Shimone looked faintly distasteful. 'We all must die; it
is a rule of nature.'

The Imperial Chancellor buried his discomfort behind a
studied mask of urbanity.

Motecha glanced from one face to another, but said
nothing. His colleagues were still. The suspicion that Mara
was guilty of uncovering some of the most closely guarded
secrets of the Assembly, secrets that for an outsider were a
death warrant, seemed to color the very air with tension.
Not even Hochopepa and Shimone had been able to deny
that the willingness of the cho-ja to shelter her suggested
worse: that she might have seeded a rebellion, a breaking
of the treaty that had stood for thousands of years. As
convincingly as Shimone and others had argued that the
Servant of the Empire deserved a full hearing before her life
became forfeit, this time their efforts had been overruled.

The Assembly had voted. Mara's execution was now
beyond debate.

Few would presume to act alone against the Servant of the
Empire, but Tapek had, and the worst trouble had resulted.
Black Robes were starting at shadows in the suspicion
that their privileged status stood threatened. Now more
critical issues were at hand than a brother Black Robe's
rashness. Hochopepa and Shimone exchanged glances of
understanding. They had, in their way, admired Mara, who
had accomplished much good for the Empire.

But now she had dared too much. The stout magician
felt drawn into conflict: his loyalty to the Assembly and the
vows sworn there when he took the Black Robe, against the
allure of fresh ideas, many of them prompted by the heresies
that Milamber the barbarian had shared with him.

Hochopepa valued the legacy of his friendship with
Milamber. Over the years the Tsurani-born Black Robe
had increasingly employed his arts in the cause of the
common people. Now, with changes in the wind too great
for even his progressive thinking to encompass, he wished
for more time. Hochopepa longed for dear conviction on
which course was right to follow: to work with Motecha's
faction for Mara's immediate destruction or to embrace
her call for reform and consider the unthinkable, after
a majority vote: to oppose the Assembly's resolve, even
perhaps save her life.

Suddenly Shimone took a long, swift step' toward the
window. He accompanied his movement with a penetrating
glance at Hochopepa, who swallowed his sweetmeat more
suddenly than he had intended.

'You feel it, too,' the fat magician said to Shimone.

'Feel what?' Motecha interrupted. And then he also fell
silent, as he sensed what had alerted the others.

A seeping chill pervaded the air, not the simple cold
of shadow, nor even the clammy feeling prompted by
uneasiness. Each magician present knew the unmistakable,
subliminal tingle of powerful magic.

Shimone poised like a dog on point. 'Someone sets
wards!' he announced in clipped tones.

782 Msstress of the Empire

Hochopepa rose awkwardly to his feet. 'No Black Robe
creates this spell.' His admission came with reluctance, as
if he deeply wished to claim otherwise.

'The Cho-ja!' shouted Motecha. His face deepened to
purple. 'She has brought mages from Chakaha!'

The small chamber erupted into chaos as the other Black
Robes surged to their feet. Their expressions, to a man, were
stormy. The Imperial Chancellor was forced cowering into
the cranny behind his desk to stay dear of them, but no
one heeded his discomfort.

'Mara will die for this!' Motecha continued. 'Sevean, call
at once for reinforcements.'

Even Hochopepa did not protest this order. 'Hurry,' he
urged Shimone, and while the outrage of the assembled
magicians whipped to a boiling rage, the fat magician and
his slender companion were the first out the door.

The corridor beyond was deserted. Even the servants had
fled. 'I don't like this.' Hochopepa's words echoed off the
vaulted ceiling of the now empty wing. 'In fact, I have the
distinct impression that more than the High Council has
been seeking unsanctioned convocation.'

Shimone said nothing, but reached for his teleportation
device, activated it, and vanished.

'Hrrumph!' Hochopepa exclaimed in frustration. 'Letting
me know where you're going wouldn't exactly be idle
chatter!'

Shimone's voice replied out of the air. 'You imply there
might be a choice?'

Disgusted that his robe belt seemed suddenly to be
cinctured too tight, Hochopepa pawed through cloth until
he found his pocket. He grasped his teleportation device and
engaged it, just as Sevean, Motecha, and the others shouted
from the antechamber of the Imperial Chancellor's office.
As he disappeared from the hallway, Hochopepa felt his last
disconcerting thought cut off by the disorientation of his

Ke~stosarss

\.]

783

transfer: which party would accomplish Mara's execution?
He and Shimone, who acted only for the purpose of the
Assembly's self-preservation, or the others, led by Motecha,
who lusted after revenge?

'She has made fools of us, and worse!' Sevean's voice rang
out just before the shift in Hochopepa's location became
accomplished.

Worse, the fat magician concluded as he reappeared,
puffing, in the sunlit splendor of the courtyard outside
the antechambers of the imperial audience hall. Mara had
brought power to battle absolute power, and now far more
than civil war might tear the Empire asunder.

The courtyard too was deserted. The flowering trees that
bordered the wall and the approach to the wide steps hung
still in the noon air. No birds flew, and no insects droned
around the flowers. The din of the armies that dashed at
the walls and the unceasing battering of rocks from the
siege engines seemed distant and faint. If the noise was
inconvenient, none of the Black Robes made any move at
this juncture to quell it.

The warriors who defended the Imperial Precinct were
best off distracted at the walls, to keep them unaware
of the pending storm that soon must break over the
audience hall. ~

Shimone stood in the center of the square, his head cocked
slightly. 'Here,' he said. 'The ward starts here.'

Nothing showed in the noon air that looked in the least
arcane. 'You can't break through?' puffed Hochopepa. He
squinted, concentrated, and extended his senses to their
utmost. At last he detected a faint shimmer that might
have been due to heat; except that when he looked directly
at it, the phenomenon disappeared. He pawed through
his other pocket, pulled out a gaudy handkerchief, and
mopped his streaming brow. 'If that's a ward, it hardly
seems substantial.'

784 Mistress of the Empire

Shimone turned with an air of sharpened reproof. 'You
try and pierce it.'

Hochopepa extended his might, then suddenly widened
his eyes as a rainbow of color played through the air before
him. As if brushed aside without effort, the potency of his
magic dissipated along the barrier created by the Cho-ja.
Hochopepa's mouth sagged open in astonishment. Then
a stray fragment of rock fired from without descended
whistling toward his head.-He recovered his poise and
deflected it as casually as a man might bat aside a fly.
Throughout, his attention remained focused on the cho-ja
wrought protections. 'That strong, eh? Fascinating. A very
subtle piece of work. The way it lets you probe, then siphons
off your energies and weaves them with its own ...'
Immersed in scholarly study, he was slow to waken to
the fact that the cho-ja had mages evolved considerably
in their skills since the treaty had effected the ban. 'This
is unsettling.'

'Very.' Shimone chose not to elaborate as behind him
other magicians arrived in the central square. More had
joined the party that had stood vigil in the Imperial
Chancellor's chamber. Their number was two dozen strong,
and growing. 'There can be no argument now except force,'
Shimone concluded sadly.

Motecha picked up this last statement. 'We should flame
this palace to the ground! Burn every mind to idiocy that
has dared to raise rebellion against us!'

Sevean stepped forward. 'I disagree. Collapse these
unsanctioned wards, yes, this is necessity. ~we must also
destroy the Cho-ja mages who work in violation of the
treaty, and execute the Lady Mara. But destroy the Imperial
Palace? That's excessive. We may be outside the law, but we
are still answerable to the gods. I doubt that heaven would
sanction the priests of every order in the Empire dying along
with Mara.'

Kentosani

78S

'The Holy Orders could be accomplices!' accused one of
the recently arrived Black Robes.

'Indeed,' Shimone cut in. 'Or they could have been
pressed into service by force. Better we hear their motives
before we do their holinesses any violence.'

'The wards only, then,' Hochopepa summed up. He
hitched at his too tight sash, and blotted with his dampened
handkerchief For all his outward resolution, his eyes were
troubled. 'We must break in without-risking the lives of
those inside the audience hall.'

The magicians banded together in silence, as carrion birds
might who contemplated the spoils on a battlefield. They
stilled in mind and body, and the air seemed shaken by
a deep, subliminal vibration as they melded their efforts
into one.

The sky darkened, though no cloud gathered. The
garden courtyard lost clarity, seeming to brood with a
greenish tinge.

'Now,' Motecha cried out.

Power speared down, lightning-bright, a sizzling bolt that
appeared to bisect the heavens. It struck in a crack of violet
sparks, but the ward seized the power, deflected it along the
curve of its surface, then absorbed it. Heat flew back in a
scorching wave. The stone faces of the buildings opposite
blackened and cracked. Trees singed, and an ornamental
fountain boiled dry in a puff of steam.

Untouched by the backlash, protected by their own
wards, the gathered magicians exchanged dark looks of
astonishment. They "gathered for a second blow. A rainbow
play of energies cascaded down upon the cho-ja barrier. It
flared back a black opaqueness.

The Assembly magicians increased the force of their
attack. Sparks jagged and flew, and thunder rumbled.
Fire rained from the sky, and then charges of incandescent
force.

786

Mistress of the Empire

'Keep up the assault,' shouted Sevean. 'Spare no effort.
The wards must eventually weaken.'

Winds howled, and fires raged. Tremors shook d e earth,
and paving cracked as gaps opened in the courtyard. The
protective bubble of spells that sealed off the audience hall
seemed to buckle, and shrink slightly inward.

'Yes!' Motecha redoubled his efforts. Lightning scored
the invisible surface, and the winds raised by disturbed
forces screamed around the spires of the Imperial Precinct
like the howl of demons released.
One of the Black Robes with lesser strength crumpled
to the pavement. The rest stood firm, sure now: d e wards
must break, over time. No magical defense could withstand
such a concentrated onslaught for very long. As power
hammered down, and split, and the rush of the gusts
drowned even the din of the armies besieging the outside
walls, the Assembly magicians immersed themselves in
spells. In their collective fury only one objective remained:
the hall of the imperial audience would be breached, now
at the cost of any lives; even their own.

The high, vaulted skylights of the imperial audience hall
went dark. Plunged into sudden gloom, "gathered courtiers
and priests shifted nervously in their places. The only
remaining illumination was cast by the wildly flickering
lamps kindled in honor of the Twenty Higher Gods. On
the dais, the priest of Chochocan who presided over the
imperial marriage ceremony faltered in his lines.

A bang of nearby thunder shook the walls. While many in
the chamber trembled, and more than one priest made signs
to ward off heaven's displeasure, Justin's voice arose over
the early murmurs of confusion. 'proceed,' he stated dearly.

Mara felt her heart nearly burst with pride. The boy
would make a fine ruler! Then she bit her lip; first, he
would have to survive his wedding and coronation.

787

The Princess Jehilia at his side looked white with fright.
She fought to keep her chin high, as royalty ought; but
more than anything, she wanted to cower behind ha
veils. Justin's hand stole out and damped around hers in
a desperate attempt to share comfort.

After-all, they were only children.

The floor shook under another concussion. The priest of
Chochocan glanced about, as if seeking safe refuge.

Mara straightened. All must not be abandoned because
one fainting priest lost heart! She tensed, prepared to
intervene, although to do so was a risk: their holinesses
would perhaps resent any further pressure from her. If she
drove them too hard, they might mistake her motives for
ambition, or worse: they might withdraw the power of their
office and pronounce that Justin's wedding to Jehilia went
against the will of heaven.

Time was too short, and circumstances were too dangerous,
to allow for long-winded justifications that after
all had only circumstantial proof that the strike upon the
cho-ja's wards was effected by mortal men whop happened
to be magicians, and that their will was no more that of
heaven than the actions of any Ruling Lord who murdered
out of greed or ambition for power.

The noise from without reached another crescendo as
yet another arcane assault battered the wards. Rainbows
of fractured light played through the skylights, bathing the
chamber in unnatural colors. Mara's discomfort increased
as the priests and officials in attendance began to shuffle
feet. Old Frasai of the Tonmargu was trembling outright,
perhaps on the point of cracking.

Support arose from an unexpected source, as the Red

God's High Priest pressed to the forefront of temple representatives
gathered beneath the imperial dais. 'Brother,' he
exhorted his wavering fellow priest, 'we are all Turakamu's,
in the end. Were heaven displeased, we should already be

788 Mistress of tJ,e Empire

struck town, and my God is silent within me. Please,
proceed with the ceremony.'

The High Priest of Chochocan nodded. He licked sweat
from his upper lip and drew a deep breath, and his sonorous
voice resumed the next lines of the ritual.

Mara exhaled in relief. At her side, the High Priest of
Juran flashed her a look of understanding 'Bide, my good
Lady Servant. You have allies.'

Mara returned a slight nod. She did have allies; many
more than she knew. The magical assault might intensify,
but not all of the priests would be easily cowed. The twists
and reverses of state politics over the course of centuries
had taught them to be canny. If their hold slipped now, if
Justin's wedding did not proceed according to law, and if his
subsequent coronation were not to go forward and stand,
they understood how greatly the authority of the temples
would be ceded to the Assembly. The Sisters of Sibi stood
like creatures from the realm of the dead, untroubled by
the possibility that the Imperial Palace might collapse upon
their heads.

For any portion of heaven's due influence and power
to fall under mortal dominion was a perilous course, one
that invited divine displeasure. Then would the gods curse
misfortunes upon mankind that could make the wrath of
an aroused Assembly seem but the tantrums of children.

Justin's reply to the next ritual question rang strongly
over the din of another attack. Thunder rumbled, a
seemingly endless peal. An ornamental bead shook loose
from the imperial throne and rattled down the pyramidal
steps. The crystal in the skylights cracked, and shards
tumbled sparkling in the lamplight to shatter against the
marble floor.
No one, thankfully, was in harm's way.

Mara closed her eyes. Hold, my children, she prayed.
Hokanu's hand tightened over hers.

Kentosani

789

She returned a half-smile that warmed as Jehilia replied
to the priest. The Princess was subdued, demure as befit her
station; if she also clung to her new husband, she was still
royalty. Her bearing stayed straight as the wicker cages with
the ritual marriage birds were raised for the blessing. The
reed doors were solemnly cut by the High Priest's knife.

Mara bit her lip, fighting tears, as the pair of birds inside
took wing at their offered freedom. Fly, she willed them,
fly up and mate and find happiness.

The omen of the birds at her own first wedding had been
unfavorable. With all of her heart, she longed for this one
to be different. She and Hokanu might not rule their lives
by portents and tradition, but there were elderly priests
present who did.

The birds shot aloft just as another bolt of thunder
slammed the air. They winged over in alarm and, as one,
arrowed up and out, through the gap in the cracked
skylight.

'Thank the gods,' Hokanu murmured. His hand squeezed
Mara's, while the tears spilled unabashed over her eyelids.
She could not hold in her emotion. Neither could she see
as two Imperial Whites in ceremonial Force Leaders' armor
stepped forward with the cloak edged in gold and sarcat
fur: the mantle of the Emperor of all Tsuranuanni, which
they spread over Justin's shoulders.

Tall as he had grown, the boy looked lost in the garment.
Mara wiped her eyes and was struck by a poignant
recollection of Ichindar, who had been as slender, and
who in the end had been bowed down by the weight of
imperial office.

Justin bore up well. He took Jehilia's hand as if he had
been born being gallant to ladies, and led her up the stairs
to the dais.

'His father's son indeed,' Hokanu murmured proudly.

Singing acolytes followed the newly wedded couple,

790 Mistrcss of tl~c Empirc
along with the priest of Juran, who bore the jeweled
golden cushion that supported the imperial crown. The
singing was ragged, cut across and half drowned by the
rumble of continuous arcane attack from without.

The blows came much more closely spaced.

