Empire in Black and Gold (45 page)

A servant youth in plain dark clothes, also local, announced him at the doorway, and now Thalric began the long trek towards the seven seats at the far end. The Emperor held court at the centre of eleven thrones, of course, but this display in Myna was still something of a liberty.

Only five of these seats were occupied. Ulther lounged in the central throne with three other Wasp-kinden on one side and a Beetle on the other, all watching the newcomer’s approach intently.

‘Thalric!’ Ulther’s voice, though not loudly spoken, rang the entire length of the chamber, showing that the builder had done his work well. ‘Captain Thalric, as I sit here! Now tell me, how well have you done for yourself, since we parted company?’

Thalric saluted smartly before the tiered dais, although it took considerable skill to keep his initial reaction to the man’s changed appearance off his face.
It’s been more than ten years
, he reminded himself sharply but, excuses aside, being governor of Myna obviously suited the old man too well. That his hair was white now, instead of grey, was time’s due, but his belt now strained to keep his waist in check, and even the tailor’s skill was not enough to have the fine gold shirt conceal the man’s bulk. There were two chins resting above the topaz gorget, and a face that had been merely heavy when Myna had fallen was jowly now.

His hesitation was noticed. ‘Oh sit, sit,’ Ulther insisted without rancour. ‘When you’re my age even you will want to find a more sedentary way of serving the Empire – and then see where it gets you. The way I look at it, if I had simply gone home to my family and managed the farm, then I would look just as bad and nobody would mind. I don’t see why things should be so different just because I’m on public display all the time.’

Thalric ascended the steps and found a vacant seat, eyes flicking across to the others there.

‘Captain Thalric served with me during the conquest, and a fine officer too,’ Ulther explained for their benefit. ‘Thalric, these here are my advisors, at least for the present. Captain Oltan is Quartermaster Corps, and Captain Rauth is Intelligence.’ The two Wasps nodded towards Thalric suspiciously. ‘And then Masters Draywain and Freigen, who are with the Consortium of the Honest.’

The Consortium was the Empire’s attempt to regulate trade but, from what Thalric had heard from his Rekef contacts, it was a narrow battle over exactly who was regulating whom. He gave the Beetle-kinden and the bored-looking, middle-aged Wasp a nod.
Perhaps it’s one of these who is responsible for strangling the supply lines. Perhaps I can exonerate Ulther after all.

And is that what the Rekef wants?

‘What brings you here, Captain? Come seeking promotion?’ Ulther grinned at him, and that grin, for all that aged and fleshy face, remained wholly familiar. Inwardly Thalric twisted. He had wanted a private audience with this man, a chance to speak frankly.

‘A change of pace, Colonel,’ he said easily. ‘It’s been a long time on the front line for me. I’ve been asking for a chance to rest my feet for months. They sent me here. Do I get my wish?’

‘We’re always busy here, Captain,’ Ulther said. ‘However,’ he added, avuncular, ‘I’m sure I can find you a tenday to lick your wounds. Make yourself at home in my city.’ When Thalric raised an eyebrow at that, Ulther’s smile broadened. ‘I’ve got Myna firmly in the palm of my hand, Thalric, and when it twitches I squeeze. It’s a simple lesson, though they never do seem to learn it.’ He clapped his hands and a moment later a dozen servants came in from a door behind them, bearing trays with flasks and goblets. ‘Let me show you what Myna can offer, shall we?’

‘I’m surprised, in a way, that you’ve not moved inwards, towards the capital,’ Thalric said. The servants attending them were all women, he noted, and all of them young. Not one of them was Mynan, either, which was undoubtedly a wise precaution for body slaves. Ulther had obviously ransacked the Empire for servants pleasing to the eye, and there were even a couple of Wasp-kinden amongst them.

‘Who would they get to replace me?’ Ulther took a goblet and watched appreciatively as a Spider-kinden slave poured it full. ‘I know Myna better than any, even better than the pestilential natives themselves. I keep a lid on the pot, you see, boil as it may. They would have risen up a few years back when Maynes did. They were all set, but I knew it in advance. Crucify a handful on the crossed pikes, arrest a few more, and then the families of the ringleaders packed off as slaves to Great Delve. A firm slap early on will stop a tantrum later.’

