RAYMOND E. FEIST
and
JANNY WURTS
Mistress of the Empire

Book Three of the Empire Trilogy

Copyright

HarperVoyager An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street Lonon SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1992

Copyright © Raymond E. Feist and Janny Wurts 1992

The Authors asserts the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work

A catalogue record for this ebook is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780586203798

Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2012 ISBN: 9780007375653

Version: 2016-12-22

This book is dedicated to

Kyung and Jon Conning,

with appreciation for giving us insights and friendship

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter One: Tragedy

Chapter Two: Confrontation

Chapter Three: War

Chapter Four: Adversity

Chapter Five: Machinations

Chapter Six: Gambits

Chapter Seven: Culprit

Chapter Eight: Interrogation

Chapter Nine: Miracle

Chapter Ten: Interval

Chapter Eleven: Bereavement

Chapter Twelve: Warning

Chapter Thirteen: Twist

Chapter Fourteen: Revelation

Chapter Fifteen: Secrets

Chapter Sixteen: Countermoves

Chapter Seventeen: Advice

Chapter Eighteen: Evasion

Chapter Nineteen: Captive

Chapter Twenty: Council

Chapter Twenty-One: Decision

Chapter Twenty-Two: Challenge

Chapter Twenty-Three: Contest

Chapter Twenty-Four: Homecoming

Chapter Twenty-Five: Assembly

Chapter Twenty-Six: Battle

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Defiance

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Retribution

Chapter Twenty-Nine: Destruction

Chapter Thirty: Pursuit

Chapter Thirty-One: Kentosani

Chapter Thirty-Two: Emperor

Chapter Thirty-Three: Imperial Council

Epilogue: Reunion

Keep Reading

Acknowledgments

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

• Chapter One • Tragedy

The morning sun shone.

Dew bejeweled the lakeshore grasses, and the calls of nesting shatra birds carried sweetly on the breeze. Lady Mara of the Acoma savoured the air, soon to give way to the day’s heat. Seated in her litter, her husband at her side and her two-year-old son, Justin, napping in her lap, she closed her eyes and breathed a deep sigh of contentment.

She slipped her fingers into her husband’s hand. Hokanu smiled. He was undeniably handsome, and a proven warrior; and the easy times had not softened his athletic appearance. His grip closed possessively over hers, his strength masked by gentleness.

The past three years had been good ones. For the first time since childhood, she felt safe, secure from the deadly, unending political intrigues of the Game of the Council. The enemy who had killed her father and brother could no longer threaten her. He was now dust and memories, his family fallen with him; his ancestral lands and magnificently appointed estate house had been deeded to Mara by the Emperor.

Superstition held that ill luck tainted a fallen family’s land; on a wonderful morning such as this, misfortune seemed nowhere in evidence. As the litter moved slowly along the shore, the couple shared the peace of the moment while they regarded the home that they had created between them.

Nestled between steep, stone-crested hills, the valley that had first belonged to the Minwanabi Lords was not only naturally defensible, but so beautiful it was as if touched by the gods. The lake reflected a placid sky, the waters rippled by the fast oars of a messenger skiff bearing dispatches to factors in the Holy City. There, grain barges poled by chanting slaves delivered this year’s harvest to warehouses for storage until the spring floods allowed transport downriver.

The dry autumn breeze rippled golden grass, and the morning sun lit the walls of the estate house like alabaster. Beyond, in a natural hollow, Force Commanders Lujan and Xandia drilled a combined troop of Acoma and Shinzawai warriors. Since Hokanu would one day inherit his father’s title, his marriage to Mara had not merged the two houses. Warriors in Acoma green marched in step with others in Shinzawai blue, the ranks patched black, here and there, by divisions of insectoid cho-ja. Along with the Minwanabi lands, Lady Mara had gained an alliance with two additional hives and with them the fighting strength of three more companies of warriors bred by their queens for battle.

An enemy foolish enough to launch an assault would invite swift annihilation. Mara and Hokanu, with loyal vassals and allies, between them commanded a standing army unsurpassed in the Nations. Only the Light of Heaven’s own Imperial Whites, with levies from other houses under his sovereignty, would rival these two armies. And as if fine troops and a near-impregnable fortress did not in themselves secure peace, the title Servant of the Empire, bestowed upon Mara for her services to Tsuranuanni, gave her honorary adoption into the Emperor’s own family. The Imperial Whites were as likely to march in her defense, for by the honor central to Tsurani culture, insult or threat to her was as an offense visited upon the Light of Heaven’s blood family.

‘You seem delightfully self-satisfied this morning, wife,’ Hokanu said in her ear.

Mara tilted her head back into his shoulder, her lips parted for his kiss. If, deep in her heart, she missed the wild passion she had known with the red-haired barbarian slave who had fathered Justin, she had come to terms with that loss. Hokanu was a kindred spirit who shared her political shrewdness and inclination toward innovation. He was quick witted, kind, and devoted to her, as well as tolerant of her headstrong nature, as few men of her culture were inclined to be. With him, Mara shared voice as an equal. Marriage had brought a deep and abiding contentment, and though her interest in the Great Game of the Council had lessened, she no longer played out of fear. Hokanu’s kiss warmed the moment like wine, until a high-pitched shout split the quiet.

Mara straightened up from Hokanu’s embrace, her smile mirrored in her husband’s dark eyes. ‘Ayaki,’ they concluded simultaneously. The next moment, galloping hoof beats thundered down the trail by the lake.

Hokanu tightened his arm around his wife’s shoulder as the two of them leaned out to view the antics of Mara’s older son and heir.

A coal black horse burst through the gap in the trees, mane and tail flying in the wind. Green tassels adorned its bridle, and a pearl-stitched breastplate kept the saddle from sliding backward along its lean length of barrel. Crouched in the lacquer-worked stirrups was a boy, recently turned twelve, and as raven haired as his mount. He reined the gelding into a turn and charged toward Mara’s litter, his face flushed with the thrill of speed, and his fine, sequin stitched robe flying like a banner behind.

‘He’s becoming quite the bold rider,’ Hokanu said admiringly. ‘And the birthday present appears to please him.’

Mara watched, a glow of pleasure on her face, as the boy reined in the mount upon the path. Ayaki was her joy, the person she loved most in life.

The black gelding tossed its head in protest. It was spirited, and eager to run. Still not entirely comfortable with the huge animals imported from the barbarian world, Mara held her breath in apprehension. Ayaki had inherited a wild streak from his father, and in the years since his narrow escape from an assassin’s knife, a restless mood sometimes claimed him. At times he seemed to taunt death, as if by defying danger he could reaffirm the life in his veins.

But today was not such a moment, and the gelding had been selected for obedience as well as fleetness. It snorted a gusty breath of air and yielded to the rein, falling into stride alongside Mara’s litter bearers, who overcame their inclination to move away from the large animal.

The Lady looked up as boy and horse filled her vision. Ayaki would be tall, the legacy of both his grandfathers. He had inherited the Acoma tendency toward leanness, and all of his father’s stubborn courage. Although Hokanu was not his blood father, the two shared friendship and respect. Ayaki was a boy any parent could be proud of, and he was already showing the wits he would need when he reached adulthood and entered the Game of the Council as Lord of the Acoma in his own right.

‘Young show-off,’ Hokanu teased. ‘Our bearers might be the only ones in the Empire to be granted the privilege of sandals, but if you think we should race you to the meadows, we’ll certainly have to refuse.’

Ayaki laughed. His dark eyes fixed on his mother, filled with the elation of the moment. ‘Actually, I was going to ask Lax’l if I might try our speed against a cho-ja. It would be interesting to know whether his warriors could overtake a troop of the barbarians’ cavalry.’

‘If there was a war, which there is not at the moment, gods be praised,’ Hokanu said on a note a shade more serious. ‘Take care you mind your manners, and don’t offend Force Commander Lax’l’s dignity when you ask.’

Ayaki’s grin widened. Having grown up around the alien cho-ja, he was not at all intimidated by their strange ways. ‘Lax’l still has not forgiven me for handing him a jomach fruit with a stone in it.’

‘He has,’ Mara interjected. ‘But after that, he grew wise to your tricks, which is well. The cho-ja don’t have the same appreciation of jokes that humans do.’ Looking at Hokanu, she said, ‘In fact, I don’t think they understand our humor.’

Ayaki made a face, and the black curvetted under him. The litter bearers swerved away from its dancing hooves, and the jostle disturbed young Justin. He awakened with a cry of infant outrage.

