Mistress of the Empire (3 page)

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
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
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 defenses here 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
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.

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 …

‘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. ‘Mara, 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.

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, First Adviser
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
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
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,
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.’

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 clues 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 subjectd 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
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
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.