A pillar near the rear of the hall cracked with a sound like
a whip. Mara started. She forces herself to focus wholly on
the tableau that unfolded on the dais. She could not ignore
signs of impending peril: that the air was growing warmer.
The wooden railing beneath the dais where petitioners came
to kneel before their Light of Heaven showed peeling layers
of varnish. The stone floor grew hot enough to raise blisters,
and courtiers shifted from foot to foot, as the leather of their
sandals failed to protect from the growing heat.

'The cho-ja mages are hard pressed,' Hokanu murmured
in Mara's ear.

Thunder slammed again, rocking the chamber. Priests
reached out to steady their colleagues, and more than one
of the High Ones presiding on the dais looked frightened.
They held to their purpose, grimly.

Mara watched as the priest of Lashima, Goddess of
Wisdom, stepped forward to anoint her son's temples
with oil. His vestments were knocked askew, ant his
hands shook. Much of the holy oil spilled on the intricate
border of Justin's mantle. Jehilia was on the verge of panic,
her hand locked white around her husband's. The priest of
Baracan came next and presented Justin with the ancient
golden sword of the Emperor, which would be brought
forth- again only when another Emperor was crowned.
Justin put out his hand and rested it upon the sacred
blade, and Mara, anguished, could see his young fingers
trembling.

She must not think of failure! Annoyed with herself,
she raised her chin and risked a glance back. The cho-ja
mages stood by the door, no longer towering with their
magnificent wings raised high. No,w, they crouched on the
floor, incanting counter-spells with a buzz that was like a
dissonance beneath the rumbling booms of outside blows.
The insectoids' strength was great, but the powers of the
united Assembly were more than even they could stand off
indefinitely. No matter how greatly they were provoked or
threatened, their stance had been made emphatically clear.
Chakaha still ruled them. Under no circumstances would
they use their magic to attack.

When at last the ward failed, the Assembly would be freed
to exercise the extent of their wrath upon the convocation
in the audience chamber.

Strangely, Mara felt no fear. Too much had been risked,
and too much lost. As if the part of herself that had known
consternation at the prospect of horrible death had been
seared out by degrees since the events that had harrowed
her in Thuril, she was beyond acknowledging risk. In
her rock-deep state of confidence, she seemed to radiate
unearthly power.

Even Hokanu regarded her with the beginnings of awe.
She barely noted. She stepped back from the front rank
participants in Justin's coronation, saying quickly, 'Praise
our new Light of Heaven for me, when the crown is at last
in place.'

Her husband showed surprise, even yet taken aback
by Mara's poise, though-he had thought he understood
all there was to know of her character. 'What are you
going to do?' His voice was falsely firm; even he must
acknowledge that the mages who defended them were
failing.

Mara gave him a firm look. 'Subterfuge,' she murmured.
'What else is left?'

He bowed to her. 'Good Servant.' And then he stared in
amazement as she walked to the back of the hall. He would
remember her in this moment, he resolved, and cherish

792 Mistress of thc Empire

her unflagging spirit, even as the spells of the Assembly
burst the wards and all of them became consumed by
arcane fires.

Mara did nothing extraordinary. She reached the arched
doors of the hall and bowed her respect to each of the cho-ja
mages. They were too hard pressed to acknowledge beyond
the merest flick of a forelimb. Then she paused by the
portals and touched the wrists of the two imperial heralds
who stood stationed at either side.

She conferred briefly with them. Hokanu, watching, was
mystified. What was she doing? Her glance flashed up, met
his: watch the ceremony, she seemed to chide.

He gave her a half-shrug and faced forward.

The earth rocked. On the dais, the priests' incantation
went raggedly out of rhythm, and yet, stubbornly, they
persisted. Sparks shot across the closed screens. The wards
were breached. They were failing. The next hard blow
would shatter all protections.

The coronation was nearly completed. 'Hail!' cried
the priests. They bowed, as the floor shook in thunderous
report. 'Hail!' The crown was raised up by the
High Priest of Chochocan. He frantically mouthed the
blessing.

- Lightning flashed. A stone fell from the domed skylight
and struck the agate flooring with a crash. The crown
slipped from the priest's nerveless fingers and dropped
crookedly to rest upon Justin's red head.

The act was accomplished. The heir to the Acoma, child
of a slave, wore the sacred imperial regalia of Tsuranuanni,
and no power short of heaven could rescind his anointed
authority.

'Hail!' shouted the priests in convocation. 'Hail, Justin,
ninety-two times Emperor, and new-made light of Heaven!'

The words tangled with an annihilating crash of thunder
and Mara's shout to the heralds: 'Now!'

Rentosani

793

Glittering gold in their ceremonial tabards, and pressed
by a howling gust of air, the officials moved. They stepped to
the great doors even as the cho-ja mages crumpled, grasped
the rings, and threw wide the doors.

Against an onrushing wall of Black Robes, they performed
their bows in perfect mirror image. 'Hail to
the new Light of Heaven!' they rang out in unison.
White-faced, but inarguably firm, they straightened and
the one with the most imposing voice qualified. 'Great
Ones of the Assembly, hear me! You are hereby summoned
to the Imperial Court.'

The lead ranks of Black Robes stumbled and rocked
to a stop.

'Summoned?' shrieked a stupefied Motecha. Soot streaked
his habit, and his red face sparkled with sweat. 'By
whom?'

The imperial heralds were well versed in maintaining
poise in the face of intransigent courtiers. They performed
impeccable bows. 'By the Light of Heaven, Great One.'

'What!' Sevean shoved forward, his colleagues crowding
on his heels.

The heralds held to their dignity. From the dais, beside
the high priests, the imperial Seneschal called out, 'Justin!
Ninety-two times Emperor!'

Motecha spluttered. Sevean looked pole-axed. Hochopepa
was for once in his life left speechless, and even the austere
Shimone never thought to press the issue with magic, as
every other man and woman in the hall bowed before their
ultimate monarch.

Between the slowly rising forms of two utterly spent
Chakaha mages, Mara smothered exultation. The heralds
had handled themselves admirably. Their confidence had
seemed so unimpeachable that even the Great Ones had
not yet thought to question the implicit inference: that the
defences of her allies were not spent unto exhaustion, and

794

Mistress of the Empire

that protective wards had not in fact collapsed, but had
been dropped deliberately.

'We have no power left,' the Chakaha mage to Mara's
left murmured in a near-inaudible frequency.

Mara waved a placating hand. 'The Great Game,' she
murmured. 'Now we must all play, or die.'

32
Emperor

The Black Robes gaped.

Flanking the entrance to the audience hall, Imperial
Whites in gold-edged armor stood at smart attention.
Nowhere were warriors in Acoma or Shinzawai colors in
evidence, as the magicians had expected to find.

They had anticipated the aftermath of struggle, with
triumphant soldiers guarding their claimant until such
time as the losers swore fealty. That was how disputed
successions had been resolved in the past. But the Good
Servant had not used compulsion to achieve her triumph.
None rushed forward to hurl themselves in prostration and
beg the mercy of the Black Robes, pleading for a reversal
of Mara's usurpation of authority. Quite the contrary, the
magicians at the forefront noticed that any discomfort on
the faces that greeted them stemmed instead from their own

Precipitous arrival. Everyone present seemed involved in

conspiracy with the end Mara had achieved.

Drums thundered in tattoo, drowning Motecha's shout
for silence. He waved his raised hands to no avail, while
colleagues on either side looked disgruntled by the flourish
of trumpets and horns that sounded over the city in a
peal not heard since the death of Ichindar. The notes even
drowned the thudding of rocks from the siege engines.
Not far behind the leading magicians, Hochopepa leaned
over to speak to Shimone. 'Servants must have been
creeping in here making preparations for hours.'

Though his words were intended to be private, Sevean
overheard. 'You imply a great deal of planning.'

Shimone treated his colleague to a gaze that masked

796 Mfstress of the Empfre

contempt. 'Of all rulers in the Nations, Mara of the Acoma
has never achieved anything without a plan.'

The fanfare rang away, leaving silence. 'You are summoned,'
the imperial heralds repeated, stepping back
to dear the entrance. A long corridor opened between
the ranking courtiers and officials who waited inside.
A glowering Motecha hastened ahead, the rest of the
magicians crowding at his heels. All stared. The panoply
of personages gathered at the head of the hall formed an
impressive sight.

At the base of the imperial dais, the High Priests and
Priestesses of the Twenty Gods of the Higher Heaven and
Twenty Gods of the Lower Heaven stood in full regalia.
Only at the coronation or the death of an Emperor would
such a convocation be called for.

High, curved headdresses framed their faces, sparkling
with lacquerwork, precious stones, and rare metal. Attendant
upon each was a pair of acolytes, bearing the ceremonial
badges of office each prelate was entitled to display. These,
too, were gem-studded or adorned with metal bands and
silk streamers. Only the Sisters of Sibi were plain; their
black, featureless appearance in ominous contrast to the
panoply of plumage and finery. The community of temples
was represented in its entirety. A delegation of one hundred
and twenty from the holy orders of every significant divinity
in the Empire made an impressive sight.

The Great Ones gave way to reluctant awe.

Hochopepa sidled closer to Fumita and Shimone in
reaction to this emphatic demonstration of temple support
for Mara's intrigues. While no single priest could rival
any magician in raw power, the High Father Superiors
of Turakamu and Jastur, as well as the Sisters of Sibi,
commanded respect, even from Great Ones. Spellcraft
had preserved the audience hall intact, despite the Assembly'
s mightiest conjury. Hochopepa was not so irreverent

r
l
l
l
Emperor

797

toward the will of heaven that he discounted the force of
divine favor.

Caution, he decided, was called for.

Incense swirled on the air. The polished marble floor
sparkled with dust from aad~ed plaster and powdered glass
from the shattered skylight. Such signs of violence could not
divert the magicians from noting further details on their
approach to the high dais: two empty reed cages festooned
with ribbons of imperial white. The carpet beneath the
imperial thrones lay heaped with veils, lately removed from
the bride in ritual order, according to the time-honored rites
of a Tsurani state marriage ceremony.

As the dismayed delegation of Great Ones reached the
supplicants" rail beneath, an imperial herald struck the floor
three times with a bronze-shod staff, crying out, 'Justin,
ninety-two times Emperor!'

The gold-armored royal honor guard knelt in homage as
a boy in shining robes arose from the throne. The gathered
nobles dropped to their knees. The boy did not look cowed;
his shoulders were straight and his chin high despite the
weight of his golden armor and the massive crown of
state with its topaz stones and fretwork. At his side arose
Jehilia, Princess no longer, but Empress in her own right, the
diamond-set circlet of office fitted over her bridal headdress.
As the magicians drew to a halt, Justin held out his hand to
his Lady. She arose and stood beside him.

Motecha went white. Around him some magicians bowed

from the waist in the obeisance a Great One traditionally
offered the Light of Heaven. Shimone, Fumita, and
Hochopepa were among the first to give the Emperor and
his bride due acknowledgment, while still other Black
Robes deliberated in stupefaction.

Motecha found his voice. 'What mummery is this?'

The High Priest of Juran advanced in stiff displeasure.
'We come to honor the new Light of Heaven, Great

798 Mistress of the Empire

One.' Pointedly he added, 'As is every man's proper
duty.'

Sevean cried, 'Upon what claim does this ... boy
presume to rule the Empire?' He stabbed a finger at
Justin, but his eyes sought out the Lady Mara, who had
moved to the base of the dais among the priests, in robes
as fine as her son's.

She did not deign to answer, but allowed the High Priest
of Juran speech in her place: 'Justin is of the blood imperial,
his adoption into Ichindar's family formalised when his
mother was named Servant of the Empire.' With that, the
priest bowed in respect toward Mara. 'He is the chosen
husband of the Empress Jehilia - Ichindar's direct blood
heir- and the marriage just completed was sanctioned
by the Imperial Consort, Lady Tamara. All has been done
according to the laws of man and the higher Law of
Heaven. If somewhat hurried, the wedding abided strictly
by custom.'

One of the most fervent traditionalists, Lord Setark of
the Ukudabi, made his way in the wake of the Great Ones
through the double doors, which remained open. He and
his army had been sequestered inside the city, prepared to
aid Jiro should the Omechan fail in their attack upon the
walls. He overheard the priest's recitation of protocols with
disfavor and raised a contentious shout. 'The High Council
never ratified this choice!'

Priests and magicians faced one another in uneasy
confrontation. Redoubled tension charged the atmosphere
at Lord Setark's outburst, and now the lines were drawn:
acknowledge Justin as the new Light of Heaven, or resort
to force of arms as the strongest nobles contended through
bloodshed to seize power.

With the walls under assault by the Omechan, the
catastrophe of the latter decision would be immediately
felt. And the staid majority of magicians were still reluctant
to become embroiled in politics. They were not of the Great
Game of the Council; they were above it.

Akani stepped to the fore, the swirl of his black robe

the only movement in the frozen tableau. He took stance
beside Motecha and raised his orator's voice. 'Your call for
ratification is a moot point; I fear. According to record, the

High Council was disbanded by the ninety-first Light of

Heaven and, despite repeated petitions, was never again

reconvened.'

The High Priest of Chochocan swept into a bow as

~polite as it was firm. 'The forms have been observed.
|The succession is established. Justin of the Acoma is

ninety-second Light of Heaven, and the gods themselves
are his judge. His ascension to the golden throne will stand,
and the temples will cast out for heresy anyone who dares
disrupt his rule.' He looked squarely at Motecha as he said,
'Even if such were a Great One.'

Motecha's glower deepened. 'You dare!'

Then a voice that grated upon the ears like a cry of pain
said, 'Do not oppose us, Great One.'

The timid cringed, while the boldest turned toward the
shrouded figure of the most senior Sister of Sibi, whose
speech echoed from the depths of her cowl. No light would
ever reveal her features - it was held the Sisters embraced
death within themselves when they joined their Goddess's
order. 'Would you have us unleash our Mad Dancers in
your City of Magicians?'

Many nobles shuddered at the mention of those warriors
who served death, whose mere touch was fatal, as they
leaped and gyrated until exhaustion claimed their lives.

The High Priest of Jastur struck his metal breastplate
with his gauntlet. 'And will you face my warrior priests? We
have little to fear in your magic, Great One, when our god
is invoked as our shield. Can you face our blessed war hammers
with impunity as we smash the walls of your city?'

800 Mistress of the Empire

Motecha felt as any ordinary Tsurani would in his position;
beliefs ingrained since childhood were not absolutely
dispelled by the sureties of his authority. In an effort
to conciliate, he said, 'We do not argue the legitimacy
of Emperor Justin.' Irritation edged his manner as, in
concession to this point, he bent his aged back in the
bow he withheld earlier. He straightened up and levered
an accusatory finger at the Lady who stood at the foot
of the dais, and whose actions had escaped all restraint.
'Lady Mara of the Acoma,' he intoned, 'you have flouted
tradition until your actions are a stink in the nostrils of our
ancestors. You have hidden behind your office, misused
public opinion, and caused confusion in the Assembly's
ranks, all for the purpose of breaking our edict against
waging war upon the Anasati. Your armies attacked on
the Plain of Nashika, and Lord Jiro died at the hand of
your husband. I name you guilty, and as Great One of the
Empire, I am mandated to do that which the Assembly has
voted best for the Nations! Our kind are outside the law!
Your son shall be Emperor, may he live long and rule wisely,
but you shall not be left at large to stand as his regent!'

'Who would you appoint in Mara's place?' Shimone
called out acerbically. 'The Omechan?'
The comment was ignored. Unopposed by his colleagues,
Motecha raised his arm- high. Green energies sparked
around his fist, and he chanted in a harsh language known
only by the magicians.