‘Very creditable,’ agreed Thalric. He helped himself from the tray of sweetmeats proffered to him, glancing up at the slave who served him. She was one of his own kinden, fair-haired and handsome, but she kept her eyes lowered, as slaves should.

‘These two,’ he said, indicating the pair of Wasp slaves. ‘Objectors or Indebted?’

‘Indebted, to the best of my knowledge. There’s a lot of them on the market these days, especially from the capital itself. Terrible, terrible situation.’ Ulther’s sympathy was transparent. ‘Still, I try to give ’em a good home, where I can.’

The young woman remained very still, and Thalric wondered what trauma she was now thinking back to: sold to pay her husband’s debts, or her father’s?

‘I’ll send her to your quarters later, if you want,’ Ulther offered. ‘We might as well make your stay here a memorable one.’

‘I’ll take you up on that,’ Thalric said. He sensed the woman stiffen slightly: a Wasp’s pride against being passed from hand to hand like a chattel. She
was
a chattel, though, merely a slave and a commodity. There was no more to it than that.

Thalric raised a goblet, and he and Ulther touched rims across the face of Captain Oltan.

‘Here’s to “memorable”,’ said Thalric, but he felt sad as he said it.
Memorable, yes, but for all the wrong reasons
.

Ulther settled more comfortably into his padded throne. ‘Speaking of memorable, or so I hope, I have now a little entertainment for you: a new jewel in my collection. I even understand that you yourself escorted her to my city.’

Thalric raised an eyebrow, even as he filed the repeated
my city
away for later perusal.

In answer, Ulther clapped his hands once more and the serving slaves retreated several steps behind the crescent of chairs. A moment later two men walked in, of local appearance. One was white-haired and bearded, and he cradled a stringed instrument that Thalric did not recognize, something like a stretched lyre. The other was little more than a boy and carried a small drum. They made themselves unobtrusive amongst the pillars and sat waiting. Thalric had already guessed what would come next, for a pair of soldiers then led the Butterfly-kinden dancer into the hall. Aagen’s special delivery. Inwardly, he made another note.

‘Well at least take the chain off her,’ Ulther directed. ‘She’s not a performing felbling.’

One of the soldiers closed the door whilst the other carefully unlatched the chain from the woman’s collar.

Thalric sipped his wine, which was sweeter than his taste preferred, and settled in for a wait. He had never much appreciated dancers or the like. He had caught a glimpse of this one performing before and she was good, but it was not his choice of entertainment.

The woman, named Grief in Chains as he recalled, stepped out until she was within a shaft of sunlight. It fed her skin so that the shifting colours there glowed and burned. From their unseen niche the musicians struck up, a slow picking of the strings at first, the drum a low but complex patter.

Grief in Chains moved, and she took the sunlight with her. It sparkled on her skin and ghosted like mist in the air behind her. And she began to dance.

Thalric maintained his lack of interest until the music changed tempo, the pace quickening bar after bar until she was spinning and leaping across from sunbeam to sunbeam. Then she was in the air, the iridescent shimmer of her Art-wings unfolding about her, and his breath caught despite himself.

She had always been chained before, so the slavers had not seen half of what she could do. With the music soaring and skittering all around them, the plucked notes becoming hard as glass, the drum like a dozen busy feet, she danced and spun, coasting in space and swooping at the pillars’ tops. She seemed to embrace the very air, to mime love to it, and Thalric had never seen the like before. Even he, for the moments of that airborne ballet, even he was touched.

Then she was in bowed obeisance again, and the music had struck its final moment, and Thalric shook off, somewhat irritably, the net that had been on him. Looking at his fellows, though, he saw a wide-eyed rapture, and nowhere more so than on Ulther’s face. What had he paid, and what had he done, to catch this jewel? More, what would he have to do to keep her from his fellows?

A spark of insight came to Thalric then, and it cut him deeply, but it was the answer to a question he had not known to ask.

Memorable
. He watched the Butterfly girl as they chained her again, studying her suddenly with renewed interest.