The dark horse shied at the noise. Ayaki held the animal with a firm hand, but the spirited gelding backed a few steps. Hokanu kept a passive face, though he felt the urge to laugh at the boy’s fierce determination and control. Justin delivered an energetic kick into his mother’s stomach. She bent forward, scooped him up in her arms.

Then something sped past Hokanu’s ear, from behind him, causing the hangings of the litter to flutter. A tiny hole appeared in the silk where Mara’s head had been an instant before. Hokanu threw his body roughly against those of his wife and foster child and twisted to look in the other direction. Within the shadows of the bushes beside the path, something black moved. Instincts honed in battle pressed Hokanu to unthinking action.

He pushed his wife and younger child out of the litter, keeping his body across them as a shield. His sudden leap overturned the litter, giving them further cover. ‘The brush!’ he shouted as the bearers were sent sprawling.

Guards drew their blades in readiness to defend their mistress. But seeing no clear target to attack, they hesitated.

Mara exclaimed in puzzlement from beneath a tangle of cushions and torn curtains, over the noise of Justin’s wails. ‘What –’

To the guards, Hokanu shouted, ‘Behind the akasi bushes!’

The horse stamped, as if at a stinging fly. Ayaki felt his gelding shudder under him. Its ears flattened, and it shook its heavy mane, while he worked the reins to soothe it. ‘Easy, big fellow. Stand easy.’ His stepfather’s warning failed to reach him, so intent was he on steadying his mount.

Hokanu glanced over the litter. The guards now rushed the bushes he had indicated. As he turned to check for possible attack from the other quarter, he saw Ayaki frantically trying to calm a horse grown dangerously over excited. A sparkle of lacquer in the sunlight betrayed a tiny dart protruding from the gelding’s flank. ‘Ayaki! Get off!’

His horse gave a vicious kick. The dart in its hide had done its work, and nerve poison coursed through the beast’s bloodstream. Its eyes rolled, showing wide rings of white. It reared up, towering, and a near-human scream shrilled from its throat.

Hokanu sprang away from the litter. He grabbed for the gelding’s rein, but slashing hooves forced him back. He dodged, tried another grab, and missed as the horse twisted. Familiar enough with horseflesh to know this animal had gone berserk, he screamed to the boy who clung with both hands locked around the beast’s neck.

‘Ayaki! Jump off! Do it now, boy!’

‘No,’ cried the child, not in defiance, but bravely. ‘I can quiet him!’

Hokanu leaped for the reins again, frightened beyond thought for his own safety. The boy’s concern might have been justified if the horse had simply been scared. But Hokanu had once seen the effects of a poison dart; he recognised the horse’s shivering flesh and sudden lack of coordination for what they were: the symptoms of fast-acting venom. Had the dart struck Mara, death would have taken seconds. In an animal ten times her size, the end would be slower, and brutally painful. The horse bellowed its agony, and a spasm shook its great frame. It bared yellow teeth and fought the bit, while Hokanu again missed his grip. ‘Poison, Ayaki!’ he shouted over the noise of the frantic horse. Hokanu lunged to catch the stirrup, hoping to snatch the boy clear. The horse’s forelegs stiffened, bracing outward as the muscles locked into extension. Then its quarters collapsed, and it toppled, the boy caught like a burr underneath.

The thud of the heavy body striking earth mingled with Mara’s scream. Ayaki refused to leap free at the last. Still riding his horse, he was swept sideways, his neck whipped back as the force of the fall threw him across the path. The horse shuddered and rolled over upon the boy.

Ayaki made no sound. Hokanu avoided a hedge of thrashing hooves as he darted around the tormented animal. He reached the boy’s side in a bound, too late. Trapped under the weight of dying, shivering horseflesh, the child looked too pale to be real. His dark eyes turned to Hokanu’s, and his one free hand reached out to grip that of his foster father’s a heartbeat ahead of death.

Hokanu felt the small, dirty fingers go limp inside his own. He clung on in a rage of denial. ‘No!’ he shouted, as if in appeal to the gods. Mara’s cries rang in his ears, and he was aware of the warriors from her honor guard, jostling him as they labored to shift the dead horse. The gelding was rolled aside, the rush of air as its lungs deflated moaning through its vocal cords. For Ayaki, there would be no such protest at shattering, untimely death. The gelding’s withers had crushed his chest, and the ribs stood up from mangled flesh like the broken shards of swords.

The young face with its too white cheeks stared yet, open-eyed and surprised, at the untroubled sky overhead. The fingers that had reached out to a trusted foster father to stave off the horror of the dark lay empty, open, the scabbed remains of a blister on one thumb a last testimony to diligent practice with a wooden sword. This boy would never know the honors or the horrors of a battle, or the sweet kiss of his first maid, or the pride and responsibility of the Lord’s mantle that had been destined one day to be his.

The finality of sudden ending left pain like a bleeding wound. Hokanu knew grief and stunned disbelief. His mind worked through the shock only out of reflex trained on the fields of war. ‘Cover the child with your shield,’ he ordered. ‘His mother must not see him like this.’

But the words left numbed lips too late. Mara had rushed after him, and he felt the flurry of her silken robes against his calf as she flung herself on her knees by her son. She reached out to embrace him, to raise him up from the dusty ground as if through sheer force of love she could restore him to life. But her hands froze in the air over the bloody rags of flesh that had been Ayaki’s body. Her mouth opened without sound. Something crumpled inside her. On instinct, Hokanu caught her back and bundled her against his shoulder.

‘He’s gone to the Red God’s halls,’ he murmured. Mara did not respond. Hokanu felt the rapid beat of her heart under his hands. Only belatedly did he notice the scuffle in the brush beside the trail. Mara’s honor guard had thrown themselves with a vengeance upon the black clothed body of the assassin. Before Hokanu could gather the wits to order restraint – for, alive, the man might be made to say which enemy had hired him – the warriors made an end of the issue.

Their swords rose and fell, bright red. In seconds Ayaki’s killer lay hacked like a needra bullock slaughtered in a butcher’s stall.

Hokanu felt pity for the man. Through the blood, he noted the short black shirt and trousers, the red-dyed hands, as the soldiers turned the body over. The headcloth that hid all but the eyes of the man, was pulled aside to reveal a blue tattoo upon the left cheek. This mark would only be worn by a member of the Hamoi Tong, a brotherhood of assassins.

Hokanu stood slowly. It did not matter that the soldiers had dispatched the killer: the assassin would have died gladly before divulging information. The tong operated to a strict code of secrecy, and it was certain the murderer would not know who had paid his leader for this attack. And the only name that mattered was that of the man who had hired the Hamoi Brotherhood’s services.

In a cold corner of his mind, Hokanu understood that this attempt upon Mara’s life had not come cheaply. This man could not have hoped to survive his mission, and a suicide killing would be worth a fortune in metal.

‘Search the corpse, and track his path through the estates,’ he heard himself saying in a voice hardened by the emotions that seethed inside. ‘See if you can find any clues as to who might have hired the tong.’

The Acoma Strike Leader in command bowed to the master, and issued sharp orders to his men.

‘Leave a guard over the boy’s body,’ Hokanu added. He bent to comfort Mara, unsurprised that she was still speechless, fighting horror and disbelief. Her husband did not fault her for being unable to keep composure and show proper Tsurani impassivity. Ayaki had been all the family she had known for many years; she had no other blood kindred. Her life before his birth had already been jarred by too much loss and death. He cradled her small, shivering body against his own, and added the necessary instructions concerning the boy.

But when the arrangements were complete and Hokanu tenderly tried to draw Mara away, she fought him. ‘No!’ she said in strangled pain. ‘I will not leave him here alone!’

‘My Lady, Ayaki is beyond our help. He already stands in the Red God’s halls. Despite his years, he met death courageously. He will be welcomed.’ He stroked her dark hair, dampened with tears, and tried to calm her. ‘You would do better inside with loved ones around you, and Justin in the care of his nurses.’

‘No,’ Mara repeated, a note in her voice that he instinctively knew not to cross. ‘I won’t leave.’

And though she did after a time consent to have her surviving child sent back to the estate house under protection of a company of warriors, she sat through the heat of the morning on the dusty soil, staring at the stilled face of her firstborn.

Hokanu never left her. The stinks of death did not drive him away, nor the flies that swarmed and buzzed and sucked at the eyes of the seeping corpse of the gelding. Controlled as if on a battlefield, he faced the worst, and coped. In quiet tones he sent a runner slave to fetch servants, and a small silk pavilion to offer shade. Mara never looked aside as the awning was set up above her. As though the people around her did not exist, she sifted torn earth through her fingers, until a dozen of her best warriors arrived in ceremonial armor to bear her fallen son away. No one argued with Hokanu’s suggestion that the boy deserved battlefield honors. Ayaki had died of an enemy’s dart, as surely as if the poison had struck his own flesh. He had refused to abandon his beloved horse, and such courage and responsibility in one so young merited recognition.