Hochopepa and Shimone flinched at his utterance, and
Akani stepped quickly away. Fumita cried out, 'No!'

Motecha continued his incantation, secure in his right as
a Black Robe.

Lady Mara turned pale, but did not flinch or flee. The
lights of Motecha's gathering spell flickered across her face
and caught sparks of reflection in her eyes. Calmly, she
murmured something inaudible to the bystanders.
Motecha's lip curled as he called out in contempt between
phrases, 'Prayer will not save you, Lady! Neither can these
priests, whatever powers they may have wielded in warding
this hall against our entry! The gods themselves might save

I you, but they are the only power capable.'
I 'The priests had no part in the warding!' Mara retorted
I clearly. 'You may hurl your spells at me, Motecha, but hear

warning. Your magic shall harm none, least of all me.'

Motecha's features pinched with fury. The Lady was not
even afraid! Her end would be painful, he vowed, as he

~drew breath to snap off the phrase that would release his
i gathered death spell. The retribution Lady Mara had more

than earned would sear her to a husk where she stood.

Mara dosed her eyes, shaken at last by the immediacy
of her peril.

'No!' intoned a voice with a resonance that held nothing
human. Its tone shot chills through every person present. On
either side of Mara, unseen where they crouched behind the
enveloping vestments of the priests, two figures reared erect.
Their bodies were patterned in intricate colors, and with a
clap of disturbed air, they extended twelve feet of iridescent
wings aloft. The majesty of the Cho-ja mages made the most
costly imperial raiment seem tawdry by comparison.

'The Lady Mara shall not be harmed!' the creatures
cried in unison. 'She is under the protection of the mages
of Chakaha!'

Fumita cried out, speech wrenched from him in stupefied
recognition. 'The Forbidden! Daughter, what have you
done?'

Motecha stood frozen; the powers he had summoned
crackled and dissipated into air, the spell incomplete as
his concentration was disrupted by shock. Other magicians
blanched as the significance of the creatures before them
registered.

'Lady Mara is blameless,' contradicted the Cho-ja mages,

802 Msstress of the Empsre

their oratory locked in a fluting two-part harmony. 'It was
by your own deed, magicians, that the ancient pact was
breached, for until you destroyed a hive our Queens within
the Empire stayed bound to the requirements of the treaty.
Never once were magical arts employed or outside aid given
to Mara, until you broke the covenant! The blame lies with
you! It was cho ja arts that protected this hall. In those lands
outside imperial borders, human, our arts have grown and
flourished. In protection and preservation, you are not our
equal. If we choose, the magicians of Chakaha can ward
Lady Mara from your death spells for the rest of her life.'

As one, the Black Robes hesitated. Never in history
had any human not gifted with magic dared to defy the
Assembly, and never with a plot so devious: to lure the
magicians themselves into destroying the very treaty their
predecessors had forged.

No Black Robe could doubt the abilities of the Cho-Ja
mages; their kind could not lie. By their word, they held
means to thwart the most destructive of spells the Great
Ones could conjure. Each candidate for the Assembly had
studied the old texts; not one who achieved his master's
robe failed to understand the significance of the markings
on a Cho-Ja magician. The complexity of their patterns
grew with the ascendance of their mastery; the pair who
allied with Lady Mara were old in their art, and powerful
beyond imagining.

Still, some Black Robes remained unmollified. The High
Priest of Chochocan made a sign of protection as Sevean
shouted to the cho-Ja, 'You are foreigners! How dare you
raise your arts to protect the condemned!'

'Wait.' All eyes turned as Mara stepped forward, boldly
claiming the authority in the new order she had dreamed
to achieve. Her bullion-edged sash of office proclaimed
her Imperial Regent, even if the appointment had not been
official. 'I have a proposal to make.'

Of their enemies. Cho-ja had cleverly manipulated the

truth, implying what Mara had every reason to believe:
that should the hive-home at Chakaha send reinforcements
to Kentosani, she stood beyond harm from the Assembly
for the rest of her life.

But now appearances were all she had to keep her
opposition off balance. She dared not provoke any test of
the cho-ja mages' abilities. Between herself and a horrible
death she had no weapons beyond words, bluff, and the
politics of the Great Game. And the Black Robes were
no fools. Mara took an inward grip on her poise and
answered Sevean directly. 'The cho-ja mages dare nothing,
but act in the cause of justice! This embassy from Chakaha
has come to make amends for the oppression of all our
ancestors.'

Motecha shook his fist. 'This is Forbidden! Any Empire
cho-ja who supports uprising is forsworn! The Great Treaty
Between Races has stood for thousands of years.'

'Thousands of years of cruelty!' Mara flung back. 'Your
precious Forbidden! Your hideous crime against a civilisation
that did nothing more than resist the rapacious
conquest of their lands! I have journeyed to Thuril. I
have seen how the Chakaha cho-ja live. Which of you can
say the same, magician?' The lack of the honorific 'Great
One' was lost on few in the room. Many Lords gasped in

Emperor

803

Those gathered in the hall stilled expectantly, and all eyes
regarded the Lady who was Servant of the Empire as they
waited to hear what she said.

Mara buried her doubt deep within her heart. Despite their
inference to the contrary, the Chakaha mages had spent
their powers in their warding of the great hall. After long
rest, they might be able to defend her as they had boldly

led the Black Robes to presume. As their magic had
improved with the centuries, so had their understanding

804 M'stress of the Empsre

admiration. The Imperial Whites stood sword-straight in
their ranks, and Jehilia and Justin clasped hands.

The priests maintained solemn formality as Mara continued, '
I have explored the beauty of cities raised by
magic, and the peace of this great culture. I have seen
what our vaunted Empire has stolen from the Cho-ja, and
I am determined to give it back.'

Hochopepa cleared his throat. 'Lady Mara, you had
allies within our ranks, until now. But this . . . obscenity' he
gestured to the Cho-ja magicians - 'will unite us to
a man.

'You aren't united already?' Mara lashed back in sarcasm.
'Did the destruction of my litter and my closest retainers not
indicate your Assembly's decision on my execution?'

Here a few of the Great Ones shifted their weight and
looked abashed, for Tapek's impulsive act had not been
regarded with favor. But the Assembly itself was Tsurani;
that one of their number had shamed his office must never
be admitted in public.

Mara's eyes narrowed. 'As for obscenity, that is a false
charge! Why?' Her wave encompassed the winged beings
who flanked her. 'Because these gentle creatures, who
harbor no ill will to any of you, despite your persecution
of their race, practice arts greater than your own?' She
quieted her voice to a whisper of menacing accusation.
'Hochopepa, how can that be an obscenity to a body
of men who kill children with power because they are
females'

At this disclosure, several Black Robes expelled breaths
in frantic dismay. Motecha whirled and gestured to a nearby
soldier. 'Kill her!' he commanded. 'I order you.'

The Force Commander of the Imperial whites stepped
before Mara, his sword half drawn. 'I will cut down the
first man, soldier or magician, who threatens the good
Servant, even should I die in the attempt. My life and

Emperor

805

honor are pledged to protect the Imperial Family. Before
the gods, I will not forswear my first duty.'

Motecha did not shout, but power radiated in waves from
his person as he demanded, 'Stand away!'

The Imperial Force Commander met the magician's
authoritative gaze. 'I will not, great One.' He snapped
a hand signal.

Other white-clad warriors closed on the dais. Their armor
might be ceremonial, but the blades they carried were sharp,
flashing in the gloom as they drew weapons in a single
motion. Akani rushed out and stayed the single warrior
who had moved to obey Motecha out of fear. 'No, wait.'

Motecha advanced on his colleague as if he faced an
adversary sworn to murder. 'You deny the law!'

'I'd still rather not turn the Imperial Palace into a charnel
house, if you don't mind.' The young magician gave Mara
a wry shrug. 'Good Servant, we have reached a difficult
impasse.' He indicated the Great Ones at his back, many
of them eager to call down immediate attack on her person,
a hundred Imperial Whites, and two cho-ja masters who
might or might not have skills enough to defend. 'If we
don't find a quick solution, many will die.' He smiled
in sour humor. 'I don't know if we must take your
cho-ja friends at their word, or test to see whose magical
prowess is the greater.' He glanced at Motecha. 'But given
the difficulty we had in entering this very chamber, I have
an inkling of the disaster that might result.' Again he
considered Mara, not entirely without warmth. 'I have
no doubt you wish to live and guide your son's steps to
maturity.' He sighed and admitted, 'There are those of

the Assembly who would spend their lives to eradicate
you for this rebellion immediately. Others would prefer
peace, and use the opportunity to study what our cho-ja
counterparts could offer to expand our knowledge of the
great arts. I exhort every man and mage to step back and

806 Mistrcss of the Empsrc

refrain from profitless destruction until we have exhausted
ad other options.'

The cho-ja magician at Mara's right hand furled its
wings; its companion followed suit ant said, 'In this,
perhaps we can assist.' It added a cantrip in its native
language and waved short forearms. An unseen disturbance
seemed to pass across the chamber, and the tension between
the combatants began to leach away.

Motecha fought to preserve his anger. 'Creature!' he
cried. 'Cease your ...' But speech died in his throat.
Against his will, his contorted face relaxed.

The Cho-ja magician chided gently, 'Magician, your fury
clouds reason. Let peace ever be my gift to you.'

Akani studied the magnificently marked carapace, veiled
now in a translucence of folded wings. His shoulders
relaxed and settled. 'Although I revere our tradition,'
he admitted, his regard encompassing his fellows, 'I also
recognise what I sense in these emissaries from Chakaha.
Look well and deeply. They bring us something . . . rare.'
To Motecha he added, 'Their presence is not an offense. We
are fools to ding mindlessly to tradition and not explore
the wonders we are offered.'

Hochopepa pushed to the fore. 'Yes, I feel this, too.' He
sighed. 'I know both . . . wonderment and'- the admission
came with difficulty - 'shame.'

Mara broke the stillness, 'Can any Great One deny that
nothing of hate or anger motivates this act of kindness?'

Hochopepa allowed the wave of calmness to envelop him
wholly. He smiled. 'Not' then his pragmatism reasserted as
he said, 'First, your son's ascension to the Throne of Heaven
may be proper according to law. But your transgressions are
. . . unprecedented, Good Servant. We may never be moved
to forgiveness, Lady Mara.'

Muted muttering resumed among some of the Lords in
the hall, but no open opposition arose. Motecha added,

Emperor

807

'The Assembly's course is clear. We cannot accept as
Justin's regent a ruler who has defied us. The precedent
is dangerous. We are outside the law for valid reasons.,
As he calmly studied Mara, all anger gentled from him
by the workings of cho-ja magic, Motecha's clear reason
stirred agreement among his colleagues. 'I have accepted
Justin's coronation, but that does not free Lady Mara of
responsibility for her disobedience. When she opposed us,
she repudiated the law!'Across the space before the imperial
dais, he locked gazes with Mara. 'You dishonor your rank
and heritage if you shelter behind alien magic, Lady of the
Acoma! You must reject cho-ja protection and voluntarily
embrace your due punishment. Justice must be served.'

'Indeed,' said Mara softly. Her shoulders stayed straight
only out of habit. She had no more ploys left; she alone
was near enough to perceive the fine tremors of exhaustion
that played through the cho-ja mages. The calming spell had
been called up from reserves that were already exhausted.
They had no hidden miracles in them to offer. Too quietly
for anyone but those closest to her and the cho-ja to
overhear, she said, 'You did your best. We have won a
review of the terms of the great treaty, no matter what
becomes of me.'

The mage to her left stroked her wrist with a gentle
forelimb. 'My Lady,' it intoned in her mind, 'among our
kind your memory will never die.'

Mara forced her chin up. To all who were gathered in the
audience hall she said, 'I once thought to dedicate my life
to service in the Temple of Lashima. But fate decreed that I
assume the mantle of the Acoma. I will be heard. The gods
have given into my care more than my house and my family.'

Her voice strengthened, carrying into the farthest corners of
the domed chamber. 'I have undertaken to change traditions
that have shackled us into stagnation. I have seen cruelty,
injustice, and the profligate waste of worthy lives. For this

808 M`stress of the Emp~re

have I set myself up as midwife to a rebirth, without which
we as a people will die.' No one interrupted while she drew
breath. 'You all know of the enemies I have defeated. They
have varied in their cunning from base to brilliant.'

She looked from face to face, seeing her appeal touch
some of those before her. Motecha and many others simply
listened. 'Our Ruling Lords craved power for honor, for
prestige, for the enjoyment of themselves, with no thought
for the suffering of subjects under their sway. Our noble
families and clans play the Game of the Council for stakes
that-spill blood to no purpose! To kill me in the name of
justice, before my son has achieved manhood and can rule
without guidance from a regent, would be to condemn the
Nations to stagnation and ruin again. Our Empire will fall,
for our flaws. That is the price of my death, Great Ones.
That is the epitaph your justice will write on our future.
That is the cost our people must pay for your privilege of
acting outside the law!'

Silence claimed the audience hall while all present pondered
the import of Mara's words. She herself stood rigid,
while behind her the priests shuffled in their ranks and
whispered among themselves. Pride forbade Mara to look
around. She saw the concern on Hokanu's face. Mara dared
not acknowledge his worry for her, not with so much as a
glance. To meet her husband's eyes would be to lose her
grip and break down weeping in public.

She stood statue-straight, as a Servant of the Empire and
a daughter of the Acoma, and prepared to meet her fate.

The magicians were once more unsettled, the effects of
cho-ja magic wearing thin.

'She's gone too far now,' Shimone murmured. 'No
argument can save her, for our Assembly is answerable
to no law. This must not be misconstrued as a privilege.
It is our right!'

Fumita averted his face; Hochopepa looked troubled.

Emperor

809

Sevean said, 'You will die, Lady Mara. Cast off the
alliance of your emissaries from Chakaha, or they will
perish with you. I say they cannot defend you. When we
destroy you, the priests will return to their rightful place
in the temple and leave politics to others.' Indicating the
High Priest of Jastur and the Sisters of Sibi, he said, 'Or
let them challenge us if they feel they must. We are still
supreme in our arts! Our powers broke the wards over
this hall! Perhaps these cho-Ja have learned to lie in the
lands outside the Empire! I say you attempt to deceive,
Lady Mara, and that you have no means of self-defense.'

Motecha looked startled for a moment. Then his expression
hardened. He studied the Chakaha magicians and
saw they made no gestures to protect Lady Mara. His
eyes narrowed as he felt Sevean's power manifest. Again
Motecha raised his hands, and again his magic coalesced
into a fiery lash of green light. He muttered a harsh
incantation, fierce in his concentration.

This time nothing would stop him and his colleagues
from striking down the Good Servant.

The priests seemed distressed. Many of them stepped
back, as if trying to set distance between themselves and the
Servant of the Empire. Hokanu looked anguished, until his
First Adviser, Dogondi, stepped between, shielding his view
of Mara's plight. 'Don't look, my Lord,' he murmured.

Enthroned on the imperial dais, Jehilia gripped Justin's
hand, while the boy stared at his mother with wide, hard
eyes that had all the fear scoured out of them. 'The Great
Ones will pay,' the young Emperor vowed in a monotone.
'If they kill her, I will see them destroyed!'

Jehilia tugged his hand in anxiety. 'Hush! They will

hear you.'

But the Great Ones had no attention to spare for the
children who sat on the thrones of power. As a body, they
banded together, conjoining their powers with Motecha's
Motecha of the Assembly stiffly accepted his defeat, but
his expression remained implacable. 'The Lady's life is not
ours to take; this has been unequivocally proven. Yet her
right to act as regent is contestable still. Lord Jiro of the
Anasati also held forth a claim to the golden throne. He
acted, as Mara has, to seize power whatever-the cost.
Are not the Lady's ambitions the same, if she rules as
Justin's regent until his twenty-fifth year? Why not have
an Omechan take the post, or a Xacatecas, or one of a
lesser house with no claim upon the Warlordship, perhaps
the Netoha or Corandaro?'

