But at least, she reflected sourly, she had the satisfaction of knowing that Prince Ruan, trudging along immediately ahead of her, looked scarcely better off. If he walked with a lighter step than anyone else, if he rarely struggled to keep his footing, the horses he led still saw to it that he was splashed with his fair share of the mud. His hair hung down in damp strands like tarnished silver, and when he looked back to see how she was faring, she saw he had a long streak of mud on one side of his face.
By the time that Faolein returned, landing so softly on the black mare’s saddle that she never heard him, Sindérian was so intent on finding the best footing for herself and the horses that she failed to even notice his presence until his voice spoke inside her head. Then she glanced up with a scowl, to meet the sparrowhawk’s inscrutable golden stare.
Ask to speak to the King. I have news for him—and not of the best.
Sindérian’s request was relayed to the King, passing by word of mouth from one person to the next. She knew when it reached the front of the line because someone shouted out an order and all progress stopped. She expected an answer to be relayed back to her, but Ristil himself came striding through the filth, flanked by two of his captains.
Resting herself against the gelding’s solid flank, she repeated everything her father told her, as quickly as the words passed from his mind into hers.
I have flown as far as the Old Fortress, said Faolein. There has been a great battle there: a section of the outer wall has been reduced to rubble, the second gate is broken, and the courtyards are filled with bodies.
“If the Eisenlonders are in possession of the fortress, all of our people will be dead.” King Ristil seemed to age before Sindérian’s eyes; the lines in his face deepened and his shoulders drooped. “The barbarians never take captives and they slay without mercy. My son, my niece, young Skerry—everyone will be dead.”
“Perhaps not all of them are dead,” she replied after a swift consultation with her father. “When Faolein was there, the Eisenlonders had not reached the innermost courtyards. It’s true that both sides are greatly diminished, and the fighting is sporadic, but someone was defending the third gate.”
A silence fell as everyone looked to the King to see how he would react. Very pale and set of countenance, he stood staring down at the ground. “We will continue on,” he said at last. “There may only be a handful of our people left, and we may come too late to save even them. But either way—”
His chin went up and his eyes acquired a steely glint. “Either way, we will still ride there with all speed—if only to bury our dead.”
10
The city of Xanthipei in Mirizandi—gorgeous, corrupt, glamourous—baked in the heat, dazzling with light and color, stinking like a midden. If rebellion was also stewing there, Prince Cuillioc had not detected so much as a whiff under the pervading ambiance.
On the palm-tree-lined streets the usual traffic of sedan chairs, elephants, camels, and sweating pedestrians was no less boisterous than any other day, no less varied and brilliant in its exotic reds, tangerines, yellows, and aquas, even if it did move a little more sedately under the broiling rays of the sun.
Parrots molted in silver cages; dancing girls shimmered on open-air stages in the bazaar; brothels and opium dens did their usual brisk business. In short, the people of Xanthipei—so easily and improbably subdued by the Pharaxion invaders—carried on much as always, while Prince Cuillioc, his household of twenty knights and one undersized page, his fighting men billeted throughout the city, and his mob of generally contentious Pharaxion nobles had melded so completely into the Mirazhite way of life, the Prince sometimes wondered who, exactly, had conquered whom.
So when a woman’s shrieks ripped through the air one day as he attempted to while away the tedium of a hot afternoon, sipping chilled wine in the shade of a fig tree and playing a game of three-sided chaet with two of his knights, he was slow to react. He had drifted so long in the dream of luxury and vice that was the Mirazhite capital, the woman’s first screams produced only a feeble sensation of curiosity. Only when sounds of a vigorous struggle and a babble of angry voices followed was Cuillioc shaken from his customary afternoon torpor. Abandoning his shady nook, he set off in the general direction of the commotion, and those of his attendants who were not too sleepy (or too far gone with drink) went straggling after him.
It was the twenty-first day of a stupendous hot spell in Mirizandi. Day by day, the swamplands adjacent to the city were drying up; in many places they were already more mud than water. Sometimes crocodiles crawled out of the ooze and waddled through the outlying neighborhoods, scattering the people and stampeding the livestock; occasionally, someone or something failed to move fast enough. No one dared to meddle with the creatures, for fear of a powerful cult that held them sacred.
Along with the heat, summer brought forth a prodigious burst of growth in the gardens of the Citadel.
There was, Cuillioc considered, something vaguely monstrous about all this vegetable exuberance: the immense sulphur-colored lilies under his bedchamber window that scented the air with a cloying perfume; the fast-growing creeper that put forth flowers the color of red-hot iron and swallowed up arbors, pergolas, and colonnades so completely that no evidence of the structures beneath remained; even the feverish haste of lemons, oranges, and apricots, which brought forth starry white blossoms and sun-colored fruits at the same time, and in such unnatural abundance.
Yet the same heat that made the plants respond so wonderfully had a very different effect on the Prince and his people. The thirty-six men-at-arms who formed his garrison at the Citadel had grown lethargic, putting off their battle armor, wrapping it up in silk, and storing it away in cedar chests to keep it from rusting in the humid climate. Even his troublesome courtiers seemed content to idle away the unbearably hot days in the palace gardens, waited on by deft, silent, ever-smiling Mirazhite servants, and to spend their nights in wine shops and pleasure houses, or in the erratic pursuit of some ultimate experience of voluptuous decadence out on the streets, at the beast shows, or in the rituals of the so-called mystery cults.
When Cuillioc woke in the mornings with the fumes of wine still in his head, he vowed to do better. He needed, above all, to remember he was a soldier of the Goddess, the sword in her hand, the instrument of her will. Yet somehow the weeks crawled by in a glut of heat, idleness, and stale, stale pleasures, and all of his best intentions amounted to nothing.
By the time the Prince arrived at the place where the screams had originated, the incident was already over. Nevertheless, it had served to stir up his blood and pique his curiosity, if only a little, and he was inclined to investigate.
Cuillioc glanced around the sunny courtyard. It seemed unusually crowded for the hottest part of the day.
He spotted several of the demure, dark-eyed servants; a handful of men from the garrison; a number of his Pharaxion nobles, sweating in their satins and rich brocades. No one seemed willing to meet his eyes.
He finally singled out the one person likely to know what it was all about: the minor lord he had appointed as his palace chamberlain.
He could, when he chose, be most thoroughly the Empress’s son: glaring out of the same green eyes, staring down the same straight, aristocratic nose. He could draw himself up to his full height, which was by no means paltry, and cause men like the chamberlain to wilt beneath his gaze.
“Your pardon, Great Prince,” was the quaking response. “I regret the matter came to your attention.”
The man wiped his forehead with a bit of silk. “The situation is simply this: three of your men have been keeping women here, slaves from Oméia and Chalézia they purchased from the pleasure houses. Now one of the women is dead and the others are found to be dangerously ill. Of course I had them removed immediately, lest the contagion spread. What you heard was only their protest at being cast out into the streets during the heat of the day. There is no—”