Mara watched, her expression rigid as porcelain, as the warriors lifted her son’s body and set it on a bier bedecked with streamers of Acoma green, a single one scarlet, in acknowledgment of the Red God who gathers in all life.

The morning breeze had stilled, and the warriors sweated at their task. Hokanu helped Mara to her feet, willing her not to break. He knew the effort it took to maintain his own composure, and not just for the sake of Ayaki. Inside his heart, he bled also for Mara, whose suffering could scarcely be imagined. He steadied her steps as she moved beside the bier, and the slow cortege wound its way downslope, toward the estate house that only hours earlier had seemed a place blessed by felicity.

It seemed a crime against nature, that the gardens should still be so lush, and the lakeshore so verdant and beautiful, and the boy on the bier be so bloody and broken and still.

The honor bearers drew up before the front doorway used for ceremonial occasions. Shadowed by the immense stone portal stood the household’s most loyal servants. One by one they bowed to the bier, to pay young Ayaki their respects. They were led by Keyoke, First Adviser for War, his hair silvered with age, the crutch that enabled him to walk after battle wounds cost him his leg unobtrusively tucked into a fold of his formal mantle; as he intoned the ritual words of sympathy, he looked upon Mara with the grief a father might show, locked behind dark eyes and an expression like old wood. After him waited Lujan, the Acoma Force Commander, his usual rakish smile vanished and his steady gaze spoiled by his blinking to hold back tears. A warrior to the core, he scarcely managed to maintain his bearing. He had taught the boy on the bier to spar with a sword, and only that morning had praised his developing skills.

He touched Mara’s hand as she passed. ‘Ayaki may have been only twelve years of age, my Lady, but he already was an exemplary warrior.’

The mistress barely nodded in response. Guided by Hokanu, she passed on to the hadonra next in line. Small, and mouse-shy, Jican looked desolate. He had recently succeeded in intriguing the volatile Ayaki with the arts of estate finance. Their games using shell counters to represent the marketable Acoma trade goods would no longer clutter the breakfast nook off the pantry. Jican stumbled over the formal words of sympathy to his mistress. His earnest brown eyes seemed to reflect her pain as she and her husband passed on, to her young adviser Saric, and his assistant, Incomo. Both were later additions to the household; but Ayaki had won their affection no less than the others’. The condolences they offered to Mara were genuine, but she could not reply. Only Hokanu’s hand on her elbow kept her from stumbling as she mounted the stair and entered the corridor.

The sudden step into shadow caused Hokanu to shiver. For the first time, the beautifully tiled stonework did not offer him the feeling of shelter. The beautiful painted screens he and Mara had commissioned did not warm him to admiration. Instead he felt gnawing doubt; had young Ayaki’s death been an expression of the gods’ displeasure, that Mara should claim as spoils the properties of her fallen enemies? The Minwanabi who had once walked these halls had sworn blood feud against the Acoma. Eschewing tradition, Mara had not buried their natami, the talisman stone that secured the spirits of the dead to life’s Wheel as long as it stood in sunlight. Could the lingering shades of vanquished enemies visit ill luck on her and her children?

Afraid for young Justin’s safety, and inwardly reprimanding himself for giving credence to superstitions, Hokanu focused upon Mara. Where death and loss had always hardened her to courage and action, now she seemed utterly devastated. She saw the boy’s corpse into the great hall, her steps like those of a mannequin animated by a magician’s spell. She sat motionless at the bier side while servants and maids bathed her child’s torn flesh, and robed him in the silks and jewels that were his heritage as heir of a great house. Hokanu hovered nearby, aching with a sense of his own uselessness. He had food brought, but his lady would not eat. He asked for a healer to make up a soporific, expecting, even hoping, to provoke an angry response.

Mara dully shook her head and pushed the cup away.

The shadows on the floor lengthened as the sun crossed the sky, and the windows in the ceiling admitted steepening angles of light. When the scribe sent by Jican tapped discreetly on the main door a third time, Hokanu at last took charge and told the man to seek out Saric or Incomo, to make up the list of noble houses who should be informed of the tragedy. Plainly Mara was not up to making the decision herself. Her only movement, for hours, had been to take the cold, stiff fingers of her son in her own.

Lujan arrived near dusk, his sandals dusty, and more weariness in his eyes than he had ever shown on campaign. He bowed to his mistress and her consort and awaited permission to speak.

Mara’s eyes remained dully fixed on her son.

Hokanu reached out and touched her rigid shoulder. ‘My love, your Force Commander has news.’

The Lady of the Acoma stirred, as if roused from across a great distance. ‘My son is dead,’ she said faintly. ‘By the mercy of all the gods, it should have been me.’

Rent to the heart by compassion, Hokanu stroked back a fallen wisp of her hair. ‘If the gods were kind, the attack should never have happened.’ Then, as he saw that his Lady had slipped back into her stupor, he faced her officer.

The eyes of both men met, anguished. They had seen Mara enraged, hurt, even in terror of her life. She had always responded with spirit and innovation. This apathy was not like her, and all who loved her feared that a portion of her spirit might have perished along with her son.

Hokanu endeavored to shoulder as much of the burden as possible. ‘Tell me what your men have found, Lujan.’

Had Mara’s Force Commander been a more tradition-bound man, he would have refused; while Hokanu was a noble, he was not master of the Acoma. But the Shinzawai faction of the household was sworn to alliance with the Acoma, and Mara was in no condition to make critical decisions. Lujan released an almost imperceptible sigh of relief. The strengths of the Shinzawai heir were considerable, and the news Lujan brought was not cheering. ‘My Lord, our warriors searched the corpse to no avail. Our best trackers joined the search and, in a hollow where the assassin had apparently been sleeping, found this.’

He offered a round shell token, painted scarlet and yellow, and incised with the triangular sigil of House Anasati. Hokanu took the object with a touch that bespoke disgust. The token was the sort a Ruling Lord might give a messenger as proof that an important errand had been carried out. Such a badge was inappropriate for an enemy to entrust to an assassin; but then, the Lord of the Anasati made no secret of his hatred for Mara. Jiro was powerful, and openly allied with houses who wished to abolish the Emperor’s new policies. He was a scholar rather than a man of war, and though he was too clever to indulge in crude gestures, Mara had once slighted his manhood: she had chosen his younger brother for her first husband, and since that day, Jiro had shown open animosity.

Still, the shell counter was blatantly unsubtle, for a working of the Great Game. And the Hamoi Tong was too devious a brotherhood to consent to the folly of carrying evidence of which Lord or family might have hired it. Its history extended back for centuries, and its policies were cloaked in secrecy. To buy a death from it ensured absolute discretion. The token could be a play designed to throw blame upon the Anasati.

Hokanu raised concerned eyes to Lujan. ‘You think Lord Jiro was responsible for this attack?’

His query was less a question than an implied expression of doubt. That Lujan also had reservations about the placement of the token was evident as he drew breath to reply.

But the name of the Anasati Lord had pierced through Mara’s lethargy. ‘Jiro did this?’ She spun from Ayaki’s body and saw the red-and-yellow disk in Hokanu’s hand. Her face contorted into a frightening mask of fury. ‘The Anasati shall be as dust in the wind. Their natami will be buried in offal, and their spirits be consigned to the dark. I will show them less mercy than I did the Minwanabi!’ Her hands clenched into fists. She stared without seeing between her husband and her Force Commander, as though her detested enemy could be made manifest through the force of her hatred. ‘Not even that will pay for the blood of my son. Not even that.’

‘Lord Jiro might not be responsible,’ Lujan offered, his usually firm voice torn by grief. ‘You were the target, not Ayaki. The boy is the nephew of the Anasati Lord, after all. The tong assassin could have been sent by any of the Emperor’s enemies.’

But Mara seemed not to hear. ‘Jiro will pay. My son will be avenged.’

‘Do you think Lord Jiro was responsible?’ Hokanu repeated to the Force Commander. That the young Anasati heir still felt as he did, even after inheriting the mantle and power that had been his father’s, bespoke stubborn, and childish pride. A mature mind would no longer nurse such a grudge; but in vain arrogance, the Anasati Lord might well wish the world to know whose hand had contracted for Mara’s downfall.