Recovered now from her dose brush with death, and
stern in her resolve, Mara cut off the chance for traditionalist
supporters to seize the opening. 'No. I give you
a choice.'

Stillness rippled through the crowd of priests and courtiers,
from the high dais and its new-made Light of Heaven,
across the band of magicians packed in the broad central
floor, to the double doors by the entry, still presided over
by the requisite pair of heralds, and the stiff rows of
Imperial Whites. All waited upon Lady Mara to hear
her unprecedented intent. Mara ascended one stair of the
dais. Over the sea of watching faces, she raised her voice.
'I could stay within these halls, acting as my son's regent.
His rule would be held stable by an alliance of Lords who
understand, as all eventually must, that change must come
to the Empire. The Cho-Ja would mediate willingly as allies
to enforce a new order that will end the wrong done them
centuries ago. Their warriors will stop internal bickering
between noble houses and avert this civil war. For Justin's
first action as ninety-second Emperor will be to free them
from all constraints imposed by humans.'

Mara paused for a steadying breath. But before insurrection
could stir Ruling Lords to shout her down, she;
hurried on.
'I offer peaceful change! As senior adviser to the late
Emperor, I know the workings of imperial government. As
Servant of the Empire, I submit that I alone hold the power
and the prestige among both Ruling Lords and the populace
to quell the riots. The alternatives are plain. The Omechan

~have already taken the field against me, laying siege to
Kentosani. They will soon be joined by allies of the late

Lord Jiro, and other Lords who support the traditionalist
party. If this trend is not stopped, we shall have civil war

unmatched, to the very ruination of the Nations we profess
;                to serve.

Hochopepa coughed drily. 'That justification has been
offered in the past, my Lady. The bloodshed in most
instances was none the less for the argument.'

Mara gestured in repressed anger, that she should,
even by implication, be apportioned the motives of her
power-hungry past enemies. 'Bloodshed, you say, magician?
For what end? There is no warlord's mantle left to be won.
The High Council is abolished!'

Many Lords stirred in unsettled protest at this, but again
Mara overrode them. 'Our taste for murderous political
infighting must be stopped. The Game of the Council shall
no longer be a justification for war and assassination. Our
concept of honor must be revitalised, and our.traditions
that endorse cruelty rejected. We shall be a nation of
laws! Whatever the crime, from lowest to highest, every
man and woman must be equally answerable to imperial
justice. From this new code of decency not even our Light
of Heaven's actions shall be exempt.'

Motecha waved a fist. 'But we are outside the law!'

Mara descended the stair and advanced until only the rail

that separated the high dais from the Emperor's petitioners
stood between her and the packed ranks of Great Ones.
Her gaze met Motecha's squarely, then swept over his
black-robed fellows who crowded on either site. 'Every
man and woman,' she insisted firmly. 'No Ruling Lord
who does murder shall be applauded, even should the
traditional forms be observed. No beggar, no slave, and
no child of noble birth shall fail to be lawfully punished
for criminal acts; you of the Assembly most of all. Your
kind will no longer be free to keep hideous secrets: to kill
baby girls and women who manifest the power.'

Muttering arose as this time her accusation was lout
enough to be fully public and not only Black Robes were
inflamed to a shifting of feet. 'Yes!' Mara cried over the
rising tumult that swept through the Lords and courtiers.
'I speak the truth! The Assembly has done murder for years
beyond counting, and for reasons our gods would never
sanction.'

The priest of Lashima brandished his staff of office,
streamers and corcara shell tokens waving to garner attention. '
Listen to the Lady. She does not lie to make her case.
Last season a young woman who was to be tested as an
acolyte was taken from the very temple courtyard. She has
not been seen by our priest or her family since the day the
Great One came for her.'

Hokanu looked faintly sick; among the Black Robes,
Fumita stared at the floor. He did not glance toward his
son. More than a few noblemen of the court showed shock
that daughters called to serve by the Great Ones were not
still alive in the city of Magicians. Angry eyes swung toward
the Black Robes, while Mara continued her oratory quickly
to redirect a mounting wave of ill feeling. 'As a community,
you should continue to govern yourselves - as must the
Lords of each family ...' Relief visited the nobles at
this assurance of their rulers' prerogatives. 'Within the
law!' Mara snapped. 'But the Assembly will no longer
be proprietors of privilege. The study of arcane arts will
not be theirs to dictate. Any who practice magic must have
license to freely pursue their art. Those lesser magicians,
and women who develop arcane talent, may study under
the Assembly or not, as it pleases them! Those that prefer
to seek knowledge elsewhere may do so.'

The Chakaha mage nearest to the Great Ones raised a
forelimb. In gentle tones it offered, 'We will be glad to teach
any who seek wise use of their gifts.'

Though the offer may have mollified some magicians,
others looked vexes as Mara added, 'I have walked in the
shoes of a captive, in Thuril, and I have shared imperial
decisions, under Ichindar. I alone in-this company can assert
the validity of the claim that every man, woman, and child
deserves protection. Only when this' - she frowned as she
sought the term that her beloved Kevin had mentioned
with such passion - 'Great Freedom is bestowed upon
us all will any one of us be safe. The Game of the
Council has become both perilous and bloody beyond
endurance, and I would see that end. True honor does
not condone murder. True power must equally shield the
weak that we, for centuries, have thoughtlessly trampled
under our feet.'

Motecha pressed forward, leaning across the railing
in ferocious contention. Mara looked back at him in

contempt. She addressed him alone, but her words carried
to the farthest reaches of the crowded hall. 'You Black
Robes have no right to destroy that which is not pleasing

to you. The gods did not gift you with magical talent so

that you could take lives at whim.'

The High Priest of Juran banged his white-striped staff

on the floor. 'The Good Servant speaks truth.'

Another Black Robe, lately arrived with the last contingent
from the City of Magicians pushed through the ranks
of his brethren to join Motecha. Tapek shed the inhibition
instilled by his recent disgrace. His hair was pushed back,
and his cheeks inflamed in passionate repudiation. 'You
seek to strip us of ancient rights!'
'Power is used at the discretion of those who hold it,'
the Lady returned, unafraid, although she stood but an
arms reach away. 'You should understand that above
all others, magician. Your colleagues have been poor
stewards, setting themselves up in arrogance, usurping
the judgment that is the rightful province of heaven. With
your attempt at my execution stayed - no, canceled! by
the power of the gods, today it is I who have the
power.'

The other magicians exchanged unsettled glances, but
none had words to add. Their magic had been negated,
rendered powerless over this woman who had handed
them a failure they were ill prepared to reverse. They
had no precedent to fall back on; no point around which
to rally.

Only Hochopepa's gaze remained upon Mara. 'You
mentioned a choice?'

Had the circumstances been of less import, and the
chamber of audience's occupants been one whit less tense,
Mara might have smiled at the stout magician's sharpness.
'Yes, Great One, a choice,' she announced loudly. 'For
centuries your Assembly has enjoyed authority-without
responsibilities. You Black Robes have done as you pleased
for "the Good of the Empire," no matter how whimsical,
perverse, or destructive the act may have been.'
Unmentioned behind her words were the memory of two
young children, slaughtered by their Minwanabi father
as a consequence of the disgrace forced upon him by
Great Ones. Although Tasaio had been an enemy, Mara
yet found the murder of his heirs abhorrent, a tragedy
the more unforgivable because it might have been prevented
by the very Assembly that had condemned the
father. Sharply she concluded, 'Since our community of
magicianS has shown little inclination to self-discipline,
now comes an accounting. You may do as I have bid,

:
.

and be about your own affairs in your city of fearful,
inward-looking men - the gods have mercy upon you-
or you may take the only other course that will avert
unbridled war.'

Hochopepa's round face furrowed in distaste, and he
tapped one foot uncomfortably. 'I suspect what that may
be.'

'Do you?' Mara withdrew an ornate dagger from her
robe sash and reversed it, pointing it toward her breast.
'The gods may have declared it is not my time to die.
But I can still exercise my free will as Lady of the
Acoma. If you choose, I can take my own life, now,
in expiation for breaking your stated edict. If I do this,
Justin shall abdicate, and return home as Lord of the
Acoma. Jehilia, his wife, will reign, and her husband
will be consort only, taking vows never to raise his
hand against you, or any other Black Robe.' Mara's
eyes narrowed as she delivered her final line, and the
blade in her hand never quivered. 'But then you must
rule.'

Hochopepa actually grinned. Shimone and Akani nodded,
while Tapek appeared only befuddled. 'Lady, what are
you saying?' the redheaded magician asked. ~

'You only have the power to destroy, to wage war, or
oppose,' declared Mara. 'My allies shall not resist. Before
sundown, if you so command, I can honorably end my
life by the blade.' Her glance swept the hall, pausing
only briefly to review the assorted nobles who strained to
catch every word, who even yet hoped of catching some
mix-step by which they could advance themselves over
their neighbors. Her blade might be plunged home, and
the Game of the Council resume as if she had never lived;
as if the dreams of a murdered Emperor and a barbarian
slave had never started to precipitate change. The moment
was at hand to decide the future. The priests waited upon
their gods, and prayed for fate to favor them. Focusing
on Motecha and Tapek in particular, Mara delivered her
summary. 'Oh, you may find another willing to play
Emperor or Warlord for a time. The Omechan would
fall over themselves for the honor, never doubt - until
an ambitious neighbor or rival decides it is time to upset
the succession.

'But consider this: the illusion is ended. Men now
know that the Assembly can be opposed. The temples
will not be content to be relegated to a secondary role.
Be assured that the last act of the Emperor Justin will
be to emancipate the cho-ja, so that they may again use
magic to raise their glass cities in the sun. Lacking willing
soldiers, how will you magicians keep order? How will
you stop the bickering and power plays between Lords
to whom tradition has allocated the trappings of honor?
The Game of the Council is a dead end, but our Ruling
Lords for the most part are too contentious or too greedy
to create a new order. Are you magicians prepared to
put on armor and pick up a sword? Tapek? Sevean?
Motecha?'

The confounded expressions upon the faces of the
three so named were comical. Never had they considered
the prospect of dirtying their hands in battle! And
yet, with their weaknesses exposed, they recognised that
magic by itself would no longer command awe. Others
as bold as Mara would start uprisings, and the Assembly
would be pressured by politics and circumstance to take
sides. They would have no choice but to absent themselves
from scholarly study to manage the mechanics of
governance.

To a body accustomed to acting at the whim of the
individual, the prospect was distastefully daunting

Motecha looked distressed. Sevean edged unobtrusively
behind Shimone, while Tapek masked dismay behind
bluster. 'We are not a council of Lords, given to haggling
over trivia! Our calling is loftier than mandating the
punishment of warring Houses!'

Hochopepa actually laughed.

Mara gave a demure bow. Still the blade remained in her
hand, unswervingly pointed toward her breast. Her eyes
were stony. 'Those are your choices, Great One. Either
administrate this Empire or cease interfering with those of
us who must.'

In the face of his colleagues' dumbfounded stillness,
Hochopepa waved a weary arm. 'It is over.'

Tapek yet looked ready to argue, but Akani intervened.
'I agree. The Assembly as a body will no more wish
to govern the Empire than we have in the past. Gods
above, our debates have extended for days in deciding
a single issue!' Unable to restrain a loaded glance at
Shimone and Hochopepa, he sighed, then bowed gravely
to the Servant of the Empire. 'Lady, you shall not take
your life before sundown. The public would create too
much outcry, and my colleagues are likely to be blamed.
Our choice is clear: chaos or a new order. You were
first to see that not all of us hold enough command
of our nature to kill without hesitation. Most magicians,
in fact, would be hard set to harm an insect.
No. Our might over the Empire has arisen from blind
obedience over the years. Without that, we are . . . powerless.'

'
Powerless!' Tapek fumed. 'Not I, Akani.'

Fumita restrained the red-haired magician with a crushing
grip. 'Tapek, one foolish act shamed you nearly beyond
forgiveness. Listen to reason for a change! Mara does not
act for herself. She never has, could you but see that. You
will never win over the Assembly to endorse civil war and
chaos. And bloodshed unequaled is what we would have
if you and your cadre of young-bloods do not accept the

820 Mistress of tl~e Empire

inevitable. I strongly suggest that you start repairing your
reputation by appearing on the walls and commanding
the attacking armies to cease fire and lay down their
weapons.'

'I will go with Tapek,' Shimone announced. He turned
a stern, even pitiless look at his younger colleague, then
grasped his teleportation device and disappeared. Few
magicians in the Empire dared to cross Shimone when he
was aroused. Still, Fumita showed no sign of releasing his
hold until Tapek lowered his eyes and conceded the point.
The young magician was then freed to vanish and rejoin
Shimone.

Hochopepa managed an affable shrug before the panoply
of religious orders and ranking Lords backing Mara. 'I have
no wish to govern, nor do I intend to attempt to murder
wholesale the most powerful priests in the Empire.' This
statement was pointedly directed toward Motecha, who
sought the support of other colleagues to back him, but
found his cadre dissolving. In Shimone's absence, Sevean
had sidled behind Fumita. Many more magicians were
nodding agreement to the fat magician's capitulation.
Gently Hochopepa reached out and removed the dagger
from Mara's fingers.

Then he announced loudly, 'A remarkable man, the
magician Milamber, from Midkemia, once exhorted that
our Empire had a stagnant culture brought into decline
by our rigid adherence to our traditions. I think he
was right' - the stout magician awarded Mara and the
magnificence of the Chakaha mages a smile of admiration '
for why else would the gods have preserved this remarkable
woman?'
To Mara he added, 'Lady, if the Light of Heaven may
allow, we will withdraw and meet formally, but you may
rest assured what our official position will be.' Then he
was first among the Black Robes to step forward and
repeat his bow of homage to emphasise that the boy on
the dais was beyond dispute the ninety-second Light of
Heaven.

The magicians as a group followed suit, most of them
humiliated enough to do so quietly, though a few in the
back were heard to grumble. Fumita gave these dissenters
a stern glare, and the Chakaha mages fixed each with an
agate black eye that reminded of the singular ability of the
cho-ja hive mind to remember.

Mara felt a giddy relief sweep through her at the
unequivocal capitulation of the most fearful enemies she
had ever dared to provoke. As the Black Robes acknowledged
her son's sovereignty, she went weak at the knees.
Hokanu's heart-warming perception anticipated her need,
and gratefully Mara accepted his support as he stepped to
her side and put his arm around her waist.

As the Great Ones filed out, and the central floor of the
great hall slowly cleared, Lord Keda, Imperial Chancellor,
swept forward in his glittering robes of office. Over his
earlier bout of nerves, the old man had lost none of his
command or his gifts as an orator as he announced, 'As
chancellor, let me be first among your nobles to swear
my loyalty to Emperor Justin.' He knelt and,uttered the
time-honored oaths, and tension seemed to flow from the
crowd. Suddenly what might have been an armed camp
was transformed into a hall of men kneeling, repeating
the words of devotion to a boy who had been conceived
as the get of a slave, and who had risen from being heir
of the Acoma to become the ninety-second Emperor of
Tsuranuanni.

When the newly sworn members of his court arose,Justin
squirmed on the dais, distress obvious on his face. To his
mother, and the father who had adopted him for his own,
he whispered loudly, 'You instructed me on everything else,

but what do I do now?'

oz' Msstrcss ot t/,e Empire

Jehilia looked mortified by his lapse.

