Perrund drew in a breath. 'Oh! Well, those of us still stumbling around with our eyes tightly shut had best be grateful to people like you then, I should think.'
'I'd have thought that you at least, my lady, would have no need of a sighted guide.'
'I am just a crippled, ill-educated concubine, DeWar. A poor orphan who might have met a terrible fate if I had not caught the eye of the Protector.' She made her withered arm move by flexing her left shoulder towards him. 'Sadly I later caught a blow as well as a glance, but I am as glad of one as the other.' She paused and DeWar drew a breath to speak, but then she nodded down at the board and said, 'Are you going to move, or not?'
DeWar sighed and gestured at the board. 'Is there any point, if I am so deficient an adversary?'
'You must play, and play to win even if you know you will probably lose,' Perrund told him. 'Otherwise you should not have agreed to begin the game in the first place.'
'You changed the nature of the game when you informed me of my weakness.'
'Ah no, the game was always the same, DeWar,' Perrund said, sitting suddenly forward, her eyes seeming to flash as she added with a degree of relish, 'I merely opened your eyes to it.'
DeWar laughed. 'Indeed you did, my lady.' He sat forward and went to move his Protector piece, then sat back again and with a despairing gesture said, 'No. I concede, my lady. You have won.'
There was some commotion amongst the group of concubines nearest to the doors which led into the rest of the harem. In his high pulpit, the chief eunuch Stike wobbled to his feet and bowed to the small figure bustling into the long chamber.
'DeWar!' the Protector UrLeyn called, hauling his jacket on over his shoulders as he strode towards them. 'And Perrund! My dear! My darling!'
Perrund stood suddenly, and DeWar watched her face come alive again, the eyes widening, her expression softening and her face blossoming into the most dazzling smile as UrLeyn approached. DeWar stood too, the faintest of hurt expressions vanishing from his face, to be replaced by a relieved smile and a look of professional seriousness.
3. THE DOCTOR
Master, you asked to know most particularly of any sorties which the Doctor made outside the Palace of Efernze. What I am about to relate took place the afternoon following our summons to the hidden chamber and our encounter with the chief torturer Nolieti.
A storm raged above the city, making of the sky a darkly boiling mass. Fissures of lightning split that gloom
with an eye-blinding brightness, as though they were the concentrated blues of the everyday sky fighting to prise the blackness of the clouds apart and shine upon the ground again, however briefly. The westerly waters of Crater Lake leapt against the city's ancient harbour walls and surged amongst the deserted outer docks. It made even the ships within the sheltered inner quays roll and shift uneasily, their hulls compressing the cane fenders to make them creak and crack in protest, while their tall masts swung across the black sky like a forest of disputing metronomes.
The wind whistled through the streets of the city as we made our way out of the Blister Gate and headed across Market Square towards the Warren. An empty stall had been blown over in the square and its sack roof flapped and tore in the gusts, clapping against the cobblestones like a trapped wrestler slapping the ground as he begs for mercy.
The rain came in blustery torrents, stinging and cold. The Doctor handed me her heavy medicine bag as she wrapped and buttoned her cloak more tightly about her. I still believe that this — along with her jacket and coat should be purple, as she is a physician. However, when she had first arrived two years earlier the doctors of the city had let it be known that they would take a dim view of her pretending to this badge of their rank, and the Doctor herself had seemed indifferent in the matter, and so as a rule she wore mostly dark and black clothes (though sometimes, in a certain light, in some of the garments she paid to have made by one of the court tailors, I thought one could just catch a hint of purple in the weave).
The wretch who had brought us out into this awfulness limped on ahead, glancing back at us every now and again as if to make sure we were still there. How I wished we were not. If ever there was a day for curling up by a roaring fire with a cup of mulled wine and a Heroic Romance, this was it. Come to that, a hard bench, a tepid cup of leaf and one of the Doctor's recommended medical texts would have seemed like bliss to me, compared to this.
'Filthy weather, eh, Oelph?'
'Yes, mistress.'
They do say the weather has been much more violent since the fall of the Empire, which is either Providence punishing those who helped overthrow it, or an Imperial ghost exacting revenge froze beyond the grave.
The cur who had lured us into this absurd mission was a hobble-legged child from the Barrows. The palace guards hadn't even let her into the outer bastion. It had been sheer bad luck that some fool of a servant, bringing the guards a note of instruction, had overheard the brat's preposterous pleadings and taken sympathy on her, coming to find the Doctor in her workshop — mortar and pestling her pungently arcane ingredients with my help — and report that her services were requested. By some bastard from the slums! I could not believe it when she agreed. Couldn't she hear the storm groaning round the lanterns in the roof above? Hadn't she noticed I'd had to light all our lamps in the room? Was she deaf to the gurgle of drain water in the walls?
We were on our way to see some destitute breed who were distantly related to the servants of the Mifelis, the chiefs of the trader clan the Doctor had worked for when she had first come to Haspide. The King's personal physician was about to pay a call in a storm, not on anyone noble, likely to be ennobled or indeed even respectable, but on a family of slackwitted all-runt ne'er-do-wells, a tribe of contagiously flea'd happen-ills so fundamentally useless they were not even servants but merely the hangers-on of servants, itinerant leeches on the body of the city and the land.
Coinless and hopeless, to be short about it, and even the Doctor might have had the sense to refuse but for the fact that she had, bizarrely, heard of this sickly urchin. 'She has a voice from another world,' she'd told me as she'd swirled on her cloak, as though this was all the explanation required.
'Please hurry, mistress!' wailed the whelp who'd come to summon us. Her accent was thick and her voice made irksome by her disease-dark snaggle teeth.
'Don't tell the Doctor what to do, you worthless piece of shit!' I told her, trying to be helpful. The lame brute ducked and hobbled away in front, across the glistening cobbles of the square.
'Oelph! Kindly keep a civil tongue in your head,' the Doctor told me, grabbing her medicine bag back from me.
'But mistress!' I protested. At least, though, the Doctor had waited until our limping guide was out of earshot before chastising me.
She screwed up her eyes against the lashing rain and raised her voice above the howl of the wind. 'Do you think we can get a cab?'
I laughed, then turned the offending noise into a cough. I made a show of looking around as we approached the lower edge of the Square, where the lame child had disappeared down a narrow street. I could just make out a few scavenging people scattered along the eastern side of the Square, flapping back and forth in their rags as they collected the half-rotted leaves and rain-sodden husks which had been blown there from the centre of the Square, where the vegetable market had been. Not another soul to be seen. Certainly not a cabbie, rickshaw puller or chair carrier. They had more sense than to be out in weather like this. 'I think not, mistress,' I said.
'Oh dear,' the Doctor said, and seemed to hesitate. For one wonderful moment I thought she might see sense and return us both back to the warmth and comfort of her apartments, but it was not to be. 'Oh well,' she said, holding the top of her cloak closed at her neck, settling her hat more firmly on her gathered-up hair and putting her head down to hurry onwards. 'Never mind. Come on, Oelph.'
Cold water was creeping down my neck. 'Coming, mistress.'
The day had passed reasonably well until then. The Doctor had bathed, spent more time writing in her