It was rare for Thalric to be able to mix business with pleasure but, still, he took his pleasure first, moving quick-eningly atop the Wasp-kinden slave-girl, sourly aware that her responses were born of a need to appear willing, and that the pleasure, such as it was, was all his. Even this pleasure was a distant thing to him, a need that he could watch and analyse even as it was being fulfilled. As he reached his peak Thalric was thinking wryly of the flesh-pots of Helleron, whose varied depravity he would now miss, and that this was the first time in some years that he had lain with one of his own kinden.

She went to leave then, sitting on the edge of the bed with her back to him, gathering up her clothes. When he touched her arm, she would not look at him – did not, in fact, until he told her, ‘Stay.’

‘I should be returning. They’ll ask—’

‘It wasn’t a request.’

And that got her attention. When she looked at him there was something left, after all, of the Empire in her face: a pride that had been battered but not quite broken down. She still possessed internal walls that her servitude had not breached.

‘What’s your name, woman?’ he asked, sitting up. He saw her eyes flick from his face to the jagged scar that flowered beneath his right collarbone.

‘Hreya,’ she said quietly. ‘They say you’re with the Rekef.’

‘Let them say what they want.’ As Ulther had started him off on that road, it was only to be expected that rumour here would be rife. ‘How did you come to this, Hreya?’

Her expression suggested that such questions would have been better asked before, but he lived his life to maxims of efficiency, in this as all else. At last she revealed, ‘My father gambled. You know the laws, sir.’

They were harsh laws, carried over by the Empire from the days when there were nothing but three score squabbling hill tribes to call themselves the Wasp people. Women were property – of either father or husband – and as such they were prey for creditors, to be sold into marriage or into slavery. Thalric would never think to speak against imperial law, of course, but it was still a tradition he could have done without. The mothers of the Wasp-kinden deserved better, he thought. They might be women, but they were still of the race. They shared in the Empire’s destiny.

‘How many of you does Ulther keep to hand?’ he asked.

‘Almost thirty, I think, at last count,’ she told him. ‘For the use of himself and his guests.’

‘Any locals?’

‘Not yet, sir. Sir, I’m cold.’

The utter indignity of her having to seek his permission to clothe herself, and the fact that she said the words with a straight back, with the shame sloughing off her, touched him. ‘Dress, by all means. I just want to talk a little. About the governor, if you will?’

As she gathered her gown to her she gave him a hooded look, and he added, ‘None of this will reach him.’

‘You’re his friend, sir. From long ago.’

‘And I’m interested in him as he is now. You can speak freely about him to me. Unless you’d rather I tell him you disappointed me.’

Her expression hardened. ‘And if I tell him you were asking questions, sir?’

He smiled, because she had so very little but she was willing to make use of it. ‘Perhaps I want him to know. Although he may not thank you.’ He saw from her reaction that he was right. Ulther would not welcome his body slaves playing spy for him unless he had asked them to. ‘Tell me about his guests, then.’

That was safer ground. ‘They are officers, mostly, and merchants of the Consortium, sir. He entertains them.’

‘Oltan and Rauth, that lot. Quartermaster and intelligencer, aren’t they?’

‘So they say.’ He had been listening for that, the slight scorn in her voice.

‘You are a good subject of the Empire, are you not?’ he said softly.

‘I am a slave.’

‘But you know what serves the Empire and what does not, even so,’ he pressed. ‘So tell me, not what
they
say, but what
you
say.’ He would have offered her money, perhaps, but slaves had no right to possess money. She could never spend it without raising suspicion. He would have to find a harder currency. ‘Speak to me honestly and openly, and I will do what I can for you. This I promise.’

Her look revealed not one grain of trust at first, but he let her read his face, his eyes. She was desperate, although she herself had not known it until now. He had opened the slightest portal into the darkness where her life had gone. What choice did she have?

Salma’s smile was wan and waning. The cell was dark, night creeping in through the high grille on one wall, but Che could still see his smile, as though through a sheet of dusky glass.

‘It’s that girl, isn’t it?’ she said, knowing that the words made her sound petty. ‘I don’t see . . . I mean, you’ve only known her for a few days, barely spoken to her.’

‘Ah, but it’s the gaps between the words that you can fall into,’ he said. ‘My people traditionally say that, but I never really appreciated it before. Perhaps it’s just because she’s a reminder of home.’