Not a few of the priests stifled chuckles behind their
ceremonial masks, while Hokanu pulled off his battle helm
and laughed outright. 'Tell your people, "Let the celebration
commence!"'

Justin jumped up from his throne, all but dislodging
the heavy golden helm with its crown piece that denoted
imperial majesty. Dragging his lady wife by the hand, he
looked far from decorous - more like a boy who had
mischief in mind the moment his elders were not looking.
'Let the celebration commence!' he shouted.

A cheer rocked the great hall of audience, more deafening
for the fact that the siege engines of the Omechan had fallen
silent. No more rocks crashed down upon the Imperial
Precinct. And when the voices and the clamor had quelled
to a more tolerable level, the great gongs in the temples of
the Twenty Gods pealed out, calling the populace into the
streets to accept largesse in the name of Justin, ninety-two
times Emperor of Tsuranuanni.

In the midst of the commotion as the great hall emptied,
and the imperial heralds cried the news throughout the
city, the small, mouselike figure of Jican descended upon the
palace staff. The great bulk of the imperial hadonra caused
him only the briefest pause.After an agitated argument,
the immense official backed down, huffed words to the
effect that royal propriety was going to be irretrievably
ruined, and stalked off to his quarters. Jican turned
his tongue-lashing on the rest of the palace staff, and
within minutes the imperial household was turned upon
its collective ear. They would produce a festival for their
new Emperor, Jican commanded, whether it killed them all
to the least of the pot boys and drudges. His determination
proved infectious. Within hours the nobles in residence had
exchanged battle armor for silk robes, and entertainers
were converging upon the city officials, vying for the

Emperor

823

honor of providing music and poetry. Throughout the
city, celebrations began as word spread that the new Light
of Heaven had been chosen, and more, that Lady Mara,
Servant of the Empire, had taken the stewardship of the
Nations.

.

.,

33

Imperial Council

Lamps burned.

Their light transformed the night into kaleidoscopic
patterns of colors as silk-robed revelers danced in the
streets and masked players staged joyous entertainment.
The sounds of lacquered bells and laughter replaced the
thudding impacts caused by siege engines. Within an ornate
suite in the royal apartments of the Imperial Palace, Mara
sat before a painted screen. The noise of the happy populace
gave her deep satisfaction, but the half-smile of contentment
that curved her lips was all for the small girl child who
lay sound asleep in her lap. The Lady's expression of
tranquillity was so profound that Hokanu, arriving at the
door, hesitated to disturb her.

But she had always been sensitive to his presence. Though
he made no sound, Mara looked up. Her expression
flowered into a smile of welcome. 'Hokanu.' Her greeting
expressed all, from tenderness to deep love to the ache of
separation that had lasted through the late troubled times.

The Lord of the Shinzawai crossed the floor, his step a
whisper on tile. He wore silk, not armor, and had replaced
his studded battle sandals for leather-soled ones with cloth
ties. He reached his wife's side, knelt, and offered his hand
to Kasuma. The little one grasped his finger, comforted by
his presence although she did not fully waken.

'She has grown so much!' Mara murmured. When she
had left for Thuril, Kasuma had been but an infant. Now
she was a toddler, already trying her first words. The
Lady's finger traced the line of her daughter's brows.
'She's going to have your scowl,' Mara mused to her

Impenal Council     825

husband. 'Probably that means she's inherited your stubbornness
, also.'

Hokanu chuckled. 'She's going to need it.'

Mara joined him in laughter. 'Surely. She had better
develop a sharp tongue, too, if she's to keep your cousin
Devacai in line. Perhaps we should send her to Isashani of
the Xacatecas for her finishing?'

Hokanu was unusually silent at this. Mara missed his
moment of stillness, touched as she was by memories of
Nacoya, the irascible nurse who had raised and schooled
her to the skills of Ruling Lady. Then reminiscence was
abandoned as Hokanu's hands lifted Kasuma and settled
her gently on her sleeping mat. He reached next for his
wife, with the intent to perform the same office.

'Your battles have not depleted you, I see,' Mara said
as her husband settled beside her, and she began to work
free the ties on his robe. 'Thank the gods for that, for I
have missed you sorely. I don't think I could have endured
another night of Lying awake wondering whether you were
alive or dead, or whether our children were going to fall
as the victims of politics . . .' She paused, letting Hokanu's
hands smooth away the unpleasant memory of dread.
Somewhere in the city, a temple gong sang notes of felicity,
and a laughing couplet of dancers ran on light feet past the
window. Mara settled in the crook of her-husband's arm.
'You came from the imperial suite, I presume. How is our
Justin handling himself ?'

Hokanu muffled a snort of laughter in the warmth of his
wife's hair. 'The little barbarian,' he said, when he could
speak. 'The boy came to me with the shakes, his face as
red as his hair, asking if he was expected to perform his
husbandry office with Jehilia. Tonight.'

Mara grinned. 'I should have thought he'd ask that
before anybody else would have found time to inform
him. He's stared down the shifts of the maids since he

826 Mistress of the Empire

was big enough to climb up on the furniture. What did
you say?'

'When I could keep a straight face, you mean?' Hokanu
said. 'I told him that he'd have to wait for the privilege
until his manhood ceremony at twenty-five.'

Playfully shoving her husband, Mara said, 'You didn't!'

Hokanu grinned. 'I don't think I've ever seen regret and
relief so evenly mixed. Then I explained that Jehilia, being
two years older than he, might decide she wished to visit his
bedchamber when she came of age, and that as he would
be only twenty-three, it would be her decision to make.'

Now Mara exploded into merriment. 'Oh, that's perfect!
The poor boy thinks he's to remain a chaste husband for
another eleven years!'

Hokanu shrugged. 'He'll figure it out soon enough.'

'Don't let Jehilia discover what you've told Justin. She'll
make his life miserable.'

Hokanu planted a kiss on Mara's forehead. 'At least
he'll think twice before he tries pushing the girl into a
fishpond again.'

'She's Empress.' Mara chuckled. 'She'd have every legal
right to pull him in after her.'

'And I expect one day, in a year or two, the rough play
will turn friendly and Justin's concerns about husbandry
duty will vanish.' Moving so that his face was above
hers, Hokanu said, 'And speaking of husbandry duties
...' Conversation died as Hokanu's lips found hers, and
their embrace slowly blossomed into passion.
Much later, the lanterns still shone. The revelers in the
streets were fewer, but no less joyously raucous. The Lady
of the Acoma and the Lord of the Shinzawai lay twined
close, replete with their lovemaking. Neither felt inclined
toward sleep. Both had much on their mind, and this was
the first peaceful moment they had gained in which to speak
of personal issues.

Imperial Council

.~.

;::

.,

..

827

Hokanu was first to broach the subject. 'Lady, with Justin
now responsible for continuing the imperial line, you are
again left without any heir for the Acoma.'

Mara turned in her husband's arms, her hands tracing
the firmness of a shoulder yet muscled from the sword. She
took a moment to reply. 'I am content. If the line should end,
there is no more honorable way. And it may be that Jehilia
will be fecund, or that Justin will father sons on a later wife.
His issue might be numerous enough that one can take on
my mantle without harm to the imperial succession.'

A moment later, she added, 'I could also adopt a child.'

But both husband and Lady knew this was not something
she would do. Tradition required that the child have some
connection to the adopting family, and no direct blood
relatives survived the early days of the Minwanabi war
upon the Acoma. Some distant linkage could be discovered,
no doubt, but the Acoma line had too old and honorable a
name to bestow upon a child of obscure descent.

Hokanu smoothed Mara's hair. 'The problem has already
been resolved,' he murmured.

Mara felt the slight tension enter his body; she knew!
He had done something irrevocable, which he was certain
before he spoke that she would argue. 'What.have you
done, Hokanu?' Her voice was sharp, with fear, worry,
and concern. And then, by his very reluctance to answer,
guessed. 'Kasuma,' she blurted. 'You have-'

He stole her words, said them for her, but without her
snap of outrage. 'I have given her over to the Acoma.'

Mara surged up, but he caught her. He stopped her rush
of words with a gentle finger, and shook her, tenderly, to
subside. 'Wife, it has been done! You cannot revoke the
oaths sworn this day. Fumita and the priests of a half-dozen
orders were witnesses, and the altar of the Temple of Juran
was the place where Kasuma's heirship to the Shinzawai
was renounced. Then I swore her to the Acoma, as is

828 Mistress of the Empire

my right as her father. She will continue your house and
lineage, as is fitting and proper. You will know far better
than anyone what instruction a girl needs to become a
Ruling Lady.'

Hokanu's finger fell away, leaving Mara struck speechless
- not with happiness, Hokanu understood, but with hurt
and rage that was entirely for his own sake. 'You will leave
yourself heirless!' she said finally. 'It's too dangerous in
these times, with Devacai plotting to assume your mantle.
The Omechan and other Ionani allies may relent and swear
fealty to Justin, but many Lords with old jealousies will .
foment traditionalist rebellion. You will face their threats
for years to come, Hokanu. Justin and Jehilia need every
advantage we can give them, and that means a secure
Shinzawai succession!' Her voice became half strangled by
tears as she added, 'Do not tempt our enemies to target you
for murder! I could not bear to see you die like your father,
struck down for someone else's venal ambition!'

Hokanu gathered her dose. 'You are right to fear,' he
murmured into her hair, 'just as I was right to place Kasuma
in custody of the Acoma heirship. She is my daughter!' The
ring in his voice was all pride now; there never had been
any rejection of the girl in his heart. Mara knew a pang of
sorrow that she had ever known doubt.

'I am her father,' Hokanu repeated. 'And to my knowledge,
there are still laws and traditions that support my
right to make this decision.' He traced the tense line of her
jaw. 'My Lady, you are overruled in this matter, perhaps
for the first time in your life.'

Mara's reply was an explosion of weeping. To have

Kasuma as heir was a joy, yes, but she would feel that -]
later. For now she was consumed by the hurt of knowing
what Hokanu renounced to give her this supreme gift and
sacrifice.

She could not help but know what he held back: that he

;

,
Imperial Council

829

would have no Shinzawai child of her loins to grow and
inherit the blue.

'I have dozens upon dozens of cousins,' he was saying,
his voice compelled to lightness. 'They are not all avaricious
like Devacai. In fact, most are honorable and worthy. It
might ease my family difficulties if I chose among my rivals
for an heir. That would divide Devacai's faction.'

Mara hoarsely found her voice. 'You will take no
concubine.'

Her tone did not indicate a question. And her husband's
steely stillness became answer in itself, until he acknowledged
the truth. 'My lady, you are all the woman I could
wish in this world. So long as you are at my side, I will
have no other.'

Mara bit her lip. In the undertones behind her husband's
statement she heard the personal longings he had hardened
himself to deny. A like hardness entered her own heart. But
she said nothing of her inward resolves as Hokanu's arms
dosed around her and his lips sought hers in the light.

The doors to the grand audience hall boomed open,
and trumpeters and drummers sounded fanfare. In the
open square outside, those commoners still celebrating
the new Emperor's accession fell silent out of respect.
Two imperial heralds stepped to the entry, their matched
voices pealing out the announcement that the inaugural

council of the ninety-second Light of Heaven was officially
called to session. They followed by shouting the
list of names of those to appear before his Imperial
Majesty, Justin.

First to be summoned were the high officials and servants
who had held office under Ichindar. These all filed inside
as they were named, dressed in dazzling finery, though
their faces were sober or apprehensive. The Lord of the
Keda led the procession. He advanced between the ranks

830 Msstress of the Empsre

of assembled Lords and made his bow before the railing
that fronted the pyramidal dais.

Young Justin formally afffirmed his continuance in the
office of Imperial Chancellor. Lord Keda made deep
obeisance, both to the boy ruler and to the Lady who
sat on a cushion among the attending priests, five ranks
up on the pyramid.

Lady Mara wore red from the ceremony of remembrance
held for her dead at dawn. Deep sorrow left her peaked,
weary, and somewhat hollow-checked. Lord Keda felt a
moment of compassion for her. She had won out over
widespread contention to achieve an impossible victory:
yet her triumph had come at grievous cost. Keyoke and
her advisers Saric and Incomo had all given their lives; many
more minor officers and warriors had fallen in the strife.
House Acoma held but a handful of its ranking servants
on this side of the Wheel of Life. Lord Keda offered the
Lady his personal salute. Not many rulers in the Empire
would have risked so much, or sacrificed nearly all they
held dear, in the name of the common good.

The heralds pealed out another title, and Lord Keda made
his bow and withdrew. He took his place amid the other
Lords as, one by one, the ministers of the court were called
forth. Many were given appointment to their former posts.
A few were promoted. ethers were sent away in shame,
though no reason was given in public.

In time, Lord Keda noted that the boy Justin took his cues
from a slight, dark figure who wore the armor of an Imperial
White and was placed in the position of bodyguard at the
boy's right hand. Lord Keda studied the man, whose face
seemed to lose itself in shadow. He had never seen the officer
before, which was odd. The ranking Imperial Whites were
all known to him, in his long years of service to Ichindar.
Lord Keda might have raised voice in concern, except that
Lady Mara seemed complaisant.

At length the list of officials drew to its end. Next, rank
after rank of Ruling Lords approached, to swear obedience
to the Light of Heaven. For a few the moment was clearly
joyous, while for others it was bitter. But when the last
of the families of the Empire had knelt, Justin rose and
spoke. 'My Lords, you who were once the Council of the
Nations, I welcome your acceptance of our assess' - He
stumbled over the word, ant the hovering imperial officer
whispered to the boy -'accession to the Throne of Heaven.
Some of you were our enemies, but are no longer. From *is
day forward, there is a general amnesty, and all rebellion
against the Empire is forgiven. Let it be known also'- again
the officer prompted the boy- 'that all blood feuds and
rivalries are abolished. He who raises his hand against his
neighbor raises his hand against me, I mean us. The Empire.'
The boy flushed, but no one laughed at his awkwardness.
For with that pronouncement, the young Light of Heaven
had decreed that this Empire would indeed be run by laws,
and that anyone who sought to rekindle the bloody Game
of the Council would do so at peril of imperial wrath.

The Emperor nodded to his heralds, and a fiery lock of
hair slipped out from under his golden helm. His freckled
face burst into a smile as the Chief Herald called out,
'Lujan, Force Commander of the Acoma! Come before
your Emperor!'

Lujan made his appearance, looking half stunned with
surprise and embarrassment. He wore his best armor,
for Mara's honor, but had never dreamed he would be
formally presented at court. He knelt before the new
Emperor and the mistress he had long served, who seemed
a stranger with the tiara of regent pressed over her mourning
headdress of red.

Mara spoke to her Force Commander in words that only
the privileged few who occupied the foremost ranks might
hear. 'Saric, Keyoke, and Irrilandi all gave their lives in this,
our greatest victory. You are summoned, Lujan, by your
Emperor, to accept reward for your years of praiseworthy
service. Let your deeds and your loyalty stand as example
to all warriors in the Nations. None living has matched
your steadfastness in our service.'

Lujan still seemed stunned as Lady Mara arose and
descended from her place of state. She took his hand,
bade him rise, and led him down the rail to one side,
where two Imperial Whites opened a small gate, and
snapped him a crisp salute as the Lady drew him through.
Force Commander Lujan, who had commanded armies
against the express edict of the Assembly, turned pale with
apprehension. He moved carefully, as if the air were too
rare to breathe, and the floor under his sandals too highly
polished to walk upon.

On the high dais, the Emperor Justin beckoned him
onward, upward, to a height of exaltation he had never
dreamed.

In the end he hesitated, and Lady Mara had to give him
a: surreptitious push.

