The Prince of Shadow (54 page)

“I didn't know you were looking for me.”

“You promised to tell me about Thebin.”

“Oh. Yes.” Llesho didn't add that he'd dismissed the request as diplomatic small talk. Or that the general's real interest made Llesho more wary than the pretend kind. What did Shou want?

“This is my favorite place in the city.” Shou put a small offering on the tiny altar and sat down, letting the conversation fade as he contemplated the waterfall. It could have been strategy, let his prey grow comfortable with his presence before pouncing again, but Llesho thought not. The smile seemed free of artifice, and quiet joy seemed to radiate from some hidden center that Shou did not often reveal. That made him all the more dangerous, Llesho figured. Apt that a general who traveled about the city in the garb of a merchant should honor the trickster god; Llesho took that as a warning.

“It reminds me of the governor's compound at Farshore Province,” Llesho commented with a gesture to indicate the garden. Idle chat. He would stay clear of his own concerns.

General Shou nodded agreement. “Her ladyship did not want to leave her home, and so her husband, the governor, promised that she could take a part of Thousand Lakes Province with her. He built the compound to remind her of her home among the lakes. This park, too, is a piece of Thousand Lakes Province.”

“I thought you were from Shan Province,” Llesho prodded.

The general shrugged. “I was born here in the capital city. But I was fostered for many years at Thousand Lakes.”

“Then it's a lucky coincidence that the city has a park you can visit to remember in.”

“Not luck, really,” General Shou corrected him. “As the center of the empire, Shan must love all her children equally, and so there are many parks, each in the style of one of her provinces.”

“And what province do you represent with the slave pens?” Llesho watched the emotion freeze on the general's face, and wondered what he showed in his own eyes. He was terrified again, shaking with it, so small and thin that he thought he must surely be culled before the market opened, spoiled goods that no one would buy. The trader had wanted to slit his throat to save himself the few coppers it cost to feed him. He remembered listening while the overseer of the pens and the trader argued his fate—he was too sickly to sell to the perverts, and too old to sell to the beggars' guild, though his size might give him a few years of good begging before he was turned out there. If he survived the exposure and the abuse.

Almost crippled by the lingering echo of past terror, Llesho crumpled in on himself, clutching his gut. Hopeless children with empty bellies still passed through the slave pens of Shan. Llesho had been luck ier than most. If Lord Chin-shi hadn't wanted Thebin children to train as divers, the trader would have killed him and fed him to the pigs. If he'd been prettier, or younger, he wouldn't have lived out the year.

He didn't cry—not with the sensations hitting him like hammer blows—but he couldn't breathe either. And he didn't know how he was going to find his brothers if the thought of the slave pens alone dropped him to his knees.

“Are you sick?” General Shou asked him, setting a comforting hand on his shoulder. “Do you need a healer?”

Llesho shook his head, wishing the general would leave him in peace to regain his composure, or at least move his hand, which was making it hard not to scream between his clenched teeth.

Shou did not move.

“None of us are brave all the time.” He seemed to be offering comfort, but when Llesho looked at him, he realized that the general didn't remember he was there at all. Shou stared into the waterfall, lines of suffering etching themselves into his cheeks.

“We do well enough at the moment,” he said to the trickling water. “It's easier, really, to do what we must than to decide even on a cowardly course of our own. But later, when it is all over, even hardened soldiers cry at night.”

Llesho stared up at him in amazement. He was a general, vigorous and energetic and a respected leader in battle. Surely he did not . . .

General Shou gave him a wry smile. “Even the emperor sometimes must take the room with the thickest walls at night, so that he doesn't disturb the sleep of those with quieter dreams.”

Llesho doubted that, but he thought it was kind of the general to say it. And he thought perhaps the general might understand his problem.

“I don't know how all this happened, you know? I was a pearl diver for nine years and never received so much as an extra banana at dinner. Then Lleck died, and he made me promise that I would find my brothers and take back our home.” He didn't mention that Lleck had been a spirit at the time—didn't think it would do much for his credibility, and it didn't matter to the story anyway.

“I thought, if I became a gladiator, I could travel, maybe win enough money to buy my freedom. I could look for news of my brothers in the cities we would visit for the games and return for them when I was free. We would travel secretly across the Harn lands and take back Thebin.

“I didn't know what plots and counterplots I was walking
into.
Since then, I've become a stone in a game that makes no sense and has nothing to do with taking Thebin back from the Harn. I can only assume Master Markko has gone mad. He seems to think I have some great magical power, and if he can't enslave it for himself, he wants me dead so that I cannot use it against him. The problem is, I don't have any magic, so I'm of no use to either of us in the way Markko thinks. Does that make sense to you?”

“Not on the face of it, no,” General Shou admitted. “But you were young when you left Thebin. Perhaps Master Markko knows something about your heritage as a prince that you would have learned if your life had not so abruptly changed for the worse.”

“ ‘Would have' isn't the same as ‘did,' ” Llesho pointed out. “My life did change, and whatever I would have learned or received as a prince, I did not learn as a pearl diver.

“As for her ladyship and Master Den, I don't know what they think they have to gain by sending me to the emperor. Thebin is a thousand li from here, and all that space is filled with Harn. If the emperor wanted to help Thebin, he would first have to conquer Harn, war band by war band, and he could never trust that those he left behind him in a conquered state would not rise up at his back or attack Shan in his absence.”