Except that since Mara was Servant of the Empire, her popularity was too widespread. Fool Jiro might be, over slighted manhood, but surely not so much that he would invite the Emperor’s wrath.

Lujan turned dark eyes toward Hokanu. ‘That bit of shell is all the evidence we have. Its very obviousness might be subtle, as if by calling attention to House Anasati, we might dismiss them at once and look elsewhere for the culprits.’ Fury coiled beneath his words. He, too, wanted to strike in anger at the outrage that had been committed. ‘It matters very little what I think,’ he finished grimly. For honor demanded that he do his Lady’s will, absolutely and without question. If Mara asked him to muster the Acoma garrison and march suicidally to war, he would obey, with all his heart and will.

Dusk dimmed the skylights in the great hall. Servants entered on quiet feet and lit the lamps arrayed around Ayaki’s bier. Scented smoke sweetened the air. The play of warm light softened death’s pallor, and shadow veiled the misshapen lumps of the injuries beneath the silk robes. Mara sat alone in vigil. She regarded her son’s oval face, and the coal-dark hair that, for the first time she could remember, had stayed combed for more than an hour.

Ayaki had been all of her future, until that moment of the gelding’s crushing fall. He had been her hopes, her dreams, and more: the future guardian of her ancestors and the continuance of the Acoma name.

Her complacence had killed him.

Mara clenched white fingers in her lap. She never, ever, should have lulled herself into belief that her enemies could not touch her. Her guilt at this lapse in vigilance would follow her all her days. Yet how bleak any contemplation of tomorrow had become. At her side lay a tray with the picked-over remains of a meal; the food had no taste that she could recall. Hokanu’s solicitude had not comforted; she knew him too well, and the echoes of her own pain and anger she could sense behind his words galled her into deeper recriminations.

Only the boy showed no reproach for her folly. Ayaki was past feeling, beyond reach of sorrow or joy.

Mara choked back a spasm of grief. How she wished the dart had taken her, that the darkness which ended all striving could be hers, instead of her son’s. That she had another surviving child did not lessen her despair. Of the two, Ayaki had known the least of life’s fullness, despite his being the elder. Fathered by Buntokapi of the Anasati, whose family had been an Acoma enemy, in a union from which Mara had derived much pain and no happiness. Political expediency had led her to deeds of deceit and entrapment that to her maturer view seemed no less than murder. Ayaki had been her atonement for his father’s wasteful suicide, brought about by Mara’s own machinations. Although by the tenets of the Game of the Council she had won a telling victory, privately she considered Buntokapi’s death a defeat. That his family’s neglect had made of him a tool open for her to exploit made no difference. Ayaki had offered her a chance to give her first husband’s shade lasting honor. She had been determined that his son would rise to the greatness that Buntokapi had been denied.

But the hope was ended now. Lord Jiro of the Anasati had been Buntokapi’s brother, and the fact that his plot against her had misfired and resulted in a nephew’s death had shifted the balance of politics yet again. For, without Ayaki, the Anasati were free to resume the enmity quiescent since her father’s time.

Ayaki had grown up with the best teachers, and all of her soldiers’ vigilance to protect him; but he had paid for the privileges of his rank. At nine he had nearly lost his life to an assassin’s knife. Two nurses and a beloved old household servant had been murdered before his eyes, and the experience had left him with nightmares. Mara resisted an urge to rub his hand in comfort. The flesh was cold, and his eyes would never open in joy and trust.

Mara did not have to fight down tears; rage at injustice choked her sorrow for her. The personal demons that had twisted his father’s nature toward cruelty had inspired melancholy and brooding in Ayaki. Only in the past three years, since Mara’s marriage to Hokanu, had the sunnier side of the boy’s nature gained ascendancy.

The fortress of the Minwanabi, Ayaki had been fond of pointing out, had never been so much as besieged. The defenses here were impregnable to an enemy. Moreover, Mara was a Servant of the Empire. The title carried favor with the gods, and luck enough to ward away misfortune.

Now, Mara berated herself for allowing his childish, blind faith to influence her. She had used traditions and superstitions to her advantage often enough in the past. She had been a vain fool not to see that the same things could be exploited against her.

It seemed an injustice that the child should have paid, and not her.

His small half-brother, Justin, had helped lighten Ayaki’s bleak spells. Her second son was the child of the barbarian slave she still loved. She had only to close her eyes for an instant and Kevin’s face came to mind, nearly always smiling over some ridiculous joke, his red hair and beard shining copper under Kelewan’s sun. With him she had shared none of the harmonious rapport she now enjoyed with Hokanu. No, Kevin had been tempestuous, impulsive, at times passionately illogical. He would not have hidden his grief from her, but would have freed his feelings in an explosive storm; in his intense expression of life she might have found the courage to face this outrage. Young Justin had inherited his father’s carefree nature. He laughed easily, was quick to get into mischief, and already evidenced a fast tongue. Like his father before him, Justin had a knack for snapping Ayaki out of his brooding. He would run on fat legs, trip, and tumble over laughing, or he would make ridiculous faces until it was impossible to be near him and stay withdrawn.

But there would be no more shared laughter for Ayaki now.

Mara shivered, only that moment conscious of the presence of someone at her side. Hokanu had entered the chamber in the uncannily silent manner he had learned from the foresters on the barbarian world.

Aware that she had noticed him, he took her cold hand into his warm one. ‘My Lady, it is past midnight. You would do well to take some rest.’

Mara half turned from the bier. Her dark eyes fastened on Hokanu’s, and the compassion in his gaze caused her to dissolve into tears. His handsome features blurred, and his grip shifted, supporting her body against his shoulder. He was strong in the same sparely muscled way of his father. And if he did not kindle the wild passion that Kevin had, with him, Mara shared an effortless understanding. He was husband to her as Ayaki’s father had never been, and his presence now as grief crumbled her poise was all that kept her from insanity. The touch that sought to soothe her sorrow was that of a man well capable of command on the field of war. He preferred peace, as she did, but when the ways of the sword became necessary, he had the courage of the tigers that inhabited the world beyond the rift.

Now, belatedly, the Acoma would need those skills in battle.

As tears rinsed Mara’s cheeks, she tasted bitterness that knew no limit. The guilt inside her had a name she could use as a scapegoat. Jiro of the Anasati had murdered her son; for that, she would destroy his house beyond the memory of the living.

As though he sensed the ugly turn of her thoughts, Hokanu shook her gently. ‘My Lady, you are needed. Justin cried all through his supper, asking what had happened to his mama. Keyoke called each hour for instructions, and Force Commander Lujan needs to know how many companies should be recalled from garrison duty at your estates near Sulan-Qu.’

In his inimitably subtle way, Hokanu did not argue the necessity for war. That brought relief. Had he offered questions, had he sought to dissuade her from vengeance against Jiro upon grounds that a single shell token offered too scanty evidence, she would have turned on him in a fury. Who was not with her at this moment was against her. A blow had been struck against the Acoma, and honor demanded action.

But the form of her murdered son sapped her will; life in any form seemed sucked dry, devoid of interest.

‘Lady?’ prompted Hokanu. ‘Your decisions are necessary for the continuance of your house. For now you are the Acoma.’

A frown gathered Mara’s eyebrows. Her husband’s words were truth. Upon their marriage, they had agreed that young Justin would become the Shinzawai heir after Hokanu. Fiercely, suddenly, Mara wished that promise unspoken. Never would she have agreed to such a thing had she realised Ayaki’s mortality.

The circle closed, again. She had been negligent. Had she not grown dangerously complacent, her black haired son would not lie in state inside a circle of death lamps. He would be running, as a boy should, or practicing the skills of a warrior, or riding his great black gelding faster than the wind over the hills.

Again Mara saw in her mind’s eye the arc of the brute’s rearing form, and the terrible, thrashing of hooves as it toppled …

‘Lady,’ chided Hokanu. Tenderly he pried her fingers open, and endeavored to stroke away her tension. ‘It is over. We must continue to strive for the living.’ His hands brushed away her tears. More spilled between her eyelids to replace them. ‘Mara, the gods have not been kind. But my love for you goes on, and the faith of your household in your spirit shines like a lamp in the darkness. Ayaki did not live for nothing. He was brave, and strong, and he did not shy from his responsibilities, even at the moment of his death. As he did, so must we or the dart that felled the horse will deal more than one mortal blow.’

