them, though. They were somewhat agitated by our arrival. I'll leave it up to you to explain things to them fully. In any event, we've arranged for you to meet their clan leadership tomorrow. We should have the Numrek with us from the start. We mentioned them to the Auldek, but they didn't grasp what we were telling them. Are the Numrek well?'
'The brutes.' Sire Neen blew a dismissive burst of air through his lips. 'Who knows? I mean, yes, yes, I'm sure they're well. They've been bound in their cabins the entire voyage. They're alive and will likely be overjoyed to set foot on dry land again.' He considered taking a seat, but his body tingled with too much energy to sit still. Instead, he paced, amazed at the situation he found himself in. It was all too perfect. He had been too modest in his aspirations; by the end of this he would be chief elder in his later years. The league would own everything that passed across the Gray Slopes, both what went out and what came in. He himself would be a deity while still in the prime of life.
This thought did, in fact, cause him to sit down. 'So tomorrow I will broker a new trade agreement with the Auldek. Are they like the Numrek?'
Noval raised his shoulders. Dropped them. 'Yes and no. I really can't tell you much about them. They are quite like the Numrek and also not that much like them at all. You should just see for yourself.'
A bit casual in his mastery of details, Sire Neen thought. Youth. 'Are they rich?'
Smiling, Noval said, 'Rich enough. Rich and strange, which together bodes well for us.'
'What more do we know about what becomes of the quota?'
'About what they do with them? Nothing. I saw Known Worlders in among the Lothan Aklun. We interrogated the few we captured. Peculiar creatures; they fought like trapped wildcats, though they were body servants, not warriors. Strangely loyal to their masters, they seemed. Quite a few of them died along with the Lothan Aklun, for no reason but blind loyalty. And the ones I saw among the Auldek…' He began to illustrate something, his fingers dancing before his face, but he dropped the effort. 'Really, Uncle, you should see them for yourself. Don't let me spoil the amusement.'
Sire Neen found all this too vague. He was about to say as much, but a commotion at the far door announced new arrivals. Several Ishtat guards jostled their way into the room, all of them focused on a single figure at their center: Prince Dariel. But not Prince Dariel as he had been a few moments ago on deck. The small interval of time between then and now had worked a transformation on him. His lips were swollen and raw. His nose puffy and leaking blood, which smeared across his face. Eyes teary with shock and pain and emotion. And anger. There was plenty of anger, too. He wrenched his body and head about, fighting the Ishtat. But they held him firmly. His hands were bound behind his back. One guard grasped him by a fistful of hair and steadied him. The most ignominious feature was a bit that had been shoved inside the royal mouth and fastened by straps that pressed against his cheeks and wrapped around the back of his head. He could breathe but not talk.
Sire Neen had forgotten the pleasure of running his tongue over his rounded teeth. Seeing Dariel reminded him of it and he indulged. 'Oh, that looks most uncomfortable, Prince,' he said, grimacing in a show of commiseration. 'It looks as though you put up a fight. Commendable, I guess, but futile.' He gestured with his fingers. The guards dragged the prince closer. 'Look here, Noval, this is Prince Dariel Akaran.'
Bowing his head, Noval said, 'Honored to meet you, Your Highness.'
'I left word for the Ishtat to bring him to us, but it seems he did not come willingly. Perhaps he thought he could fight his way through our entire Ishtat force. He might have thought his Marah would aid him. Alas. They won't.' He dropped his voice and added, 'We've… had to kill them.'
Dariel's eyes bulged. He worked his lips and tongue, clearly wanting to speak, but the apparatus let nothing more than grunts and frustrated exhalations escape his mouth-that and the drool that slipped from the corners of his stretched lips. He began thrashing about again. The sight of him was almost too much for Sire Neen to bear with composure. To keep from showing his mirth, he fumbled in his breast pocket for his mist pipe.
