ignored each other during the times when official business threw us together. He did not forget my harsh treatment of him when the galleon
Now he stalked in, and I saw the way he postured, using those thin lips and arrogant eyes to put me in my place as a loutish clansman who had had the temerity to burst into civilized Vallia and marry the emperor’s daughter. He gave me a nasty look and sat down on the other side of the Kovneva with a mumbled “Lahal.”
I cocked an eye at Natyzha Famphreon. “Any more?”
“One only, for this night’s work.”
The trouble with these Opaz-forsaken racters was that they were evil in ways they could not understand themselves to be evil. They were not committing any consciously criminal acts. If I died, they would joy, but they would not send stikitches after me to assassinate me in a dark alley — at least I did not think so. My death would have to come as a result of an open quarrel, the legality of my demise beyond dispute. They made their money through the possession of land and all the wealth that brought. They also operated the Companies of Friends, the trading ventures of Vallia. A great deal of their wealth came from slaving and investment in slaving. With the ruthlessness of those in possession, they ensured the continuation of their wealth and with it all their fancy titles and the very real powers they had taken into their hands.
Under torture, each one, I have no doubt, would swear she or he did what they did for the ultimate good of Vallia. They believed this. This kind of conviction made it hard for anyone with differing views to make any kind of coherent sense in their eyes.
Each of these people with me now, discounting the young kov, was a personality: Natyzha Famphreon, Nath Ulverswan, Nalgre Sultant. Each was a strong personality, a real live person with passions and desires and secret hungers and fears they overcame. Of their family lives I knew little. But to them I was a mere wild clansman from the wide Plains of Segesthes, the Lord of Strombor, a man from outside who had dared to wed the Princess Majestrix and to make himself the Prince Majister. That I had won the title before the wedding would no doubt conveniently slip their memories. The last racter who wished to speak with me arrived. By the tardiness of arrival and by the sweat stains on Trylon Ered Imlien’s buff riding clothes I judged my apprehension had come with speed, and these conspirators had been summoned with great urgency. This Ered Imlien, Trylon of Thengelsax, I had seen from time to time and, knowing him to be a racter, had treated him with my usual courtesy tempered with viciousness. I supposed he detested me like all the rest, and I returned the detestation with what I hoped was greater measure.
A short, squat man with a square red face and deeply set eyes of Vallian brown, he moved with a rolling gait and boomed every word and liked to use a riding crop on his slaves just to tone ’em up, as he would say, bellowing. “So he’s here, is he!” he bawled, bashing his riding crop against his booted leg. “Well, put it to him, kovneva. Tell the rast what we want.”
This vastly amused me.
It did not amuse Natyzha Famphreon, and her lower lip thrust upward like a swifter’s beak rising over the apostis of a beamed foe. “We waited for you, Ered. Have the courtesy to bear with us.” Cutting irony was lost on Ered Imlien.
“Why wait? Time presses. The bitch queen is gloating this very minute.”
“Just so. Now, Prince Majister.” And Natyzha Famphreon gestured so that we listened and marked her words. Indeed, she was an old biddy, but she had power and was accustomed to its use. “We know you have been banished from Vondium. How does not matter.”
“Oh,” says I, very easy, interrupting. “Spies only cost gold.”
“Just so.” That was a fact of life to her, if not to me, as you know. “The emperor is no longer fit to rule. We run the empire. There is no shilly-shallying about that.”
I wanted to argue the point, but reality forbade. The emperor had the final say in many things, and he balanced party against party, but the power of the Racter party so often bent dividends and results in the directions they desired.
So I said, “I may have my disagreements with the old devil; he is sometimes impossible to live with. He hates me.” This was not exactly true. “But he does rule the empire. He keeps you racters toeing the line, for one.”
They didn’t like this. Again, it was only a half-truth.
“He hates you,” spat out Nalgre Sultant. “He is not alone in that.”
I ignored the man.
“There is no profit in supporting the emperor any longer,” said the kovneva.
“He is doomed!” bellowed out Ered Imlien, red of face, grasping his wineglass as though to splinter the delicate globe.
Movement and shadows beyond a glass screen attracted my attention. This place would be like most of the villas and palaces of Kregen, a rabbit warren of secret ways. But I fancied I could find my way out. Now I saw past the end of the glass screen the unmistakable outline of a Chulik’s head. Chuliks, powerful warriors trained from birth to the use of weapons, have oily yellow skins and shave their heads to leave a long pigtail. But the characteristic that betrayed this Chulik to me was the upthrusting tusk at the corner of his mouth. I saw this plainly. Chuliks generally command higher hiring fees than other races, Pachaks apart, and are finicky in their choice of employer. Their delicateness does not come, as it does with Pachaks, from honor or sentiment; their choice of employer rests solely on his or her ability to pay. Now this Chulik lifted his head, talking to a comrade, and the profile showed me the hard tusk lifting from his curled lip.
Two savage tusks, a Chulik has, and he uses them when he fights, as I can testify. If I had to fight an army of Chuliks here — well, wasn’t that half my reason for going with Strom Luthien in the first place?
So I dissembled a trifle and made the conversation more general, and hinted obliquely that, well, perhaps the time had come for me to give up my allegiance to the emperor. I did say at one point, rather sharply,
“But if the emperor dies, his daughter and her husband will take the throne and the crown. You have thought of that?”
“If the emperor dies you are out of it, Prescot. If he dies before things are settled the land will run red with blood, for it will mean civil war, without doubt.”
“And you would run that risk?”
“It would be no risk for us,” said the kovneva, and she chuckled in her crone-like way, her gorgeous body incongruous in the soft swathes of silk. “For we will win whatever the intervening chaos may be.”
They believe that, these high and mighty of the world.
Of course, by Makki-Grodno’s disgusting diseased left kidney, it is often true.
“Do you expect me to connive at the murder of my father-in-law?”
“If you were a man with blood of Vallia in him, if you had the breeding, then it would be nothing to you.”
I did not say, “If that is breeding a fellow is better off without it.” But it was a near thing. The swathing buff cloak could be ripped off in a twinkling. Depending on the danger, it would be the longbow or the longsword. Either would suit me in my frame of mind. Eventually they offered a deal in which I would have no part of the death of the emperor and in which I would keep all the lands and titles I now held in Vallia with the exception of Prince Majister. They could not know how little I valued that. In return I was not to oppose them, and was to make sure my people did not interfere during the coup. I asked about this, but they were too cagey to give me any details. Without attempting to imply any false modesty, it seemed to me they were anxious to get me out of the coming conflict because they feared my influence. They must have some apprehension of what I could do. Otherwise the terms would not have been so generous. Whether or not they’d keep their side of the bargain would be in the laps of the gods.
Had I been acting only for myself, for the old impetuous Dray Prescot who thumped before he thought, I’d have roared out some obscene suggestion at them and then gone swinging into action. I felt a keen regret that I could not do this. I needed the exercise. But more than mere gratification of my injured ego hung on this. The fate of Vallia depended to a very great deal on what was decided here in this conservatory. It was in my interest to appear to go along with them, giving them rope, so that I might more surely bring them down into ruin.
So I said, “Let me think about this. There is the Princess Majestrix to be considered.”
Ered Imlien burst out with: “Do not worry your head over her, you onker. The Princess Dayra occupies her mind.”
Furious, Natyzha Famphreon rose from her wicker chair. “Speak not of things of which you know nothing, you