Mara closed her eyes, and tried to deny the oil-scented smoke of the death lamps. She did not need reminding that thousands of lives depended upon her, as Ruling Lady of the Acoma; today she had paid for the proof that she did not deserve their trust. She was regent for a growing son no longer. There seemed no heart left in her, and yet she must prepare for a great war, and achieve vengeance to keep family honor, and then, she must produce another heir.

Yet the hope, the future, the enthusiasms, and the dreams she had sacrificed so much for had all gone to dust. She felt numbed, punished beyond caring.

‘My Lord and husband,’ she said hoarsely ‘attend to my advisers, and have them do as you suggest. I have not the heart to make decisions, and the Acoma must make ready for battle.’

Hokanu looked at her with wounded eyes. He had long admired her spirit, and to see her beautiful boldness overcome by grief made his heart ache. He held her close, knowing the depth of her pain. ‘Lady,’ he whispered softly. ‘I will spare you all I can. If you would march upon Jiro of the Anasati, I will stand at the right hand of your Force Commander. But sooner or later, you must put on the mantle of your house. The Acoma name is your charge. Ayaki’s loss must not signify an ending but create a renewal of your line.’

Past speech, beyond rational thought, Mara turned her face into her husband’s shoulder, and for a very long time her tears soaked soundlessly into the rich blue silk of his robe.

• Chapter Two • Confrontation

Jiro frowned.

Though the unadorned robe he wore was light and the portico around the courtyard adjacent to his library was still cool at this early hour, fine sweat beaded his brow. A tray of half-eaten breakfast lay abandoned at his elbow, while he tapped tense fingers on the embroidered cushion he sat on; his eyes unwaveringly studied the game board spread at his knees. He considered the position of each piece singly, and sought to assess the probable outcome of each move. A wrong choice might not seem immediately obvious, but against today’s opponent, the consequences were apt to prove ruinous several moves later. Scholars claimed the game of shah sharpened a man’s instinct for battle and politics, but Jiro, Lord of the Anasati, enjoyed puzzles of the mind over physical contests. He found its intricacies hypnotic for their own sake.

His skills had surpassed those of his father and other teachers at a precociously early age. When he was a boy, his older brother, Halesko, and younger brother, Buntokapi, had often as not pummeled him for the contemptuous ease he displayed in defeating them. Jiro had sought older opponents, and had even contended against the Midkemian traders who visited the Empire more and more often, seeking markets for their otherworld goods. They called the game chess, but the rules were the same. Jiro found few in their ranks to challenge him.

The one man he had never defeated sat opposite him, absently scanning through an array of documents piled meticulously around his knees. Chumaka, First Adviser to the Anasati since Jiro’s father’s time, was a whip-thin, narrow-faced man with a pointed chin and black, impenetrable eyes. He checked the game board in passing, now and again pausing to answer his master’s moves. Rather than being irritated by the absent-minded fashion in which his First Adviser routinely defeated him, Jiro felt pride that such a facile mind served the Anasati.

Chumaka’s gift for anticipating complex politics at times seemed to border on the uncanny. Most of Jiro’s father’s ascendancy in the Game of the Council could be credited to this adviser’s shrewd advice. While Mara of the Acoma had humiliated the Anasati early in her rise to greatness, Chumaka had offered sage counsel that had sheltered family interests from setbacks in the conflict that had followed between the Acoma and the Minwanabi.

Jiro chewed his lip, torn between two moves that offered small gains and another that held promise of long-term strategy. As he debated, his thoughts circled back to the Great Game: the obliteration of House Minwanabi might have proven a cause for celebration, since they had been rivals of the Anasati – save that the victory had been won by the woman Jiro hated foremost among the living. His hostility remained from the moment Lady Mara named her choice of husband, and picked his younger brother, Buntokapi, as her consort over Jiro.

It did not matter that, had his ego not suffered a bruising, Jiro would have been the one to die of the Lady’s machinations, instead of Bunto. Enamored though he was of scholarly thought, the last surviving son of the Anasati line stayed blind to logic on this point. He fed his spite by brooding. That the bitch had cold-heartedly plotted the death of his brother was cause for blood vengeance; never mind that Bunto had been despised by his family, and that he had renounced all ties to Anasati to accept the Lordship of the Acoma. So deep, so icy was Jiro’s hatred that he preferred obstinate blindness to recognition that he had inherited his own Ruling Lordship precisely because Mara had spurned him. Over the years his youthful thirst for retribution had darkened into the abiding obsession of a dangerous, cunning rival.

Jiro glared at the shah board but raised no hand to advance a player. Chumaka noticed this as he riffled through his correspondence. His high brows arched upward. ‘You’re thinking of Mara again.’

Jiro looked nettled.

‘I have warned you,’ Chumaka resumed in his grainy, emotionless voice. ‘Dwelling on your enmity will upset your inner balance and ultimately cost you the game.’

The Lord of the Anasati indicated his contempt by selecting the bolder of the two short-range moves.

‘Ah.’ Chumaka had the ill grace to look delighted as he removed his captured minor player. With his left hand still occupied with papers, he immediately advanced his priest.

The Anasati Lord chewed his lip, vexed; why had his First Adviser done that? Enmeshed in an attempt to fathom the logic behind the move, Jiro barely noticed the messenger who hurried into the chamber.

The arrival bowed to his master. Immediately upon receiving the languid wave that allowed him leave to rise, he passed the sealed packet he carried to Chumaka.

‘Your permission, master?’ Chumaka murmured.

‘The correspondence is coded, is it not?’ Jiro said, not wanting the interruption as he pondered his next move. His hand lingered between pieces, while Chumaka cleared his throat. Jiro took this for affirmation. ‘I thought so,’ he said. ‘Open your dispatches, then. And may the news in them for once dull your concentration for the game.’

Chumaka gave a short bark of laughter. ‘The more scurrilous the gossip, the keener I will play.’ He followed Jiro’s indecision with an amusement that almost, but not quite, approached contempt. Then he flipped over the pouch and used the one thumbnail he left unbitten for the purpose to slit the tie.

As he thumbed through the papers inside, his brows arched. ‘This is most unexpected.’

The Lord of the Anasati’s hand hung in space. He looked up, intrigued by the novelty of his First Adviser’s surprise. ‘What?’

Servant to two generations of Ruling Lords, Chumaka was rarely caught out. He regarded his master, speculation in the depths of his eyes. ‘Pardon, my Lord. I was speaking of this.’ He drew a paper from the pouch. Then, as his peripheral sight took in the piece under Jiro’s poised hand, he added, ‘Your move is anticipated, master.’

Jiro withdrew his hand, caught between irritation and amusement. ‘Anticipated,’ he muttered. He lounged back on his cushions to settle his mind. From this changed vantage, the game board showed a different perspective; a trick picked up from his father at an early age.

Chumaka tapped a leathery cheek with the document that had caused the interruption and smiled in his enigmatic way. Typically he would point out a mistake; but in shah he would not advise. He would wait for Jiro to pay for the consequence of his moves. ‘This one,’ he muttered, making a mark upon the parchment with a small quill.

Jiro furiously reviewed strategy. Try as he might, he found no threat. ‘You’re bluffing me.’ He went on to move the piece in dispute.

Chumaka looked faintly disgusted. ‘I don’t need to bluff.’ He advanced another piece and said, ‘Your Warlord is now guarded.’

Jiro saw the trap his First Adviser had set: its subtlety infuriated. Either the master would surrender the center of the board and be forced to play a defensive game, or he would lose his Warlord, the most powerful piece, and exchange position for a weakened offensive capacity. Jiro’s forehead creased as he considered several positions ahead. No matter how many combinations he imagined, he discovered no way to win. His only hope was to try for a stalemate.

He moved his remaining priest.

Chumaka by now was engrossed in reading. Still, at his Lord’s reply, he glanced down, captured the priest with a soldier, and paradoxically allowed his master to free his Warlord.

Warned to caution by the reprieve, Jiro sought to extrapolate as far ahead as possible. Too late, his mind gave him insight: he saw with disappointment that he had been manipulated to the very move his First Adviser had desired. The hoped-for stalemate was now forfeit, with defeat simply a matter of time. Prolonging the match never helped; Chumaka seemed at times to be impervious to human mistakes.

Sighing in frustration, the Lord of the Anasati resigned by turning his Emperor over on its side. ‘Your game, Chumaka.’ He rubbed his eyes, his head aching from the aftermath of tension.

Chumaka gave him a piercing glance over his letter. ‘Your play is steadily improving, Lord Jiro.’

Jiro let the compliments soothe the sting of yet another defeat. ‘I often wonder how you can play so brilliantly with your mind on other matters, Chumaka.’

