Daish Reik would have been much this age, had he lived.
'Who are you?' Shek Kul's words echoed through the empty hall, voice as imposing as his face, deep and resonant from his barrel chest.
Kheda halted in the middle of the green-stone circle. 'A traveller.'
Shek Kul sat, elbows on his knees, staring down at Kheda. 'I hear the southern reaches in your voice.'
'I have come from the south,' Kheda agreed cautiously.
'Far from home,' observed Shek Kul sharply. 'Where would that be?'
Kheda took another careful breath. 'I have no home.'
'None that you may return to, perhaps.' Shek Kul's thick black brows knitted into an unmistakable scowl. 'Answer my question. What domain nourished your ungrateful, unworthy youth?'
'I was neither ungrateful nor unworthy.' Kheda paused and moderated his tone. 'But my youth is past and may not be revisited.'
'You chop your answers finer than my cook chops pepper pods. Very well,' Shek Kul continued with surprising silkiness, 'I will play this game until I tire of it. You may not revisit your past yet we are each and every one the sum of all we have experienced. Everything we have done forms a link in the unseen chains that tie past to future. Where are your chains?'
'Back in the fortress on your shore,' Kheda said boldly. 'Your men did not think them necessary this morning.'
'I trust their judgement in many things.' Shek Kul smiled but it was not an expression to inspire reassurance. 'Though they'll load you with enough chains to force you to your knees if I wish it.'
'As is only right and proper, for men in service of so great a lord.' Kheda tried to sound suitably humble.
Unexpectedly, Shek Kul laughed. 'Don't seek to flatter or grovel, traveller. It doesn't become you.'
Kheda ducked his head submissively.
'A traveller from the south,' Shek Kul continued thoughtfully. 'That's something in your favour, at least.'
Kheda couldn't help himself. He looked up.
Shek Kul was no longer smiling. 'You arrive on my shores, alone. No one knows where you've come from and you certainly don't care to share that information with anyone. You say you're looking for passage onwards but no one sees you talking to newly arrived shipmasters. No one knows which domain you're trying to reach. All I hear is that you read palms to fill your belly, which I find sufficiently curious to want to know more. You make safe enough predictions, I hear, nothing too outrageous, no promises of startling good fortune just beyond the turn of the stars. Any inadequate preying on men who prefer to work their way through life can do as much.' The warlord paused, eyes keen. 'Yet such parasites are far keener than you to spread word of their talents, hoping to bleed more victims dry with promises and blandishments. They don't, as a rule, insist on sufficiently unfavourable readings to be left abused and hungry. How will you win the reputation to keep you in idle luxury?'
Kheda kept his face impassive and his mouth shut.
'Still, you've avoided gloomy prognostications of general doom,' Shek Kul continued. 'As far as I've been able to ascertain, you haven't predicted death by disease or starvation or even drowning for anyone, though by all the stars, those travelling between the domains can fear that fate. My thanks for not casting such shadows over my domain with your skills.' The warlord's sarcasm cut like a lash.
'You might care to be grateful in return. If you were sharing your skills with an eastern accent, had your insights promised ill fortune for those drifting through my waters, you'd have vanished from my beach before the tide had washed away your footsteps. I'll not have my enemies sending false augurs to spread ill feeling in my domain, stirring up dissatisfaction and dissension where they may. I find even the cleverest, most treacherous tongue can be stilled by decapitation.'
Shek Kul paused to let the threat hang menacing in the empty hall. 'I have to ask myself though, are you merely biding your time before setting rumblings of disquiet along my beaches, rumours casting doubts over my future and that of all who stay loyal to me?' He leaned back, face hard. 'I'll have your answer to that, traveller, or my men will beat it out of you.'
'I am no soothsayer to speak ill of your domain.' Kheda shook his head vehemently. 'I only read palms and those can show no more than the life of one person.'
'So say all the sages,' agreed Shek Kul, voice cold. 'And those books that none outside a domain's inner circles generally ever see. There's another puzzle for me.
'You're a man of many puzzles, traveller. You deny you're a soothsayer yet you wear a dragon's tail around your neck. Granted, a galley rat might wear such a trinket, if he had won it in trade, but he'd just as readily trade it for a full belly and a night out of the rain. You won't give it up, preferring to chance the mercy of the skies and grubbing up weeds in a reckal patch for the sake of a meal.'
Shek Kul leant back in his throne, folding his formidable arms. 'More puzzles. You'll scrabble in the earth willingly enough but you show more interest in healing plants than those that'll fill a hungry belly. You're also a slow and clumsy worker. Do you realise what a poor bargain you offer? Is that why you can't accept what you earn with dignity?'
Kheda was stung into replying. 'I offer the best bargain I can.'
Shek Kul nodded as if the younger man had confirmed something. 'Ah, but you are just not accustomed to trading your labour. You're not in the habit of fleeing a domain's swordsmen either. Sezarre tells me you plainly had no expectation that they might be coming for you, until they were all but on you.' Shek Kul nodded beyond Kheda to the slave guarding the door and smiled.
'Everyone else on that beach ran, either from knowledge of their own guilt or, to be fair, from simple prudence. There are lords in these reaches who'll beat everyone friendless on a trading beach, for the supposed sins of one or two. Indai Forl tells me it helps keep the innocent honest as well as rebuking the guilty.' He raised a hand. 'But I am straying from the question. Other puzzles hang around you, traveller. Your workmate yesterday might be more used to trading his labour but he's not in the least accustomed to dogs. Few travellers are. Why else do you think I keep those particular islanders so well provided with the largest and most intimidating hounds I can breed? Though you didn't find them in the least unnerving. I ask myself this: where would you have learned such familiarity with dogs other than inside a warlord's compound? So I ask you once more; where is your home domain?'
Kheda swallowed. 'I have no home.'
'You've your own jewels safe between your legs, I'll say that much for you.' Shek Kul sounded more curious than approving. 'Do you realise what you risk by defying me like this? Do you want me to turn you over to Sezarre, to Delai, to have them wring the truth from you?' The warlord nodded again towards the door and then jerked his head towards his own bodyguard, Kheda's erstwhile jailer. 'Of course you don't. Then why are you prepared to run that risk?'
This was plainly no rhetorical question. Kheda chose his words with exquisite care. 'For the present, I have no home. I have no domain. I did once, obviously. There are those I left behind. I would not see them suffer for my sake.' As soon as those words left his mouth, he regretted them.
Shek Kul bent forward in one swift movement. 'You've done something that warrants punishment?' Delai clapped a hand to a sword hilt before he could restrain himself and a shiver of chainmail from the door suggested Sezarre had done the same.
A guilty quiver ran down Kheda's spine. 'I have nothing to answer for in your domain,' he managed to say.
Not as long as Godine sailed north as he said he would.
'You seem to speak the truth and yet not all of the truth, if I am any judge.' Shek Kul relaxed in his throne again. 'You have remarkable eyes, do you realise that?'