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  He strode quickly across the packed dirt floor and through the open portcullis with the garishly dressed dwarf struggling to keep up. They passed under the tall archway and onto the darkly stained sands of the small arena floor.

  “Our lives to the Imperial Will!” came the echoing call from across the arena floor.

  Drakis smiled as he looked to the far side of the arena. “Jerakh! How did you get back so soon?”

  “I have you to thank, brother warrior,” the manticore replied as he crossed toward the human. “Our master’s eagerness to see you has left the folds in complete disarray. The Foldmasters in their haste to comply have been moving any units from House Timuran they can find.”

  Drakis could see warriors straggling in behind Jerakh. He shook his head. “So the victorious Centurai of House Timuran is home at last, eh?”

  “Hardly,” Jerakh said with disdain. “I managed to come through with three Octia, but the rest of the Centurai is spread all through the fold system. It’s a mess that will take days to unravel.”

  “I’m sure you’ll manage it,” Drakis said.

  “I’m sure the only thing I’m going to manage is a bath,” the manticore returned, a playful edge to his smile as he passed the human. “You can straighten out the Octian . . . you’re the Centurai Master now.”

  “Well, if that is so, then I’m turning over this dwarf to you,” Drakis said, gesturing toward Jugar.

  “Excuse me, Captain Drakis,” the dwarf sputtered, “but I’m . . .”

  “Drakis, just Drakis,” he sighed. “I’ve not been appointed captain yet, dwarf.”

  “But, Drakis, I’ve not been presented to your master as yet! As part of your rightful treasure which you so valiantly liberated from the dwarven realms . . .”

  “You’ll be presented with the rest of the prize treasure tonight at House Devotions,” Drakis said, interrupting the dwarf. “Before then, Jerakh here is going to see that you get properly shaved and branded for the slave you have become.”

  “He’s full of words,” Jerakh said with disdain.

  “Which is why I’m turning him over to you,” Drakis said flashing a tight grin. “I’ve been summoned.”

  Jerakh gripped Jugar’s shoulder tightly enough to elicit a grunt from the dwarf. “I’ll see it’s done.”

  Drakis turned away, taking several steps before he stopped and turned back toward the manticore. “Oh, Jerakh . . . I was glad to see you at the Ninth Throne. It was getting a little close up there, and I needed a friendly face in the mob. We’d have never gotten away with the prize without you. You saved our honor.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” the manticore replied with a shrug of his great shoulders. “We were stuck on that pillar of rock you left us on for another six hours before a Proxi showed up to get us out. It must have been some other incredibly handsome Warrior you saw at the throne.”

  Drakis’ smile waned at the thought. He turned instinctively to look up at the avatria towering above them. He pushed Jugar’s predictions out of his mind and crossed the arena to the chakrilya and his audience with his master.

  Sha-Timuran sat upon the elevated throne and glared down through his black, pupilless eyes.

  Drakis kept as still as the cold, marble stone on which he knelt. Since he had been ushered into the large, oval room by the house slaves, he had waited on his knees, his head bent over in submission. Even so, he felt the chill stare of his master’s blank, onyx-eyes. No slave spoke in the presence of his or her master until specifically bidden to do so. No slave looked upon the master until directly addressed.

  So he had remained, with increasing pain shooting up his legs as the moments dragged into eternity.

  He was keenly aware of his surroundings. The audience hall was situated within the floating avatria, its arching walls rising upward in the shape of wide, alabaster leaves whose tips cradled crystal panes, each casting columns of light from a delicate lattice overhead. Curved stairs led down into the room from two archways situated between the leaves while the throne itself floated at the far end of the oval floor.

  Standing still as statues at the perimeter of the room were a number of the elves from the household, paid servants who worked in the avatria or as overseers in the subatria below. These were pressed against the curved walls well away from their master’s position in the hall. One slave, the Lyric, had little choice in the matter. A waiflike human woman clad in a loose fitting, translucent robe, she was chained by a golden collar to the throne of the master. Drakis vaguely remembered seeing her, though if she had a name, he did not know it. The Lyric squatted as far from the throne as the chain would allow. Only Tsi-Timuri, Timuran’s wife, and their daughter, Tsi-Shebin, stood next to the throne with any affectation of desire.

