Would it work?
The chances were good. If Nan Nulador had wanted to dispose of his wife, he would already have named her as a dralkosh, and she would already be dead. So, despite the fact that she had given him two dead children, he wanted her to live.
The door opened; General Chonjara entered the room. 'What's this?' said Chonjara.
'We've just concluded a reading,' said Yen Olass coolly.
Chonjara grunted; Nan Nulador rose to his feet, and made reverence to Yen Olass, this time using not a simple hand gesture, but a more elaborate and courtly form, thus: the right fist, clenched to the chest at heart-height, rolls open as the arm sweeps down, fist flowering into fingers as the upper half of the body bows forward.
'Come on,' said Chonjara, and Nan Nulador followed him out of the room.
Yen Olass stretched, easing the tension from her muscles, easing the tension from her bones. She picked up her empty carrier box. Outside, in the corridor, there was the sound of voices and footsteps, a clatter as a bench was pushed back against a wall. The Naquotal Conference Room was emptying.
Yen Olass waited till the corridor was quiet, then she resumed her journey.
The map was some thousands of years old. If chance favours them, vellum, parchment and papyrus will outlast the centuries, but cannot be expected to do so without suffering the insults of time; this map, on the other hand, was as clear and bright as if it had been made yesterday. However, there was no mystery in this, for it was made of twenty-five ceramic tiles, and its colours were high-temperature glazes. It is often the weakest things which outlast the cities of power: clay and poetry.
The map showed the Far South and the Deep South, the Stepping Stone Islands and the Inner Waters; in the lands south of the Inner Waters, within territory now commanded by the monsters of the Swarms, the map showed roads and cities. This map had been in the possession of the Sanctuary of Gendormargensis for centuries before the arrival of the horse tribes; however, during the Blood Purge, the Sanctuary had been destroyed, and its treasures had gone to the War Archives.
Not that the Archives had any use for the map – even the Collosnon Empire was not likely to match its strength against the Swarms, and, besides, the map was long out of date. However, on the strength of possessing 27,542 maps – nearly all of them useless – the War Archives had recently been able to acquire funding for another seven map curators.
Despite the number of people who derived their income from looking after maps, nobody appeared to be on duty when Yen Olass entered the map room; as the Ceramics Section held only a handful of maps, Yen Olass found what she was looking for without any trouble at all; she packed the twenty-five tiles into her carrier box, and left the map room.
She had not gone very far before she heard a bellow of anger:
'You!’
Shocked, she wheeled – and saw only an empty corridor behind her. But she knew who had shouted: General Chonjara. So she was discovered. 'How dare vou! Whore! I'll kill you!’
Yen Olass began to run.
She fled down the corridor, slid round a corner, and crashed into a squad of soldiers, who were running toward the shouting.
'What's this?' said one, grabbing her.
'Unhand me!' shouted Yen Olass.
At any other time, the outrage of an oracle would have led to her immediate release. However, in view of the shouts and screams now coming down the corridor – and one of the screams was that of a woman – the soldier was not going to release anyone caught fleeing from the scene.
'Come,' said the soldier.
And Yen Olass, surrendering when he started to hurt her, was hustled down the corridor. The uproar grew louder. Rounding a corner, they came upon a most extraordinary sight. The Lord Commander of the Imperial City of Gendormargensis, Volaine Persaga Haveros, was fighting with General Chonjara. Haveros was stark naked; Chonjara was fully dressed. They were on the ground, wrestling, each seeking a stranglehold. The Princess Quenerain, also stark naked, was trying to demolish Chonjara's bodyguard with a chair; unwilling to damage the head of the Rite of Purification, Karahaj Nan Nulador was doing no more than defending himself.
'Break!' shouted one of the soldiers.
The combatants paid no attention, so the newcomers intervened. One of them made the mistake of grabbing the Princess Quenerain by the hair; appalled that anyone should manhandle such a sacred person, Nan Nulador went to her aid. He snatched up one of the lighter soldiers and began to batter the others with this convenient weapon.
More soldiers arrived. Seeing the brawl, they pitched in, choosing sides at random. Yen Olass was released as her captor waded into the fray. She fled – and was stiff-armed by a short-sighted street-fighter, the veteran of a thousand tavern fights. She sat down suddenly, the breath knocked out of her. A man landed on top of her. Someone kicked for his head. Yen Olass fought free, grabbed for her carrier box – and swore as someone kicked it and it burst open.
Sheltering the tiles with her body, as she might have sheltered a child from a herd of stampeding horses, Yen Olass jammed them back into her carrier box. Some were intact, others in pieces; she did her best, then closed the box.
General Chonjara, torn away from Haveros, struggled to his feet and shouted for order, raising his voice above the raucous shouts of battle-drunk soldiers. The Princess Quenerain hit him with a chair, and he went down.
Someone sat on him. Seizing her opportunity, Yen Olass bit him on the ankle, getting a good grip and sinking her teeth deep into the general's flesh. He kicked her in the head.
Yen Olass was knocked backwards. A soldier grabbed her by the scruff of the neck, dragged her to her feet and drew back his fist to slug her – but Yen Olass smashed him in the jaw, and he went down. The women of Monogail were a sturdy breed. She grabbed her carrier box, and, seeing a break in the scrum, she lowered her head and charged.
A man got in her way, but Yen Olass won through to freedom; the man woke up later in the day with a sore head and a vague memory of losing an argument with a stone wall.
Lord Pentalon Alagrace, Lawmaker in Gendormargensis during the absence of the Lord Emperor Khmar, did his best. Those soldiers who had been found unconscious, disabled or too badly damaged to hide were flogged in public, each getting twenty lashes. The Resident Commander of Karling Drask, the War Archives complex, was demoted for failing to maintain good discipline. For good measure, all the soldiers working in Karling Drask were confined to barracks for sixty days.
That left Lord Alagrace with four people to deal with: the Princess Quenerain, Volaine Haveros, General Chonjara and Karahaj Nan Nulador. Lord Alagrace excused Nan Nulador from punishment; bodyguards are chosen for loyalty and fighting ability rather than discrimination, and it would have set a dangerous precedent to have brought sanctions against a bodyguard who had fulfilled his obligations by fighting alongside his lord.
As for the others…
General Chonjara claimed to have broken into the Princess Quenerain's quarters in order to catch Haveros indulging himself with the supposedly virginal head of the Rite of Purification; Chonjara claimed to have been successful, and certainly both his targets had been naked when the subsequent fight had spilled out into the corridor.
For her part, the princess claimed that Haveros had been manhandled into her room by Nan Nulador, and that Chonjara had raped her before Haveros managed to break free and come to her rescue. However, the time factor militated against this story; having attended a conference shortly before the fight, Chonjara could hardly have found time to do all he was charged with. The silks worn by the princess were undamaged, so they must have been removed from her body with care; at the time of the fight, Chonjara's lust had been confined by the constraints of