He recovered himself short of a stumble; he, who was
swordsman enough never to be caught off balance. He
managed somehow to ascend the stair without mishap.
At the top, he bowed at Justin's feet, his green plumes
sweeping the carpet.

'Get up, Lujan.' The boy was grinning with the same
affection he had shown the first time he had touched his
teacher with a lunge in training with his wooden sword.

Lujan seemed too stunned to respond. At length the
Imperial White with the shadowy face prodded him on
with a toe and murmured something nobody else could
hear. The Force Commander of the Acoma shot upright
as if kicked and looked down on the face of his Emperor.

Justin's grin took on an insolent edge. 'The Emperor
hereby grants to Lujan, officer of the Acoma, official

Imperi~sl Council 833

patent to commence his own house. Let it be heard
by all: this warrior's children and servants and soldiers
shall wear colors of his own designation, and swear upon
the natami of House Lujan. The sacred stone awaits its
new Lord and master in the Temple of Chochocan. The
papers of patent will be given by the hand of the Good
Servant, Mara.' Justin's happiness threatened to brim over
into laughter. 'You may bow to your Emperor and swear
fealty, Lord Lujan of the House of Lujan.'

Lujan, who had never in his life been at a loss for a
glib reply, could only gape like a fish. He made his bow,
and somehow beat a decorous retreat down the stairs But
when at the bottom he found himself confronted by Lady
Mara, the eyes that met hers were suspiciously bright at
the corners.

'My Lady,' Lujan said huskily, disbelief holding him
confounded.

Mara inclined her head. 'My Lord.' She caught his hand
as he started to flinch back at the title, raised it, and placed
in his palm three scrolls. Only one was tied off with ribbons
of imperial gold. The other two were looped with green,
and set with the shatra seal of the Acoma. ~ ~

Mara smiled. 'My first recruit, the boldest of the grey
warriors ever to swear Acoma service, and my oldest living
friend: I do formally release you now from your vows to
the Acoma natami, with happiness, as you now go on to
serve your own destiny. Today a great house is born. To
the title of Ruling Lord that our Light of Heaven has seen
fit to bestow, the Acoma add gifts of appreciation.' She

gave Lujan's hand a squeeze. 'first, the House of Lujan
shall have title to the estates that were mine by right of
birth. All lands and livestock on the properties adjacent to
Sulan-Qu are henceforward yours to manage and hold for
your heirs, with the contemplation glade to be consecrated
as setting for your house natami.'

834 ' Mistress of the Empire

'My Lady,' Lujan stammered.

Mara overrode him. 'My Lord, with this estate, I as
Lady of the Acoma grant you the service of five hundred
warriors. These shall be made up, first, of all those who
swore covenant to you in your band of grey warriors. The
rest shall be of your choosing, from among those willing to
serve you in the garrison already housed on the Sulan-Qu
estate.'
Lujan recovered enough of his rakish poise now to grin.
'Gods,' he murmured, 'wait till the men hear. They started
out robbing two needra for a meal, and now they will be
officers of my house!' He chuckled, then shrugged, and
might have broken protocol to laugh, when Mara stopped
him with a touch to the last scroll in his hand.

'You are offered a place of honor in Clan Hadama, if
you desire it,' she finished. 'Were Keyoke alive today, he
would say that you learned well. He counted Papewaio as
the son of his heart, after my brother Lanokota. You were
his youngest son . . . and at the last, the one of whom he
was proudest.'

Lujan felt a poignant moment of loss for the old man who
had always treated him fairly, and who had been among the
first to recognise and reward his gifts of command. As if
in salute to his former officer, he touched the scrolls to his
forehead, accepting their-contents with a flourish. 'You are
too generous,' he murmured to Mara. 'If every needra thief
in this Empire realises he might rise so high, you will be the
ruler of mayhem.' Then he turned serious and bowed. 'In
my heart, you shall ever be my mistress, Lady Mara. Let the
colors of House Lujan be grey and green: grey in symbolic
remembrance of my origin, and green, for my service to
Acoma that has led me to this pinnacle of honor.'

'Grey and green are the colors of House Lujan!' cried
the imperial herald by the dais, that all Lords might hear
and take note.

Imperial Council

~l

835

Mara smiled in pleasure at the tribute. 'Now be off!' she
whispered to her gallant former officer. 'Keep the promise
you made me swear to keep you to in Chakaha. Marry a
fine woman, get children, and live to a white old age!'

Lujan snapped off a jaunty salute, spun on his heel,
and marched back through the ranks of his peers, while
the Imperial White at the Emperor's right hand murmured
softly, 'I'll wager he'll be falling down drunk with
celebration within the hour.'

Justin peered up into the familiar face of Arakasi. 'Don't
sound so smug. Your turn will come in due course.'

Though the Acoma Spy Master tipped his young.master
a quizzical look, Justin refused to elaborate upon his
statement. He looked straight ahead, his young shoulders
stifffly square. Not all of the imperial grants made this day
would be as pleasurable as Lujan's patent of Lordship. He
nodded to his herald, and the name of Hokanu of the
Shinzawai was called across the audience chamber.

Now more than one in the ranks of Ruling Lords
exchanged overt glances, many of which hinted at jealousy.
Lady Mara had professed to be a fair regent, but now, not a
few presumed, she would show her venality by having her
husband appointed to some exalted station or.office.

Yet if that were true, Hokanu's face as he approached
the imperial dais was fixed in lines hard as rock. He looked
neither pleased nor annoyed; only determinedly neutral as
he made his bow before the Light of Heaven.

His obeisance was made to Justin; yet his eyes, as he
arose, were turned immovably toward Lady Mara. Neither

did she appear overjoyed to be the subject of her husbands
scrutiny. Stifffly formal, even more pale than she had been
earlier, she stared woodenly ahead as his Imperial Majesty
formally made proclamation.

'Let all present hear and take heed: your Emperor does
as he must for the Good of the Empire. It has been duly

836 Mistress of the Empsre

noted, according to a ceremony in Juran's temple yesterday,
that the child Kasuma has been dedicated by her father to
become the heir to the mantle of the Acoma.'Justin paused,
swallowed, and with a manhood beyond his years forced
his voice to steadiness. 'This has drawn our attention to
the Shinzawai, now an heirless house. By Lady Mara's
bequest, for she has been pronounced barren by the
priests of Hantukama, she has petitioned for divorce.'
Justin lowered his eyes and regarded his feet in discomfort.
'As Light of Heaven, for the Good of the Empire, I have
seen fit to grant her request.'

Murmurs swept the packed chamber.

Hokanu looked stunned, but he did not change expression.
Only his eyes, locked with Mara's, showed a silent
scream of pain.

Justin made a noise behind one wrist that might have
been a smothered sniffle. 'Shinzawai is too great a house,
and too important to this Empire, to invite internal strife
by remaining heirless. Lord Hokanu is hereby commanded
by his Emperor to seek out a bride, and remarry, for the
purpose of begetting sound children.'

It was Mara who descended the dais to deliver the divorce
papers with their crust of imperial seals. She moved against
a shocked silence, and then whispers: for all could plainly
see that she loved her Lord. Her sacrifice stilled the petty
thoughts of even the most ambitious Ruling Lords. She
was not as they had presumed, but a true Servant of
the Empire, acting selflessly even where necessity left her
wounded.

Former Lady and husband met before the dais. Naked
to public regard, they could not fall into each other's arms
and weep. For this, Mara was grateful. Only the pride of
her ancestors prevented her from shouting for appeal. Her
heart wanted no part of this brutal choice. She yearned
only to cast herself at Hokanu's feet and beg him to plead

.,

Imperial Council

837

for a reversal of the papers Justin had tearfully signed that
morning.

She had meant to say nothing, but words burst from her,
without restraint. 'I had to! Dear gods, I love you still, but
this was-' She stopped, reining back tears.

'It had to be,' Hokanu grated back, his voice as shaken
as hers. 'The Empire demands all our strength.'

His dear understanding of necessity was a sword that
cut, a gift that threatened to undermine all of her resolve.
Mara held the scroll with its cruel words and official seals
as if it were glued to her flesh.

Gently, Hokanu took the document from her. 'You will
ever be my Lady,' he murmured. 'I may breed my sons
upon another, but my heart will always be yours.' His
hands were shaking, causing the gold ribbons to flutter
and flash in the light. His eyes were hard with distance
and pain, and he was recalling the priest of Hantukama,
who had once accused him of loving his Lady too much: at
the expense of himself, that gentle holy man had rebuked.
Bitterly, and only now, Hokanu understood the extent of
this truth. Almost, he had allowed his care for Mara to set
House Shinzawai in jeopardy.

The Empire could ill afford any weakness, far less one
caused by an affection of the heart. Mara was right,
hurtful as her petition was to him in this, their hour of
triumph. She had recognised the need for this parting; he
had unknowingly made her choice the more compelling
by his own hard-headedness concerning his disposition of
Kasuma.

His course was clear, if sorrowful. He must accept
at once, lest courage fail him. For the Good of the
Empire, he, too, must make his sacrifice. He reached
out with a gentle finger, tipped up Mara's chin, and
forced her eyes to meet his own. 'Don't be a stranger,
Lady Servant,' he murmured. 'You are always welcome to

838 Mistress of the Empire

my company and my counsel, and you will ever be first in
my affections.'

Mara swallowed, speechless. As always, Hokanu's faultless
understanding held the power to captivate her heart.
She would miss his constant company, and his tender,
solicitous presence in her bed. And yet she, too, knew: if she
did not force this decision upon him, he would die without
a son, heirless. That he should not pass on his gentleness,
and his ability to choose right and merciful action when
necessary, would be a crime against humanity.

'I love you,' she whispered soundlessly.

But he had already bowed and taken his leave, his step
as firm as if he marched into battle.

The watching Lords were awed. Hokanu's courage
humbled them; and Mara's silent pain left them abashed
to a man. The Empire was entering a new order, and it
appeared that the remarkable couple who had arranged its
renaissance were themselves to become a shining example
to them all. Men who had greeted such change with
resentment were forced to reexamination. They had just
witnessed the epitome of honor. To fail to live up to the
standards Lady Mara and Lord Hokanu set was to relearn
the meaning of shame.

On the golden throne, a boy who had just renounced a
beloved father swallowed a lump in his throat. He flashed
a glance to his bride, Jehilia, and swallowed again. Then he
straightened the shoulders that seemed suddenly weighed
down by the drag of the imperial mantle, and waved to his
herald.

Next to be summoned was Lady Mara of the Acoma,
Servant of the Empire.

She seemed at first not to hear, her eyes fixed upon the
empty aisle where Hokanu had lately departed. Then she,
too, straightened, and climbed the stair of the high dais, to
give her bow to the Light of Heaven.

Imperial Council

839

Justin was through with practiced speeches. He could
not bring himself to adhere to the forms he had rehearsed.
'Mother!' he called out, a grin curving his impish mouth.
'To you, who have surpassed every prior Servant of the
Empire in service to our Nations . . .' Justin paused, and
was elbowed in the ribs by Jehilia. He flashed her a surprised
glance, and went on, 'You will accept the regency of our rule
until our twenty-fifth birthday.'

Polite applause swept the audience hall, swelling in
volume until a cheer erupted, first from the Acoma
honor guard, then echoed by the Imperial Whites and
the Shinzawai warriors. Then Lord after Ruling Lord
surged to their feet and shouted in appreciation of Lady
Mara. Justin waved to restore decorum, but order was a
long time returning. Into the ripple of reluctantly suppressed
admiration he called, 'To you, Lady Mara, greatest among
the Servants of the Empire, we see fit to create a new title.'
Justin rose to his feet, hands upraised. 'We name Lady Mara,
Mistress of the Empire!'

The noise became deafening. Mara stood at the center
of all admiring eyes, looking stunned, and pleased, and
saddened.

She had never asked for power or public adulation.
All she had ever striven for was to keep her family
name alive.

How strange it was that in the course of the life the gods
had given her, she had come to see all of the Nations as her
family, and her son, child of a barbarian slave, take the
supreme throne and title Light of Heaven.

Lord Keda's curiosity concerning the mysterious man who

wore the armor of an Imperial White was not satisfied until
afternoon, when the young Emperor called a special, closed
meeting in his private study.

The room was no small chamber but a grand hall in itself,

840 Mistress of the Empire

sparkling with gilt-trimmed screens, and appointed with
ancient paintings. Justin had doffed his imperial armor. For
this meeting he had donned a robe edged in gold, borrowed
from the wardrobe of his predecessor. The fabric hung off
his youthful frame, pinned up at the hem and shoulders
with rare metal fastenings.

Lord Keda entered. He bowed before the low dais upon
which the boy Light of Heaven reclined on cushions, then
glanced with interest at the other assembled personages.

Lady Mara yet wore her mourning red. With her was
the mysterious bodyguard, his hair damp from a recent
bath, and his poised, gaunt body no longer disguised in
white armor. He now wore a nondescript robe that was
subtly bordered in green. The man's face was guardedly
still. Clever hands were folded neetly in his lap. Only
his eyes betrayed his intellect, and they watched, missing
nothing. Quick the fellow would be, Lord Keda assessed;
he had a talent for judging men. This one would react well
in a crisis; except that about him at this moment was a
haunted air of abstraction that made him seem one step
removed from the people in his presence.

Mara noted Lord Keda's keen study. 'Let me introduce
you to Arakasi, a valued servant of the Acoma who
commands our highest respect.'

Lord Keda's interest sharpened. This nondescript man
with his almost inhuman attentiveness: could he be the
fabled Spy Master that had kept the Acoma so miraculously
well informed?

The man answered directly, as if uncannily he could read
Lord Keda's thoughts from the play of expressions on his
face. 'I have resigned from my former post,' he admitted,
his voice like velvet rubbed on stone. 'Once I was Spy
Master for the Acoma. Now I have discovered that life and
nature hold secrets more profound than intrigues fashioned
by men.'
Lord Keda considered this remarkable statement, fascinated
by the man who had uttered it.

But the Emperor they all attended was young yet for
subtle nuances. He squirmed impatiently on his gilded
cushions and clapped his hands to his runner. 'Fetch in
the prisoner.'

Two Imperial Whites entered, flanking a slender man
with bitten nails and shrewd eyes. Lord Keda recognised
Chumaka, who had served the late Lord Jiro as First
Adviser. The Imperial Chancellor frowned, wondering why
he had been summoned to this private council, since his
was not a judicial office. His appointment was more an
administrator's than one of tribunal authority who could
seal an accusation of treason.

For surely Lord Jiro had been behind the assassination
of the Emperor Ichindar; Omechan had inherited the siege
engines, and Omechan armies had been in place to back
the Anasati plot to seize the throne. Chumaka could not
have escaped involvement; all too likely, the deadly plan
had been of his own design.

Mara responded to Lord Keda's trepidation. 'You have
been called here as witness,' she explained quietly, then
faced forward as Chumaka awarded the Emperor a deep
bow. He followed with an obeisance to Mara,, murmuring,
'Great Lady, I have heard of your reputation. I cast myself
at your mercy and humbly beg for my life.'
Lord Keda frowned. The man had been Lord Jiro's
adviser; he had surely been party to the murder of Hokanu's
father, as well as to the poisoning of Lady Mara herself.

That Mara knew this was mirrored in her face. The
expressionless line of her mouth hinted at underlying pain:

but for this man's meddling, and a nearly successful attempt
on her life, she might still be capable of childbearing. The
husband she had been compelled to renounce might yet be
at her side.

842 Mistress of the Empire

Chumaka held his pose of prostration, his hands trembling
slightly. There was no arrogance in him; his humiliation
seemed deeply genuine.

'Justin,' Mara murmured, her tone husky.

The boy gave his mother a glance that hinted at
rebellion.

Mara braced herself, but it was Arakasi who coached
the boy in her place.