The First Adviser snapped the document into folds. ‘Shah is but one aspect of the prepared mind, my Lord.’ Holding his master’s attention with heavy-lidded eyes, he added, ‘I hold no trick of strategy, but of knowing my opponent. I have observed you all your life, master. From your third move, I could sense where you were probing. By your sixth move, I had eliminated more than four fifths of the total possibilities in the game.’

Jiro let his hands fall limp to his lap. ‘How?’

‘Because you are like most men in the gods’ creation, my Lord. You can be depended upon to act within a pattern determined by your individual character.’ Chumaka tucked the parchment in a capacious pocket of his robe. ‘You spent a peaceful night. You ate well. You were relaxed. While you were focused, you were not … hungry. By the third move, I extrapolated that your game would reflect directness, and … not boldness and risk.’ Paying Jiro his undivided attention, he summed up, ‘The secret is to ferret out the clues that will reveal the thoughts of one’s opponent. Learn his motives, know his passions, and you need not wait to see what he does: you can anticipate his next move.’

Jiro gave back a humorless smile. ‘I hope that one day a shah master may visit who could humble you, Chumaka.’

The First Adviser chuckled. ‘I have been humbled many times, my Lord. Many times. But you have never seen it.’ His gaze flicked over the disarranged players, in satisfied reminiscence. ‘Play with those who do not know you as I do, and you will emerge victorious. In truth, you have an enviable gift for strategy. I am not a better shah player, master.’ The First Adviser selected another paper from his pouch as he finished his rumination. ‘But I am a far better student of you than you have ever been of me.’

Jiro felt discomforted that anyone, even a servant as loyal as Chumaka, would have subjected him to so detailed a scrutiny. Then he caught himself short: he was fortunate to have the man as a high officer. Chumaka’s job was to act as adviser, confidant, and diplomat. The better he knew his master, the better he would serve the Anasati. To hate him for his supreme skill was a fool’s measure, the mistake of a master too vain to admit shortcoming. Jiro chastised himself for selfish, unworthy suspicions and said, ‘What has you so engrossed this morning?’

Chumaka shuffled through the pouch, selected several more missives, and pushed the shah board aside to make space to array the papers around his knees. ‘I have been pursuing that lead we had into the Acoma spy network, and keeping watch upon the contacts as you requested. News has just arrived that I’m attempting to fit in.’ His voice fell to a mutter intelligible only to him as he reshuffled his piles, then resolved to thinking aloud: ‘I’m not quite yet sure –’ He twitched another paper from one pile to the next. ‘Forgive the disarray, master, but such visualizations help me keep track of relationships. Too often one is tempted to consider events in a straight line, in a particular order, when actually life is rather … chaotic.’ He stroked his chin with thumb and forefinger. ‘I have often thought of having a table constructed of sticks, so I might place notes at different heights, to further dramatise interconnections …’

Experience had taught Jiro not to be nettled by his First Adviser’s idiosyncrasies. He might grumble over his work, but he seemed to produce the most valuable results at such times. The Anasati spy network that Jiro had spent all the wealth he could spare to expand was providing more useful information each year. Other great houses might employ a spy master to manage such an operation in his own right; yet Chumaka had urged against allowing another to oversee his works. He insisted on first-hand control of those agents he had placed in other houses, guild halls, and trading centers. Even when Tecuma, Jiro’s father, had ruled House Anasati, Chumaka had occasionally left the estate to oversee some matter or another in person.

While Jiro showed a young man’s impatience at his First Adviser’s foibles, he knew when not to interfere. Now, while Chumaka pored over the gleanings of his agents, the Lord of the Anasati noticed that some of the reports on the stacks dated back as much as two years. A few seemed nothing more than the jottings of a grain factor’s secretary who used the margins to figure his accounts. ‘What is this new information?’

Chumaka did not glance up. ‘Someone’s tried to kill Mara.’

This was momentous news! Jiro sat up straight, irked that he had not been told at once, and maddened that some other faction, rather than the Anasati, had discommoded the Lady. ‘How do you know this?’

The wily Chumaka hooked the folded paper out of his robe and extended it toward his master. Jiro snatched the message and read the opening lines. ‘My nephew Ayaki’s dead!’ he exclaimed.

The Anasati First Adviser interrupted before his master could launch into a tirade. ‘Official word will not reach us until tomorrow, my Lord. That gives us today and tonight to weigh the manner in which we shall respond.’

Distracted from chastising his officer for withholding information unnecessarily, Jiro diverted to consider the course of thought Chumaka desired: for politically, the Anasati and the Acoma had been bitterest enemies until Mara’s marriage to Buntokapi; since Bunto’s ritual suicide, her heir Ayaki represented a blood tie between the two houses. Family duty had provided the only reason for suspension of hostilities.

Now the boy was in Turakamu’s halls. Jiro felt no personal regret at the news of his nephew’s death. He knew anger, that his closest male kin should have been born to the Acoma name; he had long chafed under the treaty that compelled him as Anasati to provide the Acoma with an alliance in the cause of that same child’s protection.

That constraint was ended at long last. Mara had signally failed in her duty as guardian. She had gotten the boy killed. The Anasati had the public excuse, no, the honorable duty, of exacting reprisal for the boy’s untimely end.

Jiro could barely keep from reveling in the knowledge that he could at last begin to avenge himself on Mara. He asked, ‘How did the boy die?’

Chumaka shot his master a look of unveiled rebuke. ‘Had you read to the end of what you hold, you would know.’

Lord Jiro felt moved to assert himself as Ruling Lord. ‘Why not tell me? Your post is to advise.’

The hot black eyes of the First Adviser dropped back to his papers. He did not show any overt irritation over Jiro’s correction. If anything, he replied with unctuous complacence. ‘Ayaki died of a fall from a horse. That’s made public. What is not widely known, what has been garnered by our agent near her estates, is that the horse died as well. It fell and crushed the child after being struck by a poisoned dart.’

Jiro’s mind pounced on pertinent bits of earlier conversation. ‘A tong assassin,’ he surmised, ‘whose intended target was Lady Mara.’

Chumaka’s expression remained ferociously bland. ‘So the paper in your hand spells out clearly.’

Now Lord Jiro inclined his head, half laughing in magnanimous spirits. ‘I accept the lesson, First Adviser. Now, rather than your using this news as a whip to instruct me, I would hear what conclusions you have drawn. The son of my enemy was, nevertheless my blood kin. This news makes me angry.’

Chumaka gnawed on the thumbnail he did not keep sharpened, to break the seals off his correspondence. His eyes stopped tracking the cipher on the page in his hand as he analysed his master’s statement. Jiro showed no outward emotion, in traditional Tsurani fashion; if he said he was angry, he was to be taken at his word. Honor demanded the servant believe the master. But Jiro was less enraged than excited, Chumaka determined, which did not bode well for Mara. Young yet at ruling, Jiro failed to grasp the longer-range benefits of allowing the alliance between Anasati and Acoma to dissolve into a state of laissez-faire.

The silence as his adviser pondered rasped at Jiro’s nerves. ‘Who?’ he demanded peevishly. ‘Which of Mara’s enemies desires her death? We could make ourselves an ally out of this, if we are bold.’

Chumaka sat back and indulged in a deep sigh.

Behind his pose of long-suffering patience, he was intrigued by the unexpected turn events had taken, Jiro saw. The Anasati First Adviser was as enamored of Tsurani politics as a child craving sweets.

‘I can conceive of several possibilities,’ Chumaka allowed. ‘Yet those houses with the courage to act lack the means, and those with the means lack courage. To seek the death of a Servant of the Empire is … unprecedented.’ He chewed his thin lower lip, then waved one of the servants over to stack the documents into piles to be gathered up and conveyed to his private quarters. To Jiro’s impatience, he said at last, ‘I should venture a guess that Mara was attacked by the Hamoi Tong.’

Jiro relinquished the note to the servant with a sneer. ‘Of course the tong. But who paid the death price?’

Chumaka arose. ‘No one. That’s what makes this so elegant. I think the tong acts for their own reasons.’

Jiro’s brows rose in surprise. ‘But why? What has the tong to gain by killing Mara?’

A runner servant appeared at the screen that led into the main estate house. He bowed, but before he could speak, Chumaka second-guessed the reason behind his errand. ‘Master, the court is assembled,’ he said directly to his Lord; Jiro waved the servant off as he rose from his cushions. As master and First Adviser fell into step toward the long hall in which the Lord of the Anasati conducted business, Jiro surmised aloud, ‘We know that Tasaio of the Minwanabi paid the Hamoi Tong to kill Mara. Do you think he also paid them to attempt vengeance upon her should he fall?’

