heaven?’
‘I have only been a slave for a few months, unlike you, little jahani,’ said Shadisa. ‘But I have been a woman for all of my life. I know which is the better course.’
Omar reeled in shock at her attitude. This was not the reunion he had dreamed of during the long, tiring hours of sword practice, during the hard days he had spent cleaning pistol barrels and oiling drak saddles. A grateful Shadisa falling into his arms as he beat off the slavers who had captured her was what he had imagined. How could she have fallen in love with the luxury of the grand vizier’s service so easily? She had never cared about such things back in Haffa. Plenty of the great house’s female servants had made it perfectly clear that a mere slave like Omar could never provide such luxuries and was therefore of no interest to them, but never Shadisa — this was not her.
He lay his fears for her aside and followed the girl. Shadisa led Omar and Boulous to an archway bordered by towering stone shelves, the copper plates of the spell books looking as if they were slicked by blood in the crimson twilight. She bade them sit on a bench cut into an alcove while she went to fetch Immed Zahharl, leaving the two of them under the watchful gaze of the other two servant girls.
‘So, your pretty friend serves Immed Zahharl,’ Boulous whispered to Omar. ‘Immed Zahharl himself — he should not come to personally collect the blood of a drak rider.’
‘He wants to see me,’ said Omar, speaking softly. ‘To observe what an unbelievingly handsome fellow the last son of the House of Barir is for himself.’ He nodded towards the two slaves standing sentry over them. ‘That pair served in my father’s house too. The grand vizier sends us a message with their presence, don’t you think, Boulous? That a certain quick-witted hero of your acquaintance who currently wears a guardsman’s riding leathers, should really be wearing a slave’s robes, or a corpse’s shroud.’
‘I see that Master Uddin’s teaching has not been totally in vein,’ noted Boulous, dryly.
‘You know the funny thing about playing the fool?’ said Omar. ‘People ignore a slave who is clumsy and stupid. They do not expect much of him. They don’t ask him to achieve anything too complex.’
Boulous grunted, as if in understanding. ‘Master Uddin said something to me in your first week at the citadel. He said, “There, Boulous, goes the best actor who will never appear under the lamps of the imperial theatre company. The very best.”’
Omar shrugged. ‘Have I won your applause?’
‘If you can remember where the actor begins and the act ends, I think it will be very wise for a fool of a freed slave to greet the grand vizier,’ whispered Boulous. ‘Your existence in our order is already an affront to his schemes. Give him a face to match what that slave girl you like so much has probably said about you.’
‘Shadisa would never betray me,’ whispered Omar. He imagined drawing his scimitar and plunging it into the grand vizier’s gut.
Shadisa returned accompanied by a wiry thin man with an intricately oiled and curled beard hanging off his slim cheeks. By the cut of his expensive purple clothes and Shadisa’s respectful distance behind him, Omar marked this as the man responsible for his house’s destruction. Confirming Omar’s suspicions, both the slaves watching them dropped to their knees, Omar followed Boulous’s lead in giving a low bow to the man.
‘The last son of the House of Barir,’ said the man in a purring, silky voice. ‘And following such a traditional calling, too: the imperial guardsmen. Nobles, always rushing to push their sons forward for the guards.’
Omar stared into the grand vizier’s strangely cruel, calculating gaze. Eyes so wide and intense, but with heavy hoods that looked as though they were trying to press his eyelids down into a sleepy slumber. ‘I like waving a sword about, grand vizier. It is easy work compared to what Master Barir had me doing on his water farm.’
‘And now you’re to wave it about on top of a drak.’ Immed Zahharl’s lips curled in amusement. ‘Down here, everyone prefers to use the title grand mage. Only in the palace above is it grand vizier, or high keeper if I am in one of the Sect of Razat’s temples.’
‘Truly,’ said Omar, letting an almost genuine note of awe creep into his voice, ‘you are a great man.’
He seemed amused by this. ‘So it seems. My airships have given the Caliph Eternal command of the very heavens themselves. His bounty is merely in proportion to my labours for his glory.’
Zahharl led them to a round chamber. There was a horizontal steel slab as its centre, surrounded by a ring of lamps giving off a more intense form of the blood-red light that seemed to pervade the womb mages’ domain. Shadisa and the other two slaves stayed by the door to the chamber. Boulous shifted nervously from boot to boot within the circle of light.
Zahharl looked at Boulous. ‘You have seen this done before, jahani?’
‘I have, grand mage.’
‘You will assist your noble guardsman in training. I would not wish to spill
Boulous ignored the mage’s sarcasm and helped Omar onto the metal slab, then secured the leather wrist and ankle ties around Omar’s limbs.
‘Do not move,’ warned Boulous. ‘Clean cuts must be made. Struggle and you will bleed greatly.’
‘A pity that your father was not more progressive in his vision,’ said Immed Zahharl, moving behind a lectern-like bank of machinery at Omar’s feet and twisting at controls hidden from Omar’s angle of vision. ‘You could have had a commission in the new Imperial Aerial Squadron.’
‘Do they serve good food, grand mage?’ Omar coughed, trying to keep a look of panic from his face as a metal globe started to descend from a recess in the ceiling above. ‘To be frank with you, the rations up in the fortress are foul.’
‘In the years ahead they’ll be dining on the fruits of many victories,’ said Zahharl. He twisted the controls and a series of sharp razored tools and syringes pushed out of the iron ball. ‘But this is time for the old ways. Flesh of your flesh, blood of your blood.’
Omar flinched and the sphere swept down and jabbed painfully at his restrained arms, cutting an incision on his biceps.
‘Your flesh must be blended inside the arnay ball with the essence of the drak we are to create for you. Too little human flesh and the producer’s womb will reject the drak embryo. The drak will be you, Omar Barir, and you will be your drak. Is that not a fine thing? That is our magic.’
Omar yelled as one of the syringes on the globe found a vein in his leg and the arnay ball drank from him.
‘Too much of it, and well …’ the grand mage shrugged. ‘That would be unfortunate. Are there any body parts you don’t use much?’ The globe glided up towards Omar’s groin and he saw the metal arm bolted into the back of the cutter machine quiver as if in anticipation.
‘Your slave, Shadisa,’ Omar’s voice came out in a tremor. ‘I would buy her papers of ownership from you.’
A knife-like thing on the globe nicked his skin in surprise, Zahharl standing like a wraith at the other end of the bench. ‘This is an ancient and hallowed rite, last son of Barir. It is said that Ben Issman himself created the first drak on this very table millennia ago, and during this most blessed rite, you wish to haggle over a slave girl with the second most wealthy man in the empire? Is this a souk?’
‘Thank you for my drak, grand mage, but I would have the girl too. I would have Shadisa for my wife.’
‘Thank the Caliph Eternal and our foolish traditions for your drak,’ said Zahharl. He glanced back at Shadisa. ‘Do you know this dolt of a farm hand?’
She nodded.
‘And would you marry him?’
She shook her head. ‘Our time finished many years ago. Everything that was mine in that life ended for me when Haffa was razed to the ground.’