'Majesty,' he said in a tone that grated like old rust,
'there are times to hold grudges, and other times to grant
clemency. I urge you to choose as a man, and as Emperor.
Consider wisely. This man who throws himself on your
mercy is the most brilliant foe I have ever known. You've
already pardoned every other enemy in the Nations, but this
one must be specially exempted. Either order him executed,
banish him for life, or swear him to your service and give
him a commission. He is far too dangerous to let run free
inside the Empire.'

Justin's red brows gathered into a frown. He thought long
and hard. 'I cannot decide,' he said at last. 'Mother, this man
has been responsible for more pain than any other. His life
is yours to dispose of as you will.'

The Lady in her red of mourning stirred. She regarded
the thinning hair of the man who crouched at her feet. It
took her a long time to speak. 'Rise, Chumaka.'

The prisoner obeyed, all of his cleverness absent. He
regarded the Lady whose choice would determine his fate,
and by the deep stillness in his eyes, all in the chamber could
see: he knew of no reason under heaven why she should
grant him reprieve. 'As my Lady wills,' he murmured in a
dead voice.

Mara's gaze bored into him. 'Answer me on your honor;
swear by your spirit that will be bound to the Wheel of Life
after this existence shall end: why did you do it?'

She did not specify which of his crimes he should answer

P
.

Impersal Councsl

843

for. Perhaps naming them separately was too hurtful to her.
More likely, she was too numbed by events to care; or else
she was guileful, leaving the selection to Chumaka, that she
could divine his deeper motives from his choice.

Chumaka's quick intellect floundered. He sighed, conceding
her the match. As she had questioned, so he
answered in general terms. And for the first time in his
long and disingenuous life, he spoke the plain truth. 'For
my master's service, in part. But in the main, for my love of
the Great Game, my Lady. In this, I served myself, not Jiro
or Tecuma before him. I was loyal to the House of Anasati,
yes, but also not; I did my Lord's bidding, but the joy of
manipulating politics was always my own, private thing.
You were the best the gods had placed upon the soil and
under the sun, and to defeat you' - he shrugged - 'would
have been the most glorious triumph in the history of the
Great Game.'

Arakasi sucked in a breath. Too plainly he had understood
the words of the antagonist who had come nearer
than any man to besting him at subterfuge and wit, murder
and plotting.

'That was my miscalculation,' he murmured, as if he and
Chumaka were alone. 'I presumed that you acted for your
master's honor. There was where you nearly had me: your
motive was ever your own at heart, and Jiro's honor be
damned.'

'Chumaka inclined his head. 'To win, yes, was always the
goal. The honor of the master is in victory.' Then he turned
back to Lady Mara. 'No one understands this better than
you, mistress. For the winner decides what is honor and
what is not.' He fell silent, awaiting pronouncement of his
sentence.

The Mistress of the Empire clasped taut hands in her lap.
She did not, in the end, speak for herself. 'Would you serve
the Empire, Chumaka?'

844 Mistress of the Empire

A fiery light shone in the former Anasati adviser's eyes.
'Gladly, mistress. Despite vows of obedience and loyalty,
many of those at your banquet drinking your wine tonight
will be plotting your overthrow tomorrow. Keeping this
new Empire from crumbling would be the greatest challenge
any man could face.'

Mara's gaze shifted to Arakasi. 'Would you entrust your
network to this man?'

The Spy Master of the Acoma narrowed his eyes and
answered with barely a hesitation. 'Yes. Better than I, he
could run my agents. His pride in his work would keep them
safer than I ever could, even before I lost my touch.'

Mara nodded to herself. 'So I thought. You had never
found your heart. We need not fear this happening to
Chumaka. He has none, save for his work.'

She faced Chumaka. 'You will take oath to serve your
Emperor as Spy Master. As punishment for your past crimes
against this Empire, and as penance, you will serve your new
Light of Heaven to the last breath in your body. Lord Keda
stands as witness.' As Chumaka regarded the ~remarkable
Lady who had large enough heart to forgive him for some of
the greatest sorrows in her life, and as disbelief gave way to
dawning joy, he lost the chance to thank her. She dismissed
him summarily, in the care of Lord Keda, to swear his oath
of fealty and set the words under the imperial seal.

As the Imperial Whites and the Chancellor left the
chamber, Mara and Justin were left alone with Arakasi.
The Lady regarded the remarkably talented man who had
taken innumerable guises, from the lowest scabby beggar
in the gutters, to the glittering gold-edged armor of an
elite warrior in Justin's retinue. All that she had achieved
she owed in part to him. His ability to perceive without
prejudice had served her more than loyalty, more than duty,
more than treasure or wealth. 'There is only one post left
unfilled,' she said at last, her mouth showing signs of a

:

Imperial Council

845

smile. 'Will you take the mantle of Imperial First Adviser?
I very much doubt there is any other man living with a fast
enough mind to keep Justin out of mischief'

Arakasi returned a grin that was startling for its spontaneity. '
What does Justin think?'

Mara and her former Spy Master glanced at the boy,
whose face was utterly crestfallen.
'
He thinks he will lose out in his escapades,' Mara
concluded with a laugh. 'Which decides the issue. Will
you accept, Arakasi?'

'I would be honored,' he replied solemnly. And then
delight showed through his facade. 'More; I would be
pleased.'

'Then prepare to begin your duties tomorrow,' Mara
finished. 'Tonight is yours, to seek out your lady Kamlio.'

Arakasi quirked up one brow in an expression no one
present had ever seen.

'What is it?' Mara asked gently. 'Has the girl rejected
your suit?'

Arakasi's manner became bemused. 'She has not. In fact,
she has agreed I may pay court to her - for a former courtesan,
she suddenly desires a large measure of propriety. Her
moods are still changeable, but she is no longer the sullen
child you took with you into Thuril.' He shook his head a
little in bemused wonder. 'Now she has discovered her selfworth,
it remains to be seen whether I am a match for her.'

'You are,' Mara assured him. 'I have seen. Do not doubt.'
Then she looked closely at the man whose thoughts had
stimulated hers to new heights and long leaps of revelation.
'You wish to ask a favor,' she guessed.

Arakasi looked uncharacteristically chagrined. 'As a
matter of fact, yes, I do.'

'Name it.' Mara said. 'If it is within my power to grant,
it is already yours.'

The man in the unobtrusive green-bordered robe, who

846 Mistress of the Empire

would soon wear the white and gold of imperial service,
smiled shyly. 'I would ask you to assign Kamlio's service
to Isashani of the Xacatecas,' he said in a rush of embarrassed
words.

Mara laughed outright. 'Brilliant!' she said when next she
could speak. 'Of course! No one, man or woman, has ever
escaped the charm of the dowager Lady of the Xacatecas.
Kamlio will do well with her, and you will gain a superbly
trained wife.'

Arakasi's eyes glittered. 'She will certainly become a
manipulator equal to my best effort.'

Mara waved him away. 'You need a woman of wits to
keep your acuity,' she chided fondly. 'Now go and tell Lady
Isashani that the most difficult match in all the Empire is
her bag of knots to untangle. She'll be delighted to oblige,
I am sure.'

'Why?' Justin demanded outright, as Arakasi made his
graceful bow and habitually silent exit. 'Do all women
amuse themselves in such fashion?'

The Mistress of the Empire sighed and gazed fondly upon
her son, whose frankness could be an embarrassment, for
his ability to set words to truths that were a breach of good
manners and all too often resulted in reddened ears. 'Visit
your predecessor's harem,-sometime, and you will see,' she
said. Then, as Justin's eyes took on an unholy gleam of
mischief, she added hastily, 'On second thought, that part
of your education can wait until you are grown. You are
too like your father to be set loose among rival women at
a tender age.'

'What do you mean?' Justin demanded.

Mara gave her son a faraway smile. 'When you are older,
and I am no longer your regent, you will see.'

The garden was secluded, a green haven of shade surrounded
by flowers and fountains. Mara wandered its

Imperial Council

847

paths, seeking peace. Hokanu walked at her side, from time
to time speaking, other times wrapped in silence. 'I shall
miss you,' he said, in a heart-wrenching shift of subject.

'And I you,' Mara said quickly, lest she lose her voice
entirely. 'More than I can say.'

Hokanu gave her back a brave smile, his loss carefully
walled away. 'You have certainly enlivened the gossip and
given Lady Isashani pause for thought. She will be busy
writing letters, and I will have to fend off the results of
her matchmaking.'

Mara tried to smile at his humor. 'You are the best a
woman could wish for in a husband. You gave love without
condition. You never held me back from my destiny.'

'No man could,' Hokanu admired wryly. Unspoken
behind his words was an anger for the works of Jiro's
assassin: if not for the tong's ugly poison, he would not
be losing the only woman who would ever match him

...

m sp~r~t.
Mara plucked a white flower, and Hokanu gently took
it from her. As he had once done before, he wound it in
her hair. There were light strands amid the black, now, that
matched the hue of the petals.

'You gave me a beautiful daughter to follow after me,'
Mara said. 'One day she will have brothers who are
your sons.'

Hokanu could only nod. After a long moment of just
walking at the Lady's side, he said, 'There is a certain
elegance in your being succeeded by Kasuma as Ruling
Lady.' His smile was bittersweet. 'Our daughter. My father
would be pleased to know that our children will rule two
great houses.'

'He is,' announced a voice.

Lord and Lady spun around in surprise. Deep in mystery
in his black robes, Fumita offered them both a bow. 'More
than you know . . . my son.' The admission of kinship was

848

Mistress of the Empire

not wrung from him, but a glad pronouncement that the
changed status of the Assembly now made possible. The
magicians stern face broke into a startlingly brilliant smile.
'Lady Mara, always think of yourself as my daughter' then
his manner became impassive, as he delivered his official
message. 'I asked to be the one to inform the Great Mistress
that the Assembly has voted. The decision was reluctant,
but the magicians concede to her demands. Our order will
be answerable to the new law, as set down by the Emperor
Justin over the Nations.'

Mara inclined her head in respect. She half expected
Fumita to effect the same abrupt departure that was his
habit when he saw his part as finished.

But as if his admission of kinship with his son had opened
the floodgates of change, this one time he lingered. 'My son,
my daughter, I^wish you both to know that your courageous
actions are approved. You have done Acoma and Shinzawai
honor. I only wish my brother- Hokanu's foster father were
still alive to bear witness.'

Hokanu kept an impassive face, but Mara could sense his
great pride. A crooked smile finally cracked his warrior's
facade, matched almost at once by a mirroring one from
Fumita. 'I guess none of the scions of House Shinzawai
are adept at keeping tradition,' the magician observed.
To Mara he added, 'You may never know how difficult
it has been, sometimes, for our kind to give up the life
we knew before our power was recognised. It is worse for
those like myself, who were grown men with families when
our power manifested. The Assembly's secrets have crippled
our emotions, I sometimes think. That has been a tragic
mistake. We were forced to wall away our feelings, and as
a consequence, acts of cruelty seemed removed from us. As
change refreshes us, we will reawaken to our humanity. In
the end, we of the Assembly will grow to have cause to
thank you, and to bless Lady Mara's memory.'
The Mistress of the Empire embraced the magician with
a familiarity she would never have dared before. 'Visit the
Imperial Court often, Fumita. Your granddaughter must
grow with the joy of knowing her grandfather.'

As if uncomfortable with the rush of feelings, for the gift
of a family restored, Fumita bowed brusquely. A heartbeat
later, he vanished in a breath of air, leaving Mara and
Hokanu alone to share a last moment of each other's
private company.

The fountains sang, and the flowers released their perfume
on the deepening evening air. The page who arrived
was an intrusion, as he made his bow and announced, 'My
Lady, the Light of Heaven requests the presence of his father,
and the Mistress of the Empire, for his council.'

'Politics,' Mara said with a sigh. 'Is it the dance or
ourselves that are the masters?'

'It is the dance that masters us, of course,' Hokanu smiled.
'Else I should never be leaving you, Lady.' Then he turned,
and presented his arm to his former wife. With a dignity
born of profound courage and unshakable inner peace, he
escorted her toward the imperial suite, and her new role as
Regent and Mistress of the Empire.


Epilogue
Reunion

The herald struck the gong.

Lady Mara, Mistress of the Empire, resettled her weight
on the gilt-edged cushion that failed to soften the unyielding
marble of her official seat on the imperial dais. Hers might
be less brilliant a throne than Justin's gold-overlaid one, but
it was no less uncomfortable. In two years of presiding over
Justin's public duties, she had never grown used to it.

Mara's thoughts drifted. Gaining in his experience on
the golden throne, Justin was more and more capable of
managing the decisions presented on the Day of Appeals.
He had his mother's talent for seeing the pattern in complex
issues, and his father's ability to cut to the heart of the
matter. Most of the time Mara served at his side more
in the role of adviser than Regent; sometimes she sat
lost in memories as she endured the lengthy hours of
state councils, trusting Justin to let her know when her
attention was needed.

Sundown was near, she saw by the slant of the light
through the dome in the grand hall of audience. The Day
of Appeals was at last drawing to a close. The last few
of the Emperor's petitioners approached the rail on the
floor below. Mara resisted the urge to rub tired eyes as
Justin, ninety-two times Emperor, called out the traditional
words that acknowledged his approaching subject's right
to be heard.

'Lord Hokanu of the Shinzawai, know that you have the
ear of the gods through our ear.' Justin's voice was breaking
to the baritone that would be his in manhood, but joy at the
arrival of his foster father caused him to forget to blush at

Reunion
851

the roughness that had invaded his speech. 'Heaven smiles
down upon the felicity of your visit, and we bid you glad
welcome.'

Mara started sharply from reverie. Hokanu was here!
Her heart leaped as she looked down to see how he fared.
Months had passed since their paths had last crossed at
a state function. The Shinzawai Lord had left the court,
she recalled, to attend upon his lady wife, who had been
pregnant with his heir.

Heirs, Mara was forced to correct herself, as the imperial
herald called out two names, and she reviewed the pair of
bundles borne in the arms of their father. A nurse and two
servants hovered nearby, and another, a slight, pretty girl
whose eyes were downcast and shy before the presence of
her Emperor.

Justin was grinning; another trait he had inherited from
his outworld father was spuming the Tsurani bent for
stiff-faced protocol. These days some of the younger nobles
were imitating him, affecting his animated expressions and
frank speech, as unmarried women might follow popular
fashion, much to the discomfort of the older Ruling Lords.
He gave his stately mother a mischieviously unroyal poke in
the ribs. 'Mother, you must have words for this occasion.'

Mara did not. She could only smile down on the proud
father for a long minute close to tears. The babies were
beautiful, perfect; if they could not have been hers to bear,
she blessed the gods that the quiet Elumani's fertility had
granted her husband's fierce desire. 'Sons?' Mara managed
to whisper at last.

Hokanu nodded, speechless. His eyes mirrored the joy
in her own, and also the aching regret. He missed Mara's
quick mind, and the ease of her company. Elumani was a
gentle girl, but she had not been chosen for fiery spirit.

Still, she had given what Mara could not: the House of
Shinzawai now had children for continuance of the line.

852 Mistress of the Empire

Hokanu had his boys, and they would grow and come to
replace the companionship he had lost.

The imperial herald cleared his throat. 'Lord Hokanu of
the Shinzawai, presenting to the Light of Heaven his heirs,
Kamatsu and Maro.'

Justin voiced the official acknowledgment of the children.
'May they grow in joy and strength, with the blessings'

of heaven.'