‘Possibly.’ Chumaka counted points on his fingers, a habit he had when ordering his thoughts. ‘Minwanabi revenge might explain why, seemingly from nowhere, the tong chose to act after months of quiet.’

Pausing in the shadow of the corridor that accessed the double doors of the great hall, Jiro said, ‘If the tong acts on behalf of some pledge made to Tasaio before his death, will it try again?’

Chumaka shrugged, his stooped shoulders rising like tent poles under his turquoise silk robe. ‘Who can say? Only the Obajan of the Hamoi would know; he alone has access to the records that name those deaths bought and paid for. If the tong has vowed Mara’s death … it will persevere. If it merely agreed to make an attempt on her life, it has fulfilled its obligation.’ He gestured in rueful admiration. ‘The Good Servant has her luck from the gods, some might argue. For anyone else, an agreement to send an assassin is a virtual guarantee of success. Others have avoided the tong, once, even twice before; but the Lady Mara has survived five assassins that I know of. Her son was not so lucky.’

Jiro moved on with a step that snapped on the tiles. His nostrils flared, and he barely saw the two servants who sprang from their posts to open the audience hall doors for him. Striding past their abject bows, Jiro sniffed. Since getting his First Adviser to act with proper subservience was a waste of time, Jiro sniffed again. ‘Well, it’s a pity the assassin missed her. Still, we can seize advantage: the death of her son will cause much confusion in her household.’

Delicately, Chumaka cleared his throat. ‘Trouble will transfer to us, master.’

Jiro stopped in his tracks. His sandals squeaked as he pivoted to face his First Adviser. ‘Don’t you mean trouble for the Acoma? They have lost our alliance. No, they have spit on it by allowing Ayaki to come to harm.’

Chumaka stepped closer to his Lord, so the cluster of factors who awaited Jiro’s audience at the far end of the hall might not overhear. ‘Speak gently,’ he admonished. ‘Unless Mara finds convincing proof that it is Tasaio of the Minwanabi’s hand reaching from the halls of the Dead in this matter, it is logical for her to place blame upon us.’ Acerbically, he added, ‘You took pains when Lord Tecuma, your father, died to make your hostilities toward her house plain.’

Jiro jerked up his chin. ‘Perhaps.’

Chumaka did not press chastisement. Caught again into his innate fascination for the Game, he said, ‘Her network is the best I’ve seen. I have a theory: given her adoption of the entire Minwanabi household –’

Jiro’s cheeks flushed, ‘Another example of her blasphemous behavior and contempt for tradition!’

Chumaka held up a placating hand. There were times when Jiro’s thinking became clouded; having lost his mother to a fever at the tender age of five, as a boy he had clung irrationally to routine, to tradition, as if adherence to order could ward off the inconsistencies of life. Always he had tended to wall off his grief behind logic, or unswerving devotion to the dutiful ideal of the Tsurani noble. Chumaka did not like to encourage what he considered a weakening flaw in his Lord. The ramifications of allowing such traits to become policy were too confining for his liking. The perils, in fact, were paramount; in a bold move of his own, Chumaka had seized the initiative to take in more than two hundred soldiers formerly sworn to Minwanabi service. These were disaffected men whose hatred of Mara would last to their dying breath. Chumaka had not housed such for his own entertainment; he was not a disloyal man. He had secretly accommodated the warriors in a distant, secret barracks. Tactful inquiry had shown Jiro to be adamant in his refusal to consider swearing them to Anasati service; ancient custom held that such men were anathema, without honor and to be shunned lest the displeasure of the gods that had seen the unfortunate house fall be visited upon their benefactor. Yet Chumaka had refrained from sending these men away. He had no hope of a change in attitude from his master; but a tool was a tool, and these former Minwanabi might someday be useful, if the Ruling Lord of the Anasati could not be weaned from his puerile hatred of Mara.

If the two Houses were going to be enemies, Chumaka saw such warriors as an advantage to be held in trust for the day their service might be needed. Mara had proven herself to be clever. She had ruined one house far larger than her own. Guile would be needed to match guile, and Chumaka was never a man to waste an opportunity.

Indeed, he saw his secret as a loyal act, and what Jiro did not know, could not be forbidden.

The warriors were not all. Chumaka had to restrain himself from the desire to rub his thin hands together in anticipation. He had spies as well. Already a few factors formerly in the Minwanabi employ were now working on behalf of the Anasati and not the Acoma. Chumaka gained the same pleasure in co-opting these people to his master’s service that he might in isolating an opponent’s fortress or priest upon the shah board. He knew eventually the Anasati would benefit. Then his master must see the wisdom of some of Mara’s choices.

And so the Anasati First Adviser smiled, and said nothing; to a fine point, he knew just how far he could go in contradicting Jiro. Pressing his Lord toward his meeting with the factors, he said quietly, ‘Master, Mara may have flouted tradition by taking on responsibility for her vanquished enemy’s servants, but rather than merely removing her greatest enemy, she has gained immeasurable resources. Her strength has grown. From being a dangerous, dominant player in the Game of the Council, at one stroke Mara has become the single most powerful Ruling Lord or Lady in the history of the Empire. The Acoma forces, alone, now number more than ten thousand swords; they surpass several smaller clans. And Clan Hadama and its allies together rival the Emperor’s Imperial Whites!’ Chumaka turned reflective as he added, ‘She could rule by fiat, I think, if she had the ambition. The Light of Heaven is certainly not of a mind to oppose her wishes.’

Disliking to be reminded of the Lady’s swift ascendance, Jiro became the more nettled. ‘Never mind. What is this theory?’

Chumuka raised up one finger. ‘We know Tasaio of the Minwanabi employed the Hamoi Tong. The tong continues to pursue Mara’s death.’ Counting on a second finger, he listed, ‘These facts may or may not be related. Incomo, Tasaio’s former First Adviser, was effective in discovering some or all of the Acoma agents who had infiltrated the Minwanabi household. There was a disruption after that, and a mystery remains: our own network reported that someone killed every Acoma agent between the Minwanabi Great House and the City of Sulan-Qu.’

Jiro gave an offhand wave. ‘So Tasaio had all her agents killed as far back as he could trace her network.’

Chumaka’s smile became predatory. ‘What if he didn’t?’ He flicked up a third finger. ‘Here is another fact: the Hamoi Tong killed those servants inside the Minwanabi household who were Acoma agents.’

The Lord’s boredom intensified. ‘Tasaio ordered the tong –’

‘No!’ Chumaka interrupted, verging on disrespect. Swiftly he amended his manners by turning his outburst into prelude for instruction. ‘Why should Tasaio hire tong to kill his own staff? Why pay death price for lives that could be taken by an order to the Minwanabi guards?’

Jiro looked rueful. ‘I was thinking carelessly.’ His eyes shifted forward to where the factors were fidgeting at the delay, as Lord and adviser continued to equivocate just inside the doorway.

Chumaka ignored their discomfort. They were underlings, after all, and it was their place to wait upon their Lord. ‘Because there is no logical reason, my master. However, we can make a surmise: if I were the Lady, and I wished to insult both the tong and Tasaio, what better way than to order the tong, under false colors, to kill her spies?’

Jiro’s expression quickened. He could follow Chumaka’s reasoning on his own, now he had been clued in to the first step. ‘You think the Hamoi Tong may have cause to declare a blood debt toward Mara?’

Chumaka’s answer was a toothy smile.

Jiro resumed walking. His steps echoed across the vast hall, with its paper screens drawn closed on both sides, and its roof beams hung with dusty war relics and a venerable collection of captured enemy banners. These artifacts reminded of a time when the Anasati were at the forefront of historical battles. Theirs was an ancient tradition of honor. They would rise as high again, Jiro vowed; no, higher yet. For Mara’s defeat would be his to arrange, a victory that would resound throughout the Empire.

He alone would prove that Mara had incurred the gods’ displeasure in granting reprieve to conquered enemy servants. Single-handedly, he would exact vengeance for her flouting of the old ways. She would look into his eyes as she died, and know: she had made her worst mistake on the day she had chosen Buntokapi for her husband. Unlike the grandeur of the Minwanabi great hall that Mara had inherited, the Anasati great hall was as reassuring in its traditional design as the most time-honored ritual in the temple. Jiro luxuriated in this; no different from the halls of a hundred other Ruling Lords, this chamber was nevertheless unique; it was Anasati. Along both sides of the center aisle knelt petitioners and Anasati retainers. Omelo, his Force Commander, stood at attention to one side of the dais upon which Jiro conducted the business of his court. Arrayed behind him were the other officers and advisers of the household.

