'Is it true what the rumours say, Alagrace? Is it true you let this woman help you rule your city?' 'No,' said Lord Alagrace.
'Then more fool you,' said Khmar. 'Celadric – tell them. Trial by unarmed combat.' Celadric hesitated.
'He flinches,' said Khmar. 'He'd have a woman killed, that was easy enough. But he falters when it comes to men. Celadric, you'll have three men to kill when I'm gone. York, Meddon, Exedrist. When I'm gone.’
So saying, Khmar raised his voice to a battlefield bellow:
'Do you hear that, Exedrist? Are you listening, you soft-brained vermin? Do you hear me? Do your spies hear me?' He coughed then, and spat.
'Otherwise, civil war. You'll find out, soon enough. Soon, I'm dead. No – don't say otherwise. Soon I'm dead. I'm a sick man already. Shitting blood and leaking water. You'll have your test soon enough, Celadric. Now tell them! Combat!’
Celadric spoke, and the two remaining pirates squared off. A moment later, one lay dead. The survivor withdrew his blade: a vicious little boot-knife with an oosic handle. Not much of a weapon, but still lethal in the right hands.
'Who gave him the knife?' said Khmar. 'Was it you, Celadric? Was this animal your assassin? You don't want to answer? I'm not surprised. No matter. I'll be dead soon anyway. But when we leave tomorrow for Gendormargensis, you'll be leaving some of your skin here, that's for certain.’
Celadric showed no emotion. He had excellent self-control. Khmar pointed at the surviving pirate:
'Celadric. Tell your assassin that a man who takes orders from a woman is only fit to be the slave of a woman. And the slave of a slave woman, at that. Tell him he belongs to the oracle. From now on, she is his god, and he will obey his god in ail things – or die.’
Celadric translated, and thus it was that in the autumn of the year Khmar 19. the oracle Yen Olass Ampadara acquired a slave, an Orfus pirate from the Greater Teeth, a man by the name of Draven (Bluewater Draven, not to be confused with Draven the leper or Battleaxe Draven or with Draven the Womanrider, even though he'd done a little of that in his time.)
But that was not the end of the day's business. Khmar was fatigued, but he was not finished.
'Alagrace, now – I had so many, many things to say to you. We were going to have a very interesting conversation here. There were so many things you had to explain. But now… now I don't care for the answers.’
That was as close as Khmar could come to admitting that he was exhausted. When he said he was sick, he was telling the honest truth. He knew his own mortality.
'So let me tell you your duties. Your orders have been written down for you, in detail. You always were the best at logistics, weren't you? Argan is yours. Chonjara will help you take it – you need a good fighting general to give you some fire in your belly – but overall command, that's yours.’
Khmar held up his hand.
'No, I don't want to hear it.’
'But my lord-’
'Do it,' said Khmar. 'It is finished.’
When Khmar used that formula, everyone knew better than to argue. Lord Alagrace, granted leave to speak, would have argued for hours against the invasion of Argan. Alagrace had always argued that any move south of Tameran must be preceded by a campaign against the Ravlish Lands, which would secure ports from which the Collosnon Empire could project seapower into the Central Ocean. However, Khmar – who could not swim – had planned this war between continents by looking at a map and seeing where there was the smallest gap between landmasses. Khmar, the Master of All the Cavalry, the Horse born of the line of Horse, was not amenable to argument.
The audience was at an end.
The next day, Yen Olass saw Yerzerdayla at a distance, comforting Celadric after his public punishment. She realized Celadric had bought Yerzerdayla, and at first she was horrified at the thought of such a cold-blooded monster owning such a warm, generous woman.
But then, when she thought about it, what better fate could Yerzerdayla have hoped for?
Yen Olass sensed that Yerzerdayla would organize Celadric, and that he would appreciate her incisive intelligence, her poise, her elegance. They might never love each other, but their relationship might, in time, become an alliance of powers: in time, Yerzerdayla might make herself empress.
Now, if Yerzerdayla had been bought by Khmar… that would have been a disaster.
What kind of woman would Khmar want?
Yen Olass lay awake at night, thinking about it. Thinking about the way Khmar had denied Losh Negis the right to claim the flesh of the woman he had bought from the Sisterhood. About the strange meal they had had together. About the way he had let her decide for the pirates.
The emperor could scarcely take Yen Olass to bed. Whatever her legal status, she was of the Sisterhood. The most powerful men in Khmar's empire were those from the Yarglat clans which had followed him out of the north, and those men tended, like Chonjara, to be true to the old ways. Such men might tolerate oracles, and even make use of them on occasion – but to have their emperor succumb to one? That would be a different thing again.
Everyone remembered the reign of terror of the Witch-lord, Onosh Gulkan. An oracle who captured an emperor might all too easily remind men of the wiles of the dralkosh, Bao Gahai of evil memory. In the popular imagination, the gap between an oracle and a dralkosh was not so terribly wide. A great warrior, Haveros, had recently been seduced by a dralkosh. An emperor could not be presumed to be immune…
Yen Olass realised Khmar had chosen the path of discretion for good and sufficient reasons. But she could not help thinking that she was better equipped to live as an empress than as a slave.
Lord Alagrace knew why Khmar had put him in charge of the invasion of Argan. Logistics was his speciality, in which no Yarglat clansman could match him; the invasion across the waters of the Pale was going to need an enormous amount of planning and organisation, which made Lord Alagrace the inevitable choice as supreme commander. He accepted his fate.
But one person who did not accept her fate was the Princess Quenerain. Her father had told her she was going to go to Argan in her capacity as head of the Rite of Purification. She was appalled at the prospect. In effect, she was being exiled from Gendormargensis. She thought her father was punishing her – and she was right.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
In Favanosin, Lord Alagrace, dealing with military simplicities instead of the delicate politics of Gendormargensis, had no need of an oracle to help him. Yen Olass lived alone in a small two-room house, the property of a midwife who had fled when Khmar's troops invaded; she never saw Lord Alagrace from one week to the next. She drew food and fuel from Central Supply, eating well, for as an oracle her rations were those of a junior officer.
Winter came, and it grew cold. The days shortened, but little snow fell. Instead, pounding rain swept in from the Pale, obliterating the sun. Everything became damp and wet for days on end; fires smoked, the roads were churned to mud, mould clagged the walls, and eyesight itself faltered in the dull everwater light.
Yen Olass was homesick that winter, dreaming back to the cold, hard snows of the north, and the clear cold skies of the northern winter. The days passed slowly. She made a proper Casting Board, and fashioned 365 Indicators from pieces of wood, but few people came to ask for readings. She grew lonely.
She had nobody. Even Snut had gone off to war in the mountains, and Yen Olass had said a parting for him. She tried to make friends with some of the local fishermen, so she could go out and help catch gaplax, but women were