He did not look up again until he had lit it and sucked a quick puff of the green smoke. Dariel hung panting, his gaze positively blazing with hatred. 'I can see your thoughts,' Sire Neen said. Despite the meaning of his words, his voice was syrupy sweet, playful. 'They're right there in your eyes. You're thinking, How can he think he can offend an Akaran prince and not regret it later? You never were the brightest of your brood, were you? Aliver would not have trusted me for a moment. Corinn would have figured everything out by now and already be working to undo the damage. Mena, even bound as you are now, would likely have found some way to cut my head from my shoulders. Not you, though. You had a skill at treachery and murder-I'll grant you that-but I've always found you rather dull. You let your sister be master of the world you could have claimed. That lack of ambition mystifies me.'
Sire Neen reached out as if to smooth a lock of the prince's hair back into place, but he was not really near enough and did not complete the gesture. For a moment he forgot how much he hated the prince. He felt something like warmth for him. 'Should we explain things to you? There's no reason you shouldn't face your future with clear eyes.' He gestured for one of his secretaries to vacate his seat. 'Let the prince sit.'
A kind offer, but one that took the guards a moment to convince the prince to accept. Once he was seated, held in place against the chair's cushions, Sire Neen began a casual discourse, one he punctuated with pauses to sip from his pipe. 'As you can imagine,' he said, 'the league has attempted to gain intelligence about the Lothan Aklun for generations. They were annoyingly secretive, giving nothing, wanting nothing other than to trade mist for quota. That's all they wished of us. No more or less. We sent spies among them, but rarely heard back. Usually, they were lone individuals disguised as child slaves. They had orders-and the means-to kill themselves if discovered.'
Neen pursed his lips. 'Why did we spy on them? For the same reason that Edifus broke the jaw of any man who raised his voice to him. For the same reason that Tinhadin betrayed Hauchmeinish and exiled the Santoth. Because of the very same impulse that drove your sister Corinn to see Hanish bleed to death upon his ancestral Scatevith stone. Because they were competition, Prince. Because the world, not even the entire stretch of the Gray Slopes, was wide enough to contain our ambition. Why share trade with them when we could own it all ourselves?'
Noval said, 'As an Akaran you should understand such thinking well.'
Sire Neen slitted his eyes at the young man, not exactly a reprimand but nearly so. He did not yet feel like sharing his discourse. 'Yes, well, the league is patient, and because of our patience we learned some time ago that the Lothan Aklun were a ceremonial people. Among their many customs was a yearly ritual, a cleansing ceremony in which every Lothan took part. Each and every one, Prince: you can see how that would interest us. It was some years later, but eventually we gained a sample of the ceremonial purgative that was part of this cleansing from one of the few spies to make it back to us alive. Again, remember that every Lothan Aklun takes this purgative on the same day of the year, during the same hour. They, but only they. This gave my grandfather-he was the first architect of this venture-an idea. What, he asked, if we could find a way to poison that purgative in a way that would wipe out the Lothan entirely on a single day?'
He stared at Dariel for a moment. 'I see by the way your cheeks are twitching that you acknowledge what a fine idea he had. It proved difficult to orchestrate, though. We simply did not have the agents in place to spread a poison evenly among them. Never would, it seemed. So we tried to find another way. All the time, of course, we kept up the trade. Prospered from it, really. Some of the older leaguemen would have been content to continue like that, but most of us wanted more. What man doesn't really, at some fundamental level, want more? More of everything! More riches. More lovers. More power. More revenge.
'Because he remained persistent, my father-who had taken up my grandfather's mission-worked with his physicians until they found a component of the purgative they could separate out. This they made into a poison, a vastly potent one.' Here Neen paused and shared a knowing glance around the room, finally returning to Dariel. 'Do you see where this is heading yet? Earlier this year-at great expense and risk-we managed to contaminate the purgative. A single agent did it, with a single vial of our poison mixed in with their purgative. It was all manufactured and stored in one place, you see. Security around it was surprisingly lax. A weak spot, indeed.'
Dariel had stopped struggling some time ago. His eyes, still red with emotion but calmer than before, remained fixed on Sire Neen. More bewildered now than angry.
'Somebody wipe the boy's chin,' Sire Neen said. 'It's disturbing to see a grown man drool so.' One of the Ishtat actually tried to carry out the order, but Dariel yanked his chin away. Lovely to see the fight in him, Sire Neen thought. I wonder how long he'll manage to keep it up? Out loud he said, 'Noval, tell him what you witnessed. Exactly the same as you told me before.'
