voice, accompanied by an unpleasant bubbling noise, the captain addressed him face to face and very quietly.
“Get them home, Samir. Get them to Lassos. You know where the compass is and how to use it now. Time to practice the hard way.”
Samir nodded absently, as he started to pull away.
“I’ll fetch the doctor…”
Khmun rasped what could have been a laugh.
“I’ll be dead before he gets here, Samir.”
The young man suddenly found he had tears in his eyes; most unfitting for a pirate officer. And yet, it had happened again. Every father figure he found was taken from him. Every father figure he found was taken from him by Pelasia! He growled and the flow of tears stopped.
“I will get them back for this, captain. I will string up every last Pelasian east of Akkad for this.”
Khmun made that rasping, bubbling sound again. It was a laugh.
“Oh, Samir…”
Whatever had been the captain’s last planned words, however, would never be heard. With a rattling sound, Khmun passed to the other world, supported by the rail and his trusted Lieutenant. And now Samir had to do the worst thing imaginable: to tell the crew their captain had died.
Captain Samir of the Dark Empress, his face bleak and angry, bent and gathered up the body of the fallen captain.
“All free hands to the stern!”
Another death for which to repay Ma’ahd. The focus of the Dark Empress was about to narrow.
In which Asima progresses
The harem was a place of rules and discipline, but those rules changed depending on the position and rank of the occupant and, if one knew how to play the game well, they were surprisingly flexible.
Asima had learned early on in her days as an official concubine of the God-King that she had a great deal more freedom and authority than before, though the women who lived at this exalted rank took various differing viewpoints on their newfound power. Tanita, one of the other two women who had been chosen alongside Asima, seemed to drift happily along, content with her role and enjoying what freedoms she had. Sharra, as always, continued to complain about her captivity and seemed to have taken this authority and used it to separate herself from the others.
Asima saw in the relaxing of control the opportunity to advance.
It had taken her a couple of years to get to know all of the wives and concubines, their foibles and traits, and to work out exactly where in the line of seniority they all stood. This was only partially important to her plans, of course, since some who were considerably more senior than Asima were now old or ugly or both, and therefore posed no great threat to her… barring one.
Keshia was now sixty three and, frankly, not looking her best. Asima had initially placed her under the ‘people not to care about‘ heading, but had learned quickly that Keshia held a special place in the heart of the God-King. She had been his first wife and they had married before he had even ascended the high throne. He must have been so like Prince Ashar in those days.
Keshia, despite her age, was as much a threat as those eight years of chosen that followed Asima and the many that came before. And yet many of them were so mundane that they blended in with the wall decorations. There were, to Asima’s surprise, more than a hundred women in the harem that the King had apparently never sent for and who lived lives of anonymity and great freedom. It had been this that had given Asima her greatest idea.
There were one hundred and seventy of the God-King’s women in the harem. Of those, a little more than sixty ever actually saw him and those women were divided in Asima’s mind into those above her, those level with her and those beneath her.
The more than thirty women beneath her, she kept her eye on, just in case they decided to make a play. Of the others, six women Asima believed were as favoured as her in the God-King’s eyes, and only one of those was a wife rather than a concubine. The rest, eighteen women who outranked Asima, were all wives and, while a wife officially held higher rank than a concubine, such distinctions were quite blurred in the palace of Akkad.
Now, the only way to compete with the rest was to change her status completely, which meant either raising her own, or lowering that of those above her. Over the past six years, she had moved gradually up the ladder until it was often her that the God-King sent for when he needed companionship; moreover, flatteringly, it was as much her advice and conversation that he required as her beauty and her… other talents.
Now, however, she needed to become a wife. Once that happened, she would be perhaps tenth in line and would be in a position to jostle her way higher.
And so, here she was, strolling out of the great private palace at the centre of the complex, her hand resting lightly on the God-King’s arm. Timing was everything and it had taken every tool in her arsenal to keep the ruler of Pelasia busy until the appointed time. Finally, she had smiled and told him sweetly that she was ready to return to the harem now.
“What route shall we take, my dear?” the handsome man had asked. “The jasmine by the Loggia of the Winds is particularly fragrant at the moment.”
Asima had, as always, marshalled every argument and conceived of every possible problem before joining the God-King tonight. She shook her head quietly and, smiling, gestured out north.
“I would rather, if it suit your majesty, pass by the orchard. The smell of the lemon trees between the observatory and the harem is fresh and pleasing this time of year and, to visit the Loggia, we would have to pass the kitchens of the public palace at the time the slops are discarded.”
The God-King had laughed and squeezed her hand.
“Then the observatory and orchard it is. I might, if time allows, go inside and see what patterns the stars have formed for me tonight.”
She had smiled. That wouldn’t happen. Not tonight.
And so now they walked down a paved white path between rich lawns and toward the northernmost point of Akkad. Ahead, the great pentagonal towers of the palace walls rose up like the great horns of some silhouetted beast, the crown of its head formed by the dome of the observatory. Away to the left, beyond the citrus grove, stood the sombre bulk of the harem.
The moon was intermittently covered by scudding clouds that prevented too much silvery light from playing across the gardens and Asima had to narrow her eyes discretely to pick out any details on the observatory.
A relic from the days of the God-King’s grandfather, the observatory was a three storey structure of white marble and porphyry. Octagonal, each face was smooth, punctuated between floors with purple decoration and surmounted by a domed, grey roof with portions formed of delicate glass.
The ruler who had originally had the curious building constructed had been convinced that the stars held some power over events in the real world and that, if man only learned how to read their patterns, he could predict the future. It was a belief that was commonly held to be erroneous, though nobody would say so in relation to the God-King’s family.
Tonight, however, there was a certain ring of truth to this.
The observatory, if everything was going according to plan, would herald certain future trends and foretell at least one specific event.
They strode down the gentle slope from the palace toward the structure and its adjacent orchard, the King humming a tune that the musicians had played through dinner, while Asima smiled and kept herself as calm and steady as possible. Periodically she looked up with her head lowered, casting surreptitious glances at the observatory. There was nothing to be seen there. Not a surprise. There would be in a minute, but not if the God- King kept up that irritating humming.
“Listen, majesty. Do you hear the gentle song of the nightingale?”
The God-King tilted his head slightly.
“You must have good hearing, Asima? I hear nothing.”
