“Mistress Archeth!” The Reachman went up to a full-scale shout. “The Emperor wills your presence!”
The cursing stopped abruptly. The metallic cacophony died. For a long moment, the open hatch yawned and oozed a silence no less unnerving than the noise that had gone before. Then Archeth’s voice emerged, a little hoarse.
“Who’s that?”
“From the palace. The Emperor summons you.”
Indistinct muttering. A clank, as the engineer’s hammer was apparently dropped, and then an impatient scrambling sound. Moments later, Archeth’s ebony head emerged upside down from the hatch, thickly braided hair in stiff disarray around her features. She grinned down at the messengers, a little too widely.
“All right,” she said. “I’ve done enough reading for one day.”
BY THE TIME THEY GOT BACK TO THE PALACE, THE KRIN COMEDOWN HAD hit and the Emperor was waiting in the Chamber of Confidences, a fact whose significance was not lost on the ushering courtiers Archeth encountered en route. She saw the glances they exchanged as she passed them. The Chamber of Confidences was a tented raft of rare woods and silks anchored in the center of an enclosed pool fifty yards across and windowed only from above. Water cataracted down the cunningly sculpted marble walls at the circumference of the chamber, rendering eavesdropping an impossibility, and the waters of the pool were stocked with a species of highly intelligent octopi who were fed regularly on condemned criminals. What was said in the Chamber of Confidences was for the ears of either those utterly trusted by the Emperor or those who would not be leaving. And in these uncertain times, it was not always easy to tell which of those two groups someone might fall into.
Archeth watched with drugged disinterest as the two senior courtiers who had taken it upon themselves to deliver her this far cast furtive glances down into the pool. Beneath the ripples of the water, it was impossible to see anything clearly. A wobbling patch of color might be an uncoiling octopus or simply a rock, a stripe through the water a tentacle or a frond of seaweed. The courtiers’ expressions reflected every uncertainty as if they were in the grip of a bowel disorder, and the rippling, pallid light of the chamber conspired further to enhance the impression of illness on their faces.
The face of the slave who poled their coracle across the pool was by contrast as emotive as a stone. He knew he was needed to bring his Emperor back, and he was in any case a deaf mute, carefully chosen, maybe even specifically mutilated for the duty. He would neither hear nor give away any secrets.
They reached the raft and bumped gently against its intricately carved edge. The slave reached up for one of the canopy supports and steadied the coracle while the courtiers climbed out with evident relief. Archeth went last, nodding her thanks as she passed. It was automatic—Kiriath habits, hard to break even now. Like any piece of furniture, the slave ignored her. She grimaced and followed the courtiers through the maze of hanging veils within the canopy, into candlelit opulence and the imperial presence. She dropped to one knee.
“My lord.”
His radiance Jhiral Khimran II, first son of Akal Khimran, called the Great, and now by royal succession Keepmaster of Yhelteth, Monitor of the Seven Holy Tribes, Prophet Advocate General, Commander-in-Chief of the Imperial Armed Services, Lord Protector of the High Seas, and Rightful Emperor of All Lands, did not immediately look up from the sprawled body of the young woman with whom he was toying.
“Archeth,” he murmured, frowning at the swollen nipple he was rolling between his thumb and forefinger. “I’ve been waiting nearly two hours.”
“Yes, my lord.” She would not apologize.
“That’s a long time for the most powerful man in the world, Archeth.” Jhiral’s voice was quiet and unreadable. He slid his free hand across the soft plain of the woman’s stomach and into the shadow between her cocked thighs. “Too long, some of my advisers have been telling me. They feel you”—his hand moved deeper and the woman stiffened—“lack respect. Could that be true, I wonder?”
Most of Archeth’s attention was on the woman. Like a lot of the harem, this one was a northerner, long-limbed and pale-skinned. Large, well-shaped breasts, not yet marked by motherhood. It was impossible to make out hair color or facial features—the black muslin wrappings of the harem veil covered her from the neck up—but Archeth was betting she was from the rather erroneously titled free mercantile states. The Yhelteth markets had seen a lot of this type recently, as the northern economies tottered and whole families were sold into slavery to pay their debts. From what Archeth heard on the trade-route grapevine, the free cities were fast becoming home to a whole new class of slavers; canny entrepreneurs who made their rapid fortunes acquiring the local flesh at knockdown prices and then selling it on southward to the Empire, where the centuries-old tradition of servitude made for a massive established market and a never-slaked hunger for exotic product. A woman like this one might easily increase her initial sale value by a factor of fifty on the long march south into imperial lands. With profit margins like these, and war debt in most cities still largely unpaid, it was hardly a surprise that the League had rediscovered its enthusiasm for the trade. Had neatly and cheerily rolled back nearly two centuries of abolition in order to facilitate the new flow of wealth.
The Emperor looked up from what he was doing.
“I require an answer, Archeth,” he said mildly.
Archeth wondered briefly if Jhiral planned to hurt the woman while she watched, to punish the alleged lack of respect by proxy. A calmly rational rebuke for the intensely black woman before him, while the milk-white woman in his lap suffered the physical cruelty like some kind of inverted avatar. Archeth had seen it done before, a male slave lashed bloody for some trumped-up infraction and, against the backdrop of tortured cries and the wet slap of the lash, Jhiral remonstrating gently with one of his chiefs of staff. He was not and never would be the warrior his father had been, but Jhiral had inherited the same shrewd intelligence and with it a depth of court-bred sophistication that Akal Khimran, always in the saddle at one end of his empire or the other, had never troubled to develop.
Or maybe the woman was simply there to tantalize. Not much was secret in the imperial palace, and Archeth’s preferences were widely whispered of, if not actually proven or known.
She cleared her throat and lowered her eyes deferentially.
“I was working, my lord. In the shipyards, in hope of some progress that might benefit the realm.”
“Oh. That.”
Something seemed to shift behind the emperor’s eyes. He withdrew his hand from between the pale woman’s thighs, sniffed delicately at his fingers like a gourmet chef, and then clapped her on the rump. She coiled out of his lap with what looked like schooled decorum, and crept out of the imperial presence on her knees.
“You may rise, Archeth. Sit near me. You two.” He nodded at the courtiers, who might have been made of wood for all the life they showed. “Get out. Go back to . . . whatever valuable tasks it is you usually fill your time with. Oh, and—” Upturned hand, a regal gesture of magnanimity. “Well done. There’ll be a little something in the new season’s list for you, no doubt.”
The courtiers bowed out. Archeth seated herself on a cushion at Jhiral’s left hand and watched them go, torn between envy and scorn. As soon as the veils had fallen behind them, Jhiral leaned across and gripped Archeth’s jaw tightly in his hand. His fingers were still damp, still scented with the white woman’s cunt. He pulled Archeth to him and stared at her as if her skull were a curio picked up from some bazaar stall.