  Everyone waited.

  At long last, Sha-Timuran spoke.

  “Drakissssss,” he said, his grating, high-pitched voice hanging onto the last syllable, drawing it out like the sound of a snake.

  “My Master,” Drakis answered, his words sounding too loud in his own ears. He looked up.

  Sha-Timuran was tall even by elven standards, making even more pronounced the narrow features of his race. His sharp, narrow chin jutted out from the angular features of his face. The back of his head was elongated compared to the other creatures of the world, a protuberance that the Imperial Will had pronounced at once as unquestioned evidence of both the physical and mental superiority of their race. His elegantly elongated ears framed his face, and the hair that rimmed his protruding crown fell back in long, white strands. He still wore a common lime-colored work tunic beneath the mantle of his House. The mantle was a required sign of his authority whenever formally holding audience, though today it had apparently been hastily donned. He held his long baton restlessly in his hands, the Imperial medallion fixed to its head turning repeatedly, flashing occasionally in the column of light cast down from overhead.

  But it was the featureless, black eyes staring down the thin, hooked nose that held Drakis in such awe that he forgot to answer.

  “Drakis,” Sha-Timuran repeated from behind a thin veil of patience.

  “By your will, my Lord!”

  “So you have returned to us from the war,” the elven lord said with quiet detachment. “My great warrior—now leader of my Centurai, it seems. ChuKang has fallen, and yet somehow—somehow—you managed to survive.”

  Drakis swallowed. “My Lord! My brother warrior ChuKang was great, indeed, and led the Centurai of your House to great honor. We followed him into the heart of the Dwarven Throne and . . .”

  Sha-Timuran held up his long-fingered left hand, his right still gripping the baton. His voice wheezed with the sound of rusted blades sliding together. “We have heard the stories of that final battle—indeed, all the elven world, it seems, is talking about the fall of the dwarves, news of it having reached the Imperial ear itself. How could it be helped since the House of Tajeran has insured it to be impossible not to hear the tale?”

  Sha-Timuran’s long, pale fingers twitched along the handle of the baton.

  “Tajeran . . . ah, that noble House of my neighbor.” Sha-Timuran stood now from his throne, his voice rising with each step of his bare, narrow feet, “A neighbor who shall never let me forget that a warrior of my own House . . . my own House . . . held the crown of the dwarves in his hands and tossed it into HIS hands!”

  “But, my Lord,” Drakis blinked in confusion. Lord Timuran was a kind master who prized him. Lord Timuran had never spoken harshly with him in all the years of his life. “If you will but hear me . . . you will understand . . .”

  “THREW IT TO HIM!” Lord Timuran screamed, his voice squealing with a sound like scraping glass. “Tossed it to my neighbor’s warriors as if it were scraps from the table!”

  Instinctively, Drakis leaned back from the onslaught, catching himself with one hand behind him before he could fall to the floor. Sha-Timuran stood over the startled warrior, his hands shaking with fury. “But, my Lord
, your warriors . . . we saved them for you, and I thought I was throwing the crown to . . .”

  “Saved them?” Sha-Timuran’s lips twitched into a hideous grimace. “You thought?”

  In a sudden eruption of rage, the elf lord’s baton slammed against Drakis’ face, its medallion cracking his jaw. The sharp edges of its ornamental wings cut furrows across his cheeks and nose that instantly erupted with welling blood. Drakis’ head pitched sideways with the blow, its power twisting him around until he fell with his face against the marble.

  Through the haze enveloping his mind, Drakis saw his blood staining the marble beneath him.

  Marble, he noticed only now, that had been deeply stained before.

  The pain of his broken face was nothing compared to the confusion that overwhelmed his mind. Drakis had fought and killed many creatures—human and otherwise—who had done him far less harm. Yet all he could think was that Timuran was good. Timuran was kind. Timuran was father to them all. Surely there had been some mistake. His master, he thought, did not understand. He pushed himself up, kneeling on the floor, his hands clasped together as he turned to grovel before the elf lord.