“You'll make a good general someday, Llesho. I couldn't have explained the situation between Harn and Shan any better after years on the border.”

“It's not that hard to figure out when you've made the Long March.”

Shou didn't deserve sarcasm from him, but it was the only defense Llesho had. The emperor would certainly listen to his general, and Llesho had hoped that Shou would come up with a flaw in his argument and prove to him that her ladyship had been right all along. Instead, the general had just agreed that it was pointless to support Llesho's fight for Thebin. Praise was a poor substitute for hope.

“If you will direct me to the slave market, I'll be on my way.”

“I love Shan, but I wouldn't trust her slavers to resist a Thebin boy on the streets alone.” General Shou stood up and stretched out kinked muscles. “I'll take you there, and see that you get back safely.”

“Thank you.”

Llesho stood as well, and followed Shou out of the park. It seemed strange that someone with the responsibilities of a general would have the freedom and the inclination to humor the stubborn goals of a slave. If Shou felt inconvenienced, however, he didn't show it.

“You should realize I am only humoring you in this, Llesho.” General Shou led them down a narrow, twisted street with ramshackle buildings stacked helter-skelter one on top of the other and leaning into the cartway on both sides. The general walked with a casual air, as if he had no particular place to go and no set time to be there. In spite of his apparent nonchalance, he kept a cautious eye out, and directed them around a pile of garbage heaped on the paving stones. Llesho copied the general's next action when he stepped out into the cartway to avoid walking under the narrow balcony overhead. He was glad he had done so when a pail of refuse cascaded over the landing they would have been passing just as it fell.

“It's been nine summers since Thebin fell, and almost as long since anyone from the highlands but ignorant farmers have come to market,” General Shou pointed out, ignoring both the obstacles he avoided and the begging children to whom he absently threw coins without breaking stride. Harn traders walked among the passersby with hard, sharp eyes and a hand to their money belts. Llesho shuddered when those eyes glanced over him with silver in their evaluation and leering smirks for the general. He knew what they thought the man used him for, but their scorn was better than his fate if they found him alone.

I don't expect to find my brothers in the pens,” Llesho said, “but there must be records.”

“Maybe. But you can be sure they have been falsified to hide the identities of any slaves who might have the power to attract a following.”

“One would almost think you disapprove that we were not killed out of hand.”

The general shrugged. “I wouldn't have attacked Thebin in the first place, obviously, since I
didn't
attack her. But you're right: if I had, I would have killed her rulers and all their kin before I ever sat on her throne. It is bad policy to turn your back on someone with a grudge.”

“Then I guess Thebin was lucky that it was Harn that attacked, and not Shan.” Not a comfortable conversation to be having in the heart of Shan's capital city.

“No doubt.” General Shou did not seem to take offense. Or if he did, he had his revenge when they turned the next corner. “Here we are,” he said.

Llesho hadn't needed the words to tell him. He recognized the place even before he saw it, by its stench.

Chapter Thirty-two

FORMALLY titled the “Labor Exchange,” the slave pens took the more common name from the maze of stockades and livestock runs that ended at the slave block in the market square. The place reeked of misery: rotting food and feces and the sweat of too many human beings, tainted with unendurable horror and despair and crammed together like cattle. Senses on overload, Llesho's memories assailed him like blows to the gut. He grabbed for the top railing of the nearest stockade, and rested his head on his hands; absorbing the blood-drenched horror opened old wounds in his soul.

“Prince Llesho of Thebin died here,” he said. The slave market had obliterated the prince, if not the flesh he wore, had stripped him to the bone and rebuilt him as another person entirely. So many terrified children had passed down these chutes, and yet no one had raised a hand in protest when the innocent were sold like animals to be used and bred and slaughtered at the whim of whoever had the money to buy them.

A keening wail of mourning fought him for control of his throat. “My people,” he moaned softly. “Oh, Goddess, what have you done to my people?”

In stark images of crumbling horror, the slave pens reminded him that he was alone in this world. He'd known it since Lleck had died, of course, but sometimes the knowledge crashed in on him with the force of his need for allies, or friends. He felt a hand on his shoulder. He knew it was General Shou's, but memory of rough hands in the market made him flinch. What comfort could Shou offer him now, anyway?

“An empire with the rot of the slave pens festering at its heart cannot help itself,” Llesho told him bleakly. “It certainly has nothing to offer Thebin.”

“The old emperor is dead.” General Shou withdrew his hand and rested his forearms on the top rail, next to Llesho. “His son now rules. Things will be different for Shan, but change takes time.”

Change. Llesho stared at the holding facility leaning over its rotted foundation. The slave traders had called it the dormitory even though it had no beds—just an unswept dirt floor to lie upon. It had never been meant to shelter the wretched slaves, Llesho realized, but served to hide their exhaustion and hopelessness from potential buyers. They'd put men and women together. He'd thought at the time, with the mind of a small boy, they'd done it out of kindness, so that families might have one last night together. Later, when he'd come to understand what those anguished cries in the night had been about, he realized it was because the traders didn't care. If the females turned up pregnant in the morning, well, the buyer had made a bargain: two for the price of one. No. He couldn't expect help from Shan.

“It takes more than a day to change a world, Llesho. It needs a cause to raise the will of the people to change. Can you do this?”