'You!' he barked.
'Me?'
'Yes, you. Come with me.'
'I have a lesson to get to. I'll be late.'
'Come!' Baracha barked impatiently.
Nico swallowed as the Alhazii strode off along the corridor. For a moment he considered making a dash for it, but that would look stupid and childish. Instead, he propelled himself along in his wake.
They marched through the kitchen area, steamily hot. The two cooks paid little heed to them, engrossed in a tug-of-war over use of an empty pot. Towards the back of the kitchen Baracha bent and opened a trapdoor in the floor. He stepped down into darkness.
Nico peered down at the stone steps, and the massive form of Baracha vanishing into the gloom. He wondered what this was about. But then, he already knew what it was about.
An angry, over-protective father.
'Down here,' echoed Baracha's voice, and it tugged Nico forward so that he placed a foot on the first step. He descended the rest as though in a dream.
It was a storage room, stone-clad and cold. The only light came from the stairwell behind him. In the dimness, Nico could discern shapes hanging from iron hooks fixed to the wooden ceiling: joints of wild game, smoked and salted, next to sacks of flour, spices, or dried vegetables. Something swung on its hook just to the right of him. A bird ready plucked and gutted.
He stepped that way, stilling the bird with one hand as he passed by. It felt cool and fleshy beneath his fingertips.
Ahead, a shape shifted in the darkness. He saw a sudden flash of whiteness: Baracha's grinning teeth.
I did nothing wrong, Nico reminded himself. We merely talked for a moment.
It hardly reassured him, and sweat began to prickle his forehead.
'Over here, boy.'
Nico swallowed nervously. In a daft moment of fantasy he wished he was carrying a blade on him.
The silence was heavy like that of a tomb. Baracha leant back against something, arms crossed. As he drew nearer, Nico saw it was the raised lip of a stone well, perhaps six feet across, covered by a rusty iron grille. Within it, deep down, he could hear the echo of fast-flowing water.
Without a further word, Baracha turned and laid his hands upon the grille. With a grunt of exertion and a squeal of hinges he pulled it open.
Nico stared down into darkness. Water rushed down there, unseen but frightening. He felt the coolness of it against his face. It was an underground stream running right beneath the grounds of the monastery.
Nico took a quick, involuntary step away. 'What do you want of me?' he demanded.
Baracha bent to lift something from the floor. It was a bucket, green with algae, fixed to a rotten rope. The end of the rope was tied to the iron grille.
The Alhazii lowered the bucket down into blackness.
'My daughter may have lost something yesterday,' he explained. 'I want you to climb down there and find it.'
Nico took another step away from the well. 'I'm fairly certain I will not.'
The rope almost yanked itself from Baracha's hand, suddenly caught by the flow. He tightened his grip on it. Nico could hear the bucket bouncing against stone, the sound of water even louder as it rushed past the obstruction.
'You will,' said Baracha. 'One way or another, you will climb down there.'
Nico stared dumbfounded at the man's shadowed face. He couldn't tell if he was being serious.
If he's trying to frighten me, he is succeeding!
Nico wanted to run but his feet seemed rooted to the stone floor. Baracha took a step towards him, dragging the rope with him. Still, Nico could not move.
The young man opened his mouth – to shout for help, to plead his innocence, he wasn't sure – as a large hand fell on his shoulder. Baracha's fingers grabbed a fistful of his robe. The cloth tightened against Nico's throat. Without any visible effort, the big Alhazii pulled him back towards the well.
'Get off me!' Nico shouted, as he felt his feet dragging across the floor. He struggled then, trying to break loose of the man's grip. 'No!' he yelled in anger, as the dark opening of the well reared towards him. He tried to get a hand up to Baracha's face, fingers groping wildly for his eyes. The man lifted his face out of reach. His strength was staggering as he shoved Nico's head down into the well, tried to get the rest of him inside too. Nico's hands flailed for a grip against the slimy rim, while the unseen waters crashed deep and cold through the earth below him.
And then, mercifully, Baracha's grip loosened and with a surge Nico broke free. He staggered away from his tormentor, catching the amused look on the man's face. 'Bastard,' spat Nico, retreating in a rush, batting aside the hanging obstructions, as Baracha's laughter flayed his back with mockery.
Nico did not stop until he was outside in the fresh air, gulping deeply, squinting in the sunlight and cursing himself for the fool that he was.
Serese, he later heard, was sent away from there that same day.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Divine Assurances In the windowless antechamber of the arena known as the Shay Madi, Kirkus watched his mother holding court before the priests gathered about her.
Her two years as Holy Matriarch of the Empire had begun to take their toll on her, in spite of the Royal Milk she paid for so handsomely to sup each morning. The noticeable lines across her forehead could only come from frowns generated by worry, though here today, in public, his mother preferred to smile, and smile often.
This visible aging had been the first thing Kirkus had noticed upon his return from the state progress with his grandmother, when laying eyes on his mother for the first time in many months. It had been the first thing he had commented on, bringing a laugh to her lips and a gentle kiss to his forehead.
Save for the priestly fine-link chains of gold that dangled from the lobes of her ears to her nostrils, and the light-reflecting sheen of her shaven skull, his mother might have been the madam of some bawdy city brothel at the high point of a comfortably busy night. Sasheen's plain face was flushed from the heat of so many bodies crammed together in close proximity, the many gas-lights in sooty alcoves along the walls, and the lack of any breeze coming through the sunlit portal in the wall behind her that led out to the imperial stand. She stood with one hip aslant, a bent wrist resting on her pelvis. Beneath a chin held high her heavy breasts thrust through the white cloth of her robe.
Alluring but dangerous, was the first thought that came to the minds of most men. She was, perhaps, the only thing Kirkus knew about his father – in as much as she indicated this man's taste in bedfellows.
The male and female priests thronging the room talked amongst themselves, except for those gathered closest to the Holy Matriarch herself. These listened respectfully to Sasheen but spoke in their turn with a lack of formality common to the High Priests of Q'os, and which had surprised Kirkus on the first occasion he had attended the court of the previous leader, Patriarch Nihilis. Kirkus had expected a greater degree of pomp and ceremony, as was shown during official ceremonies of state.
Instead, the high priests of Q'os acted like uneasy comrades involved in a grand and impossibly ambitious conspiracy: the ruling of the entire known world no less. What deference they chose to show to their Holy Matriarch arose not simply from their respect for her position, having risen as she had to the leadership of Mann as though from nowhere, but from awe at her readiness to snuff out any least sign of disloyalty, as manifested in the deaths of so many of their former colleagues.
A threat they remained close to even now, in the form of her two massive bodyguards, their eyes masked by goggles of smoky glass so none could tell where they looked, and their hands sheathed in poisonous scratch- gloves.
Kirkus only half-listened to what his mother or the others had to say. This wasn't an official gathering of court today, only an afternoon of leisure here at the Shay Madi, in which members of the higher caste took the