  “I didn’t want them saved you stupid, thoughtless hoomani! I wanted the crown! But now my neighbor has the crown, and in his appreciation of your ‘gift,’ he arranged to have you delivered to me at once—so that all the Myrdin-dai would know which House of the Western Provinces gave away the greatest prize of the war!” Sha-Timuran shouted through a rage that seemed boundless, beyond control or thought. His hands were working the length of the baton handle now, twisting it and pulling at it. “You embarrass my House, you embarrass my name, you make me the heart of every citizen’s laughter from one end of the Empire to the other, and you think that is worth saving the pointless, worthless lives of a few slaves! You will pay for the insult—someone always has to pay, Drakis—someone always has to pay. Hoo-mani always have to pay!”

  The baton handle separated under Sha-Timuran’s hands, revealing as they pulled apart the long strands of a living firereed. The nine fronds of the plant extended nearly six feet in length, a whip waving menacingly in the air as Timuran raised his arm above his head.

  Drakis’ eyes went wide. His speech was slurred by the sudden swelling of his cracked jaw but he spoke past the pain. “My Lord! The bounty we brought you! The greatest treasure of the dwarves . . .”

  “Bounty?” Sha-Timuran snapped. “You bring me a dwarven fool and an ugly piece of rock and call it ‘bounty’?”

  Sha-Timuran’s arm swung. The fronds flashed suddenly through the columns of light, wrapping around Drakis’ back. The razor-sharp hooks of the firereed cut through his tunic, burrowing down into the flesh of his back. Searing pain engulfed the human as Sha-Timuran pulled, raking the fronds across his back, their barbs tearing his flesh and leaving his nerve endings raw and exposed.

  Drakis’ tears mixed with the blood flowing from his face. “Please,” he choked. “I’ll do anything for you! Tell me and it shall be done!”

  Sha-Timuran, his hand raised for another blow, gazed for a moment at Drakis through the solid blackness of his eyes.

  Then, with a coldness Drakis had never known, Sha-Timuran slowly smiled.

  The firereed whip cracked again through the hall, ripping at Drakis’ back and tearing new furrows in his skin and muscles.

  “Master! Please!” Drakis sobbed like the confused child he was, “Tell me what you want!”

  The blows rained down on him faster now, the pain becoming an overwhelming, encompassing reality. Drakis panicked within himself, repeating the same words over and over again through the cries and sobs that were wrenched from his soul.

  “Please . . . I’ll do anything . . . tell me what you want!”

  The last thing Drakis knew was the sound of the whip grating against his own bones . . .

  . . . And the sound of Sha-Timuran’s angry laughter.

  CHAPTER 11

  Taboo

  “TRULY, DRAKI, I’m finding this tiresome,” spoke the reedy, high voice, calling him back from oblivion.

  Drakis’ sight returned to him slowly along with his awareness. He was staring up into a hazy, dim green fog as pungent, conflicting smells assaulted his nostrils.

  I’m not dead, he thought. But I should have been.

  “I thought perhaps you had finally managed to anger Father enough to butcher you at last,” the voice spoke once more with its dangerous, high-pitched purr. “I’ll admit that I was tempted to just let him kill you—trouble that you are—but after all the effort I’ve put into you, I just couldn’t let you go. Not yet.”

  Drakis seemed to float in a misty, emerald void. He tried to move, but his muscles refused to respond to his mind in even the smallest degree; his eyelids remained open, and his burning eyes were relieved only by the flow of tears that welled up in a constant and unbidden cascade. Panic threatened to pull his mind back into the abyss from which he had just emerged, but he thought of Mala and pushed the horror back down.

  He ached everywhere, and his back felt as though it were burned raw; but it was a more general pain, he realized, than the deep cuts that had nearly stolen his breath for the last time. Sha-Timuran’s unbridled rage still hurt and confused Drakis—in all Drakis’ long memories of his enslavement not once could he remember Lord Timuran striking him in anger. Yet Drakis had seen enough war to know the meaning and intent behind those black, featureless eyes. It was unmistakable; Sha-Timuran meant not just to punish Drakis, not to teach him discipline, but to beat him to death for the simple pleasure of doing it.