Mara found her voice. 'I am happy for you both. I~
Elumani, I am especially flattered and proud.' She paused,
deeply touched by the unexpected gift of having a namesake
of Hokanu's blood. She had to force herself not to weep a'
she continued. 'When your sons are old enough, I would k
pleased to have them visit the imperial nursery, and to enjoy,
making acquaintance with their half-sister, Kasuma.' ~

The tiny, auburn-haired girl at Hokanu's side gave a
graceful bow. She still did not raise her eyes, and th.
skin of her cheeks blushed pink at this royal recognition,
'I am deeply honored,' she said in a voice like a mellow.
songbird's. 'The Mistress of the Empire is too kind.'

All too soon the Shinzawai party were making bows d
parting to the Emperor. Mara gazed wistfully after the
blue-armored figure that strode out with all the warrior'
grace she remembered. Then her emotions overcame lied
She raised her ceremonial fan and tipped it open to hide
her sudden tears. Sons for the Shinzawai: they were no.
a fulfilled wish, more than a dream for the future of d.
Empire. Twins! Mara shook her head, bemused. It seemed.
as if the bounty of the gods outdid itself to make up ~for
the poor infant of hers who had died before birth. ~ ~

Her loneliness was now well worth such rewards. Sodni
Hokanu, spending time with him, was no longer possible
and she missed him, but a time would come when they could'
visit without pain, because deep friendship had formed the
heart of their marriage.

,.,

Reunion       853

Again the gong chimed. The imperial herald's voice rang
out, announcing the presentation of the newly arrived
ambassador from the Kingdom of the Isles, on the world
of Midkemia.

Mara stole a peek at the group who approached, then
raised her fan swiftly as her heart twisted yet again.

Never could she behold a group of men in outworld dress
without thinking of the barbarian lover who had tossed her
life tempestuously into change. Three of them were slender
and tall, and one even walked with the barest hitch to his
stride. That flawed movement tugged at her memory.

She chided herself. Too much, today, she had allowed
herself to become maudlin over past affairs of the heart.
She braced herself to endure greeting a man who would
be a stranger, who might speak Tsurani with the odd, nasal
twang of a Midkemian, and who,-though tall, would not be
Kevin. That these men did not wear slave's grey, but rather
the fine silks and rich velvets, with the blazon of the King
of Isle upon the tabards of the officers, made no difference.
Mara looked away, avoiding even imperfect reminders of
personal loss.

The ambassador from the Isles and his company reached
the rail. An official who had visited repeatedly in establishing
this exchange of envoys, Baron Michael of Krondor,
addressed the court. 'Your Majesty, it is my honor to present
to you the ambassador of the Kingdom of the Isles-' The
sudden silence caused Mara to look.

The ambassador. had one hand half raised to sweep off
his plumed hat and bow, in the style of his homeland. But
there he had frozen. His knuckles obscured his face. The

watching courtiers stilled also; a few of the nearer Imperial
Whites peculiarly struggled to hide amazement.

Then the barbarian ambassador doffed his hat and
bowed, slowly, his eyes never leaving Justin's face. A
murmur swept the court as he did so. Mara looked again

854 Mistress of the Empire

at the new ambassador, and her heart again seemed to
skip. The man who had reminded her of her lost love
was replacing his outlandish hat, with the white plume
and gold badge. Her eyes again threatened to betray her,
so she quickly fanned her face, lest rumors sweep the city
this night that the Imperial Regent had been given over to
unreasonable bouts of tears for no good reason. She heart
Baron Michael finish the introduction: '. . . emissary from
His Royal Highness Lyam, King of the Isles.'

'You may approach,' the Light of Heaven allowed,
sounding all boyishly treble. Mara heard movement as
the Imperial Whites stepped aside and opened the railing,
inviting the ambassador onto the dais to present his
credentials.

The Midkemian ascended the first stair. His booted footfall
rang across a chamber arrested into stillness. Carefully
Mara dosed her fan, as the emissary from the Kingdom of
the Isles mounted the last steps between them.

He paused three paces from the throne and swept into
another bow. This time his hat stayed off as he straightened.
Mara beheld his face.

A soft cry escaped her. The profile of the man, and that of
her son in his gold-edged robes of state, were mirror images
But where the boy's features were yet unlined, and only
lately beginning to mature into the firmness of adulthood"
the man's were well scored with creases, as fair skin will a0e
with passing years and too much sun. The once red hair we'
frosted now with white, and the eyes were wide, stunned.

The Mistress of the Empire saw fully. She was forced to
confront what all the Lords in the court had seen, from the
instant the ambassador had made his entry. Only the hat,
and the high angle of the dais, and the weak moment of
cowardice that had caused her to hide behind her fan had;
made her the last to discover just who stood before her with iR
an air of exasperated startlement. ; ~;

.$

Reun~on

855

'Kevin,' Mara mouthed soundlessly.

Arakasi, as Imperial First Adviser, stepped forward to
receive the ambassadorial credentials. Showing an unusual
grin, he said, 'You've changed.'

Recognition registered. With an answering laugh, Kevin
said, 'So have you. I didn't recognise you without a
disguise.'

With only the barest glance at the documents, Arakasi
turned and said, 'Your Majesty, before you stands the
ambassador from the King of the Isles, Kevin, Baron of
the Royal Court.'

Justin nodded and said, 'You are welcome,' but his voice
showed he, too, was dose to losing decorum. For before
him stood the blood father he had only heard about.

Mara's hand went to her mouth, as if to prevent words
from escaping unbidden. That smallest motion from her
caused a shiver to chase over Kevin's flesh. His eyes - so
much bluer than she recalled - turned toward her. His smile
warred with a frown on his familiar face that the years had
changed little, after all. 'I expected I might find you here,'
he said in husky, pent-back emotion that only those atop
the dais could hear. 'Who else in these Nations could fit
the title "Mistress of the Empire?" But this, your Light of
Heaven.' His large, capable hand indicated Justin, and his
eyes brightened to a knifepoint of intensity - 'Lady, why
ever didn't you tell me?'

The pair who had once been lovers might have been alone
in that vast hall.

Mara swallowed. Too clearly she recalled their last
parting: this man in the street, scuffed and half-beaten,
as he resisted the slave handlers who had acted on her
orders to send him by force back to his homeworld.

She had lacked the capacity for speech then. Now words
came to her in a rush. 'I didn't dare tell you. A son would
have kept you this side of the rift, and that would have

8S6 Mistress of the Empire

been a crime against all that you taught me to profess. You
would never have married, never have lived for yourself.
Justin has been raised knowing who his father was. Arc
you angry with me?'

'Justin,' Kevin repeated, trying the name out on hid
tongue. 'After my father?' As Mara gave back a timid nod,
he shot a glance that glowed at the boy who sat straight on
the golden throne. Then he shivered again. 'Angry?'

Mara flinched. He always had spoken at inopportune
moments, in a tone that rang too loud.

He looked at her, quieting his voice, though his inflection
was no less harsh. 'Yes, I am angry. I've been robbed. I'd:
have liked to watch my boy grow.'

Mara blushed. He had lost none of his ability to throw
her off balance. Forgetting to show demure Tsurani poise she defended herself 'You would never have
had any other children had I done so.'

Kevin slapped his hand against his knee. While still low,
his rejoinder was starting to carry to those standing at the
bottom of the dais. 'Lady, what is this talk of children? l:
have none! I never did marry. I took service in my Prince
Arutha's court - for a dozen years I've been fighting goblins
and dark elves with the border barons at Highcastle and
Northwarden. Then out of nowhere, I'm summoned to
Krondor, and told to my chagrin that when the Emperor
of Tsuranuanni requested an exchange of ambassadors; I
was overqualified for the post- I'm noble born, but beyond:
any chance of inheritance with older brothers and near

dozen nephews, and I speak fluent Tsurani. So my Kin'
commanded - or rather, Prince Arutha appointed on his
brother's behalf - and suddenly I'm a beribboned court;
baron, bowing like some sort of trained monkeY before;

my own son!'

Here the Midkemian ambassador turned to regard the
Emperor. His irritation modulated as he said, 'He does look

Reun~on

857

like me, doesn't he?' Then he grinned and tossed a wink at
Justin. The gaze he turned back to Mara was edged as ice
as his merriment faded again. 'I hope that your husband
doesn't come after me with a sword for this!' he finished
in that tone of dry mocking that could either delight or
enrage Mara.

The Mistress of the Empire blinked, realising how little
Kevin would know of dine-past fourteen years. 'Hokanu
fostered the boy, knowing the truth of his conception.'

Now Kevin looked dumbfounded in turn. 'Didn't I just
see the Lord of the Shinzawai outside, with a child bride,
and two babies?'

Mara nodded, past speech.

Never one to be caught speechless, Kevin said, 'You're
not married?' Mara could only shake her head no. 'Yet
you had a husband. What Tsurani convolution of traditions
is this?'

'It's called divorce on grounds of barrenness. Hokanu
needed heirs, for the stability of Justin's reign, and the Good
of the Nations. You just observed the result.' Mara shook
off the play of feelings that threatened to knock her dizzy.
She was in public, in full view of the court; her image as a
Lady and a Tsurani must be laughable at this moment.

Taking his cue from Mara, Arakasi called out,'The Day
of Appeals is at an end. Let all retire and give thanks for our
Light of Heaven.' Then began a very slow withdrawal, as
most of the court nobles lingered, curious to overhear the
strange exchange taking place atop the imperial dais. The

cadre of Midkemian nobles who had accompanied Kevin
exchanged uncertain signals, unsure if they should wait for
their leader or withdraw without him.

Mara saw a hundred pairs of eyes turned toward her,
to see how she would react next. And then, suddenly,
she did not care. She assumed her most dignified, formal
posture. 'Kevin, Baron of the Court, Ambassador of the

858 Mistress of the Empir

Midkemian King of the Isles, I have been remiss in m'
duties as a mother. I present to you your blood vent
Justin, ninety-two times Emperor, and Light of Heaven
of Tsuranuanni. I humbly pray he is fair in your sight, and
an honor to your family pride.'

The senior imperial herald, eyes wide in astonishment at
what he had just heard, glanced at Arakasi for instruction.
The Imperial First Adviser shrugged and nodded, and the
herald raised his voice to ring out over the assembled
Tsurani nobles. 'Kevin of Rillanon, ambassador of King
Lyam, and father of our own Light of Heaven!'

Lady Mara was jolted almost out of her skin by the ~
noise of a resounding cheer from the younger nobles of
the court, who were halfway to the great outer doors.
They flooded back toward the railing and began stamping
and clapping their approval. More than any other thing
that impressed upon Mara how swiftly two short years of
changed policies were taking deeper root: for there was
but one way for a Midkemian to have become the father

of a fourteen-year-old boy: if he had visited the Empire
previously as a slave and a prisoner of war.

It had not been long in the past when the idea of a
slave's child becoming Emperor would have been cause for
bloody rebellion, a war over insult and honor that had no
point beyond an excuse for each Lord who harbored secret:
ambitions to see his house triumph over his enemies.

But as Mara studied the faces on the floor below, she saw:
mostly bemusement, surprise, and honest admiration. To all
but a narrow-minded few, the Laws of the Great Freedom
were already coming to replace the Game of the Council.
More sons of nobles sought out imperial duty rather than
serving with their family's forces. It was these young men,
breaking free of the traditions of their ancestors, who
cheered the loudest.

Once again, Mara had done the unthinkable. Her people

.

Rcunior'

859

of the Empire were coming to expect that of her, so adept
had they grown at taking such turns in their stride.
And then Justin was off his throne, discarding his mantle
and headdress into the care of his body servant. He flung
himself into the arms of the father he had never known, but
whose name had become a legend spoken in awed tones by
the older Acoma servants.

Mara looked on, new tears brightening her eyes, until
Kevin's huge arm hooked out and hauled her off her
cushion to share in a three-way embrace.

The Lady was startled into laughter. She had forgotten
how impulsive he was, and how overwhelmingly strong.

'Mistress of the Empire,' he murmured over a redoubled
volume of cheers. 'You are a Lady of surprises! I trust I will
have the chance to spend time in the imperial suite, getting
to know my son, and renewing old acquaintance with his
mother?'

Mara took a deep breach, smelling the odd taint of
off-world fur, and strange spices, and velvets that were
woven on looms far away, in a colder land that someday she
must journey across the rift to visit. Her blood quickened to
a beat of passion that all but swept her from her feet. 'You
will have a lifetime to share with your son,' she murmured
to Kevin so that only he could hear. 'And all the years you
could desire in the company of his mother, so long as your
King permits.'

Kevin laughed. 'Lyam's glad to be rid of me, I think.
Things are too quiet on the border for a troublemaker like

me.' Then he pulled her tight against him, for the simple
joy of holding her.

The temple gongs rang out over the Holy City at that
moment Sweet music sounded over the Imperial Precinct,
as the priests of the Twenty Greater Gods sang their
devotions at evening. Officially, the Day of Appeals was
at an end.

56u Mistress of the Empire

Kevin drew back and smiled upon the Lady who had
never for a day lost her hold upon his heart. 'You are
mistress of far more than this Empire,' he said, laughing,
and the cheers from the Lords of Tsuranuanni did not stop .
as he led her and his Emperor son, hand in hand, down
from the high dais.

Faerie Tale
Raymond E. Feist

An imaginative work of fiction from the master of modern
fantasy. With Fasne Tali Raymond E. Fdst turns his pen
to the timeless worlds of ancient Celtic myth - and the
unspeakable terror that lurks beneath the ordered surface
of everyday life.



When successful screenwriter Phil Hastings decided to
move his family from sunny California to a ramshackle
farmhouse in New York State, the old Kessler place
seemed like an ideal base from which to pick up the
threads of his career as a novelist.

But the Kessler place was originally known as Elf King
Hill - 'Hill of the Elf King'. Soon Phil's wife and
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began to sense that strange presences were moving in the
centuries-old wood that tangled around their new home
like the enchanted web of a huge, malignant spider . . .

'A tantaliang sense of foreboding . . . highly readable'
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ISBN O 586 07139 3

Mag~cian
Raymond E. Feist

New Revised Edidon

Raymond E. Fdst has prepared a new, revised edidon, to
incorporate over 15,000 words of text omitted from
previous editions so that, in his own words, It is
essentdally the book I would have written had I the skills I
possess today'.

At Crydee, a frontier outpost in the tranquil Kingdom of
the Isles, an orphan boy, Pug is apprendced to a master
magician - and the destinies of two worlds are changed
forever. Sudd~nly the peace of the Kingdom is destroyed
as mysterious alien invaders swarm through the land. Pug
is swept up into the conflict but for him and his warrior
friend, Tomas, an odyssey into the unknown has only just
begun. Tomas will inherit a legacy of savage power from
an ancient civilisadon. Pug's destiny is to lead him
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'Epic scope . . . fast-moving action . . . vivid imaginadon'
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ISBN 0 586 21783 3

~e Master of
Whitestorm
Janny Wurts

'Jenny Wurts is a gifted creator of wonder'
Raymond E. Feist

Everyone knew there was no escape from the slave galleys
of the Murghai: but Korendir, a man whose past was
shrouded in mystery, recognized no impossibilities in life.

After leading a desperate and successful revolt, he frees
the prisoners and sets out on a series of remarkable quests;
battling the sorceress Anthei to lift the curse on the
blighted land of Torresdyr; challenging the elemental
Cyondide to win the lost hoard of the dragon Sharkash;
travelling to far Northengard to save its people from a
plague of poisonous wereleopards.

Always Korendir's goal was treasure; but never for its own
sake. His ultimate aim was to build a fortress at
Whitestorm, impregnable against all comers, be they
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'Pace and fire . . . Janny Wurts writes with astonishing
energy' Stephen R. Donaldson

'Powerfi~l . . . epic grandeur . . . magnificent!'

ISBN 0 586 21068 7

Anne McCaffrey

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