them paused to listen for the sound of laughter. It didn’t take long to locate the source.
It was Fraine, but she was most definitely not alone. Raed peered down through a grate into another level of the fortress and saw a most strangely beautiful scene. Below, three women were lounging on reclined benches, while another three stood nearby. He recognized two of them immediately—his sister and his old friend Tangyre Greene. His instant reaction was to feel a flare of unreasonable happiness, though both of them had passed him into the hands of a geistlord that wanted to kill both him and the Rossin. Hastily, he quashed those feelings. He reminded himself that they had also ordered the destruction of the small portion of his crew that had followed him. The Young Pretender forced himself to recall the hard look in his sister’s eyes when she had done it.
Yet all his struggles to get from Orinthal to here were suddenly worth it. Raed had, in truth, feared that he would never find them. They looked to be well, and no different from when he had last seen them, as he was held in the sand and his crew was massacred.
Next he examined the other women in the room with his sister. The Shin women were creatures of beauty— Raed had read about that before—but nothing had prepared him for the aura of strange lethargy around two of them. He was, however, the only one to remain calm; the Rossin was almost apoplectic with rage on seeing them. The Beast flooded the Young Pretender’s brain with images of slaughter.
It was, perhaps, because the women were still laughing. Certainly their appearance would have been enjoyed by a huge number of men in the Empire, even if the geistlord was raging about it.
The pair reclining were pale to the point of eeriness, their white hair spread out on their couch. The hair was however the only covering they wore. Their breasts were exposed, nipples painted with ocher, and around their waists were looped strings of pearls and lapis lazuli. It had been months since Raed had seen any kind of naked woman, but he found no excitement stirring in his trousers. He had seen napeth users in the islands, and those empty-eyed beauties left him as cold as these Shin women.
Sorcha, all flame and passion, leapt up in his recollection in contrast to these chill beauties.
Behind the supine two were another pair, also white blonde in coloring, but they were more clothed. Flowing silks were bunched around their waists, but their breasts were bare, and there was nothing lethargic about them; they had the coiled power of a jungle cat, and they paced backward and forward. These were the two that the Rossin was focused on, particularly when he noticed their nails. Curved sheaths of bronze extended them out far beyond normal length, and gave them the unsettling appearance of claws. Upon seeing these two, the Rossin flooded the Young Pretender’s brain with images of slaughter.
Now the Rossin’s rage crystallized into actual words.
Raed let his breath out slowly and carefully. Yet the Rossin’s constantly running thoughts were bleeding into his own. It was warm in this narrow space and he could not afford to panic now.
“So, Fraine Rossin,” one of the standing women said, taking a seat at the feet of her supine companion, “have you had a chance to consider our terms?”
Raed’s stomach clenched. It appeared he was too late. The Empire was about to come undone.
Below, his sister shifted on her chair, and glanced up at the silent Tangyre. “Lady Iuhmee, if you join our rebellion there will be plenty of benefits to the Shin and Ensomn itself. I don’t understand why you need—”
“If you don’t understand,” the second woman broke in, “then our business is done here. Your rebellion will founder without us and you know that very well.”
Above, in the vent, Raed frowned. He knew the Shin were influential among the Princes, but not so that they could have such a deciding vote.
Raed was beginning to feel his own anger rise. He had most certainly not been sleeping while tracking down his sister. Also he was suspicious that the great Beast in him knew something it was not yet sharing. Raed had only felt rage this great twice before, in the ossuary and in the desert of Chioma. He could only conclude one thing: the Shin were in league with a geistlord.
His sister glanced back at Tangyre. “I will not become your peon.” She waved her hand at the pale-haired women, still reclining on the couch and about as noticed as a piece of furniture.
Iuhmee’s gaze remained fixed on Fraine while those sharp bronze fingers danced along the girl’s pale skin, causing her breathing to come in tiny gasps, before one flicked at her throat. The thin line of blood oozed from the cut, shockingly red against her almost chalky flesh, before Iuhmee bent and licked it clean. Both drinker and supplier let out the slightest of groans: the kind that might be heard from a contented lover after long hours of play.
The Rossin, for once, had been speaking literally. Blood drinkers indeed. Summoning geists through from the Otherside, luring them with the spilling of blood in terrible ways, was something that only the mad and the foolish dared.
If ever he had seen a threat demonstrated more clearly, Raed could not think of it. Fraine blanched, and Tangyre’s hand went to the younger woman’s shoulder. “You have made your point,” the captain said, actually stepping between the Shin and her companion, “but that does not mean Her Grace will be tying herself to you as a peon. How dare you! She is of the greatest line of nobility in Arkaym!”
The Lady Iuhmee lifted herself from the peon’s throat, and wiped delicately at her mouth, for all the world like some aristocrat at a state banquet. “If she were a peon, she would hardly make a decent leader for the rebellion, would she? No, that is not what we ask.” She snapped her fingers, and a fourth slave appeared from out of the shadows of the room. She was carrying a tray with a curved silver bowl on it, from his position it was impossible to make out the nature of the symbols carved into it, but he did catch the gleam of tiny weirstones embellishing the rim. Not good.
However Raed was too transfixed to move. He wondered if his ancestors had known this about the Shin, or if this was a recent development. The west had always been a place of terrible legends and wildness—but he had never heard of anything like this. Blood drinking was the ultimate dark path to power, and had been one of the first things the Order of the Eye and the Fist had stamped out. How could they have missed all of this?
Now here was Fraine about to indulge in it. From all the threats he had faced in the ossuary under Vermillion and the temple of the false goddess Hatipai, Raed Rossin knew the power of his blood. The blood he shared with Fraine. He cast about for a way to get down there quickly, but the vent was made of stone, and all his shoving against it didn’t move it any discernible amount. The restrictions of the shaft meant he couldn’t swing his sword or anything else.
His mind ran to the weirstone bullets he had taken off a bounty hunter in his travels across the west. Made by the scarlet witches, they were thought to be most useful against geists who had taken flesh. The bounty hunter had thought to use them on the Rossin. Now they could be put to better use. With frenzied wriggling, Raed was able to pull out the pistol and slide it between the grating. He knew what the consequences would be, but he could not merely watch as his sister aligned herself with these blood drinkers.
Raed pulled the trigger. His aim was off, thanks to the tight confines of the shaft, and the limitations that the grate afforded him. The bullet instead of striking Iuhmee, punched a neat hole through her reclining peon’s head.
The Princess of Ensomn screamed however, as if it had been she that had been struck. At least he presumed she was screaming, since the retort of the pistol had set his ears to ringing. She collapsed to her knees, and when she turned her face upward in his direction, it was a totally different one, with burning eyes and a mouth full of fangs.
She pointed at Fraine who was looking as pale as a Shin peon. While Raed yelled through the grate, since stealth was now abandoned, three slaves appeared and wrestled his sister to the ground. Two held her, while the third slid Fraine’s sleeve back, and sliced the softest part of her forearm. Her blood seemed to drip into the bowl the peon held beneath for a very long time.
When he had been a young man, Raed had seen his little sister do many foolish things, but coming to this nest of evil was an awful kind of grown-up idiocy. However she was no longer a little child he could warn away from open flames and sharp objects. The worst bit was that Captain Tangyre, supposedly her friend, stood by as she was forced into giving up her blood.