  “What are you thinking of, slave?” the voice whispered into his ear. “Are you thinking of your little slave girl hoomani ? Does it excite you to think of her?”

  Drakis felt the black panic rising inside him once more. Where am I? What happened to me? Why, after all these years, would Sha-Timuran wish me dead today? If he wants me dead, what is to stop him?

  As he struggled to keep his fears at bay, the words of the dwarf came back to him, and he clung to them for a time like the last bit of rope before the fall into a bottomless chasm.

  “He would kill you if he could, Drakis, this very afternoon. But someone will intervene on your behalf—and will save your life, though in doing so you will wish that you had died.”

  “Are you listening to me, Draki?” The voice was murmuring in his other ear now. He could feel the hot breath on his ear as she spoke and would have pulled away if he could. “We’ve shared so much over the years. I’ve always kept our dark little secret, haven’t I? But you . . . you’ve been bad to me, hoo-mani. Very bad, indeed.”

  The dim ceiling overhead was coming into focus now and again through his tear-blurred vision: the outline of arches converging in a dome above him with frescos of vines set between the columns. It was useless. He did not recognize the room at all. It followed the elven pattern of design, but what its purpose was or even where it was he could not say.

  But the voice . . . he knew that voice.

  Tsi-Shebin’s voice.

  “You left me here with nothing to comfort me,” the elven princess pouted, “and nothing with which to occupy my time in this forsaken frontier.”

  Drakis felt the brush of silk against his right arm. The pinched face of the elf woman drifted into view as she sat next to him, leaning across him as she rested her weight on her hand.

  Tsi-Shebin was young for an elf woman . . . impossible to guess in actual time but easily placed as equal to human females of sixteen or seventeen years. She was far from a child and yet not quite acceptable in elven adult company—an age of being between. Her head had the characteristic elongation of her race, though the back of her skull had a gentle taper to it that other elves found quite becoming. She wore her long, silver-white hair up after the royal fashion, exposing her shoulders while at the same time covering the baldness of the female elven crown with carefully pinned curls. Indeed, her angular features, narrow face and long, tapered ear tips were, Drakis ha
d heard, considered stunningly beautiful by elfkind.

  She looked revolting to Drakis.

  “So, I suppose you’re wondering what you always wonder about now,” Shebin said through a crooked smile. She had been in a flowing household dress when he had last seen her in the throne room. Now she wore a vibrant blue silk robe wrapped with a wide sash about her narrow waist. She sat upright and placed her bony hand on Drakis’ chest. “There isn’t much time, so I’ll just tell you.”

  Drakis was suddenly, horrifyingly aware that he was completely naked.

  “We are in the healing room in the avatria,” Shebin continued in languid tones. “You’re lying on a bed of Healer’s Blade, and thanks to the Aether Well of my father, your wounds are being bound back together. I managed to stop Father’s little self-indulgent rage before you were of no further use to anyone ever again. I had the servants bring you here, and I dismissed them so that I might tend to your healing myself. They’ve never told on us before . . . so they certainly won’t now.”

  She moved her hand lightly up his chest. “The door is barred, so no one will bother us.”

  His breaths came more quickly. He tried to think; Shebin was Timuran’s only child, a pampered young woman whom he could only recall having seen watching the combats from the wall around the training arena. She had applauded him once some years ago—this much he could recall—but beyond seeing her smiling at him as she stood next to Sha-Timuran at court for the presentation of each bounty, he had no recollection of her at all.

  “You were always my favorite,” Shebin said, the long, carefully manicured fingernail of her right hand scraping across the skin of his wide chest. “Tsi-Narusin—she’s that insufferable girl over in House Tajeran—she always used to brag about her little games with a hoo-mani from her father’s stables. Her father found out about it, though, and burned that slave to ash right on the spot.

  “Narusin was devastated about it for weeks.” Shebin giggled to herself with a strange gurgling sound. “It still galls her that I’ve got you to play with—and I remind her of it every chance I get.”