Mistress of the Empire (50 page)

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
vanished in an inrush of breeze 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, leather-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 brightly 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
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 lay 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 for 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 City 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.’