'Have you come here to gloat, old man?'
'Hardly. To know the son, I would first know the mother. It might help your boy's situation.'
Reese looked down at her hands, and Nico followed her gaze. Coarse working hands, covered in the cuts and scalds of many years; they looked older than her face, which was pretty, even now, despite its tears and worry. She inhaled a deep breath before she spoke. 'He is my son, and I know his heart. I know that he can bear it.'
Nico dragged his gaze from his mother to the old man, whose sharp face offered nothing.
'What if there were another way?'
She blinked. 'What do you mean?'
'What if he did not have to take the whip across his back, or the brand on his hand?'
She glanced at her son again, but Nico was still staring at the figure in the black robe. There was something about this old man… something he felt he could trust. Perhaps it was his easy authority – not the authority of one who has been granted it, and learned to adopt it in his ways, but rather something entirely natural, the result of a sincerity, a directness, of spirit.
'What I have to tell you must stay within this room. Your… man must leave, then I can explain.'
Los snorted. He had no intention of leaving.
'Please,' said Reese, turning to him. Los feigned a look of hurt pride. 'Go,' she insisted.
Los still hesitated; he glanced at the old man, at Nico, then back to Reese.
'I'll wait outside,' he announced.
'Yes.'
Los skulked from the room, casting the old man a final glare before closing the door behind him. Even as the noise of it slamming rebounded from the walls of the vault, the farlander continued.
'Mistress Calvone, my time is short here, so I must get to the point.' But he stopped then, and Nico saw how his thumb stroked the leather binding of his sheathed sword.
'I am growing old,' he ventured, 'as you can see.' A smile, perhaps, in his eyes. 'There was a time when a boy such as yours would have never made it through my window without waking me. I would have cut off his hand even as he reached out for my purse. Now though, I sleep through it all, exhausted by the afternoon heat like the old man that I am.' His gaze dropped to the floor. 'My health… it is not what it once was. I do not know how much longer I can continue in this work. In simple terms, and in the tradition of my order, it is time that I trained an apprentice.'
'More likely you're lonely,' replied Nico's mother sharply, 'and in the fancy for a pretty boy.'
He shook his head simply. No.
'Then what line of work are you in? You dress like a monk, yet I see a sword in your hand.'
'Mistress Calvone,' he spread his hands wide, as though indicating something obvious, 'I am Rshun.'
Nico laughed then, despite himself. It came out tinged with hysteria and, when he heard it echo back from the curving roof of the vault, he stopped just as abruptly.
Both faces had turned towards him.
'You want me to train as Rshun?' Nico managed. 'Are you mad?'
'Listen to me,' the farlander said to him. 'If you give your consent, I will speak with the judge today. I will ask for the charges to be dropped, and I will pay him a sum of money for his trouble and that of the gaolers. You will be saved from your ordeal.'
'But what you ask…' protested his mother. 'I may never see my son again. He would risk his life in such work.'
'We are in Bar-Khos. If he stays here, sooner or later he may be called upon to risk his life on the walls. Yes, my work is dangerous, but I will prepare him for it well, and when I bring him into the field with me, he will be present only as an observer. Once his apprenticeship is finished, he may choose to commit himself to the profession, or to go anywhere else that he wishes. He will have money by then, and many useful skills. He may even return here to Bar-Khos, if it still stands.'
He watched as she pondered this, then continued, 'Right now, a skyship is waiting for me at the city skyport. In a few days its repairs will be finished, and we will travel to the home of my order. There he will be introduced into our ways, and I assure you, Mistress Calvone, that at all times I will place your son's life before that of my own. That is my solemn oath to you.'
'But why? Why my son?'
The old farlander seemed stopped in his tracks by that question. He ran a palm across the shaven stubble on his head, creating a sound like stone rubbing against the finest of sandpaper.
'He showed skill, and some courage, in what he did. Such qualities are what I seek.'
'But surely that is not all?'
The old man stared at her for what began to seem a long time. 'No,' he conceded, 'that is not all.' And he rocked back on the stool, looking once more to the floor, at the space between himself and Reese. 'I have been having dreams of late, though that will mean nothing to you. Still, they guide me in some way, and I feel they are right.'
Nico's mother squinted at him, still unconvinced.
'I'll go,' announced Nico suddenly from across the vault. Both heads swung towards him again and he smiled, feeling foolish. His mother frowned.
'I'll go,' he repeated, more firmly this time.
'You will not,' she announced.
Nico nodded, a little sadly. He knew what the Rshun were, everyone did. They killed people, murdered them in their sleep in exchange for the money they had been paid to carry out a vendetta. He could not see himself doing that, not for anything in all the world, but, still, he could leave as soon as his apprenticeship was finished, armed at least with new skills and experiences. Perhaps in its own way, this was it, his chance to make something of himself. Maybe the Great Fool had been right, and in the worst of days were laid the seeds for better times.
Then again, perhaps instead of escaping one punishing ordeal, he was trading it for a much worse one.
He didn't know. He could never know unless he went through with it.
'Yes, mother,' he said with a tone of finality, 'I will.'
CHAPTER FOUR
Flags of Conquest 'I'm hungry,' complained the young priest Kirkus.
The woman lying on the divan opposite gave a smile that almost split her withered features in two, showing a fine set of teeth that were not her own. 'Good,' purred the ancient priestess, while she spiralled a painted fingernail across her gleaming pot belly, tracing the course of old stretch marks and the gold ring pierced in her navel. 'The flesh is strong, Kirkus. But it may only become truly divine when it acts in accordance with the will. Deny your hunger. When next you eat, do so because your will has decided the issue as much as your stomach. That is how we maximize our appetites so that they demand power. That is how we achieve Mann.'
Kirkus grunted in irritation. 'You are starting to bore me. You offer nothing but sermons that I have heard a thousand times before.'
Her chuckle made him think of dry paper being ground purposely underfoot. It only irritated him more. Still chuckling, she shifted her bony frame on the divan, turning over to expose her bare, wrinkled back to the sun. The sound of her laughter spilled over the side of the imperial barge and fell, between the splashing, slow-moving strokes of the oars, into the brown waters of the Toin, before fading, ever so slowly, towards the distant bank of mud – where a crocodile stirred and plunged into the sluggish current in a brief sparkle of sunlight.
Abruptly, her teeth clacked shut.
'But I think you forget yourself, my young man, hmm? Not yet fully cocked, and you think yourself the next Holy Patriarch. Very good, but we are on the grand progress meanwhile, and I am to instruct you until you prove yourself worthy of the faith. These things you must know… but more than just know. You need to feel them, too, right down in your guts.'
'I already feel them right down in my guts,' he snapped. 'That's the problem, you old crone.'
Her look was one of measured appreciation. Kirkus knew he was her favourite pupil, and sometimes, when she