Jiro mounted his dais, knelt on the Lord’s cushions, then settled back on his heels as he adjusted his formal robe. Before he signaled his hadonra to begin the day’s council, he said to his First Adviser, ‘Find out for certain if the tong pursues Mara on its own. I would know, so we can make better plans when this news of Ayaki’s death becomes official.’

Chumaka clapped his hands and a servant came to his shoulder. ‘Have two runners in my quarters by the time I reach them.’ While the servant bowed and hastened away, he made his own obeisance to the master. ‘Lord, I shall begin at once. I have some new sources that may provide us with better information.’ Then, seeing the hardened glint in Lord Jiro’s eyes, Chumaka touched his master’s sleeve. ‘We must show restraint until Mara’s messenger reaches us with formal announcement of Ayaki’s death. Speak now, and your staff will gossip. We would ill be served by giving our enemy proof, that we have spies in sensitive places.’

Jiro snapped away from Chumaka’s touch. ‘I understand, but do not ask me to be complacent! All in Anasati service will mourn. Ayaki of the Acoma, my nephew, has been slain, and every man of ours who is not a slave will wear a red band upon his arm in token of our loss. When this day’s business is finished, you will ready an honor guard for travel to Sulan-Qu.’

Chumaka bit back annoyance. ‘We attend the boy’s funeral?’

Jiro bared his teeth. ‘He was my nephew. To stay home when his ashes are honored would be to admit responsibility or cowardice, and we are guilty of neither. He may have been the son of my enemy, and I may now destroy his mother without constraint, but he shares Anasati blood! He deserves the respect any grandson of Tecuma of the Anasati is entitled. We shall carry a family relic to be burned with him.’ Jiro’s eyes flashed as he finished, ‘Tradition demands our presence!’

Chumaka kept his reservations about this decision as he bowed in acknowledgment of his master’s wishes. While it was a First Adviser’s place to shepherd his Lord through decisions that affected house policy, Chumaka was wont to chafe at the more mundane responsibilities of his office. The Game of the Council had changed dramatically since Mara of the Acoma first entered the arena; yet it was still the game, and nothing in life captured the adviser’s fascination like the puzzle of Tsurani politics. Taut as a coursing hound, he rose up in excitement for the chase.

Almost happy despite the prospect of unfortunate developments on the horizon, the First Adviser left the great hall, muttering over the lists of instructions he would need to dispatch with his runners. Substantial bribes would be necessary to pry loose the information he desired, but if the gathered bits of intelligence could prove his morning’s theory, the gains would outweigh the cost. As Chumaka paused for the servants to open the door to let him out, his lips reflected an unholy smile.

Years had passed since he had tested his wits against a worthy opponent! Lady Mara was going to afford him much amusement if Lord Jiro’s obsession could not be cooled, and the Anasati marked her house for ruin.

Mara tossed fitfully in sleep. Her sounds of distress tore at Hokanu’s heart, and he wished to do something, to touch her, to speak soft words, to ease her agony. But she had slept very little since Ayaki’s death. Even the restlessness of nightmares offered some release. To waken her was to force her to awareness of her loss, and to the crushing necessity of bearing up under the strain.

Hokanu sighed and regarded the patterns that moonlight cast through the screens. The shadows in the corners seemed to loom darker than ever before; not even the presence of doubled sentries at each door and window could recover the lost sense of peace. The heir to the Shinzawai and husband to the Servant of the Empire now found himself a man alone, with nothing but his wits and his love for a troubled woman. The predawn air was cool, unusual for lands in Szetac Province, perhaps owing to the proximity of the house to the lake. Hokanu arose and slipped on the light robe he had cast off the night before. He tied the sash, then took a stance overlooking the sleeping mat with his arms crossed tightly against his chest.

He kept vigil while Mara tossed in the bedclothes, her hair like a patch of lingering night in the slowly brightening air. The coppery moonlight faded, washed out by early gray. The screen that opened upon the private terrace had turned slowly from black to pearl.

Hokanu restrained an urge to pace. Mara had woken during the night, sobbing in his arms and crying Ayaki’s name. He had held her close, but his warmth would bring her no comfort. Hokanu’s jaw tightened at the memory. A foe he would willingly face in battle, but this sorrow … a child dead as his potential had barely begun to unfold … There was no remedy under sky that a husband could offer. Only time would dull the ache.

Hokanu was not a man who cursed. Controlled and taut as the pitched treble string of a harplike tiral he allowed himself no indulgence that might in any way disturb his wife. Silently, dangerously graceful, he slid aside the door just enough to pass through. The day was too fair, he thought as he regarded the pale green sky. There should have been storms, strong winds, even lightning and rain; nature herself should rail at the earth on the day of Ayaki’s funeral.

Across the hill, in the hollow before the lakeshore, the final preparations were being carried out. The stacked wood of the pyre arose in a ziggurat. Jican had made free with Acoma wealth, on Hokanu’s order, and made sure that only aromatic woods were purchased. The stink of singed flesh and hair would not offend the mourners or the boy’s mother. Hokanu’s mouth thinned. There would be no privacy for Mara on this most sad occasion. She had risen too high, and her son’s funeral would be a state rite. Ruling Lords would converge from all parts of the Empire to pay their respects – or to further their plot’s intrigues. The Game of the Council did not pause for grief, or joy, or any calamity of nature. Like rot unseen under painted wood, the circumstances that had created Ayaki’s death would repeat themselves again and again.

A dust cloud arose on the northern skyline; guests already arriving, Hokanu surmised. He glanced again at his wife, reassured that her dreams had quieted. He stepped quietly to the door, spoke to the boy runner, and arranged for the Lady’s maids to be with her when she wakened. Then he gave in to his restlessness and strode out onto the terrace.

The estate was beginning to stir. Jican could be seen crossing at a half run between the kitchen wing and the servants’ quarters, where laundry girls already hurried between guest chambers with baskets of fresh linens balanced on their heads. Prepared for state visitors, warriors in dress armor marched to relieve the night watch. Yet, amid the general air of purpose, two figures walked by the lake, keeping pace with each other, but apparently on no logical errand beyond a morning stroll. Suspicion gave Hokanu pause, until he looked closer and identified the pair. Then curiosity drew him across the terrace and he descended the stairs that gave access to the grounds below.

Following quietly between the rows of akasi flowers, Hokanu confirmed his first impression: Incomo and Irrilandi moved ahead of him at their unhurried pace, seemingly lost in thought. The former First Adviser and the former Force Commander to Tasaio of the Minwanabi did not wander aimlessly.

Intrigued by what these two previous enemies turned loyal servants might be doing out so early on this sad day, Hokanu slipped silently after.

The pair reached the edge of the lake, and the reed-frail adviser and leathery, battle-muscled warrior both knelt upon a little rise. Past a notch between the scrolled eaves of the great house and the hill it fronted, the first pink clouds drifted in the sky, their undersides heating to orange as the rays of a sun not yet visible gilded their edges.

Both men sat as if praying. Hokanu noiselessly drew nearer. For several minutes the Lord and the two servants abided in frozen tableau. Then daybreak pierced the gloom, and a sun beam fanned across the sky, catching in a crystalline formation at the peak of the rise. There came a flash that dazzled. Warmth and first light bathed the secluded quiet, and the dew sparkled, touched to gemlike brilliance. Then Irrilandi and Incomo bowed until their heads touched the earth, repeating faint words that Hokanu could not make out.

For that brief instant, the son of the Shinzawai was nearly blinded by the unexpected flash; then it was gone as the angle of the rising sun changed.

The two men completed their strange rite and stood. The war-wary eyes of Irrilandi were first to pick out a discrepancy in the quiet morning. He saw the Lord who waited nearby, and bowed. ‘Master Hokanu,’ he said. Caught short, Incomo repeated the gesture.

Hokanu motioned both servants back toward the house. ‘I could not sleep,’ he said ruefully. ‘I observed you walking and came to see what brought you here.’

Irrilandi gave a Tsurani shrug. ‘Each day before sunrise we give thanks.’

Hokanu’s silence begged for a further explanation, though he did not look at either man but studied his bare feet as he stepped through dew-damp grass.

Incomo cleared his throat in what might have been embarrassment. ‘We come here each day to witness the day’s beginning. And to give thanks, since the Good Servant came to us.’ He regarded the great house, with its high, peaked gables, stone pillars, and the screen lintels tied now with red bunting in respect for Turakamu, the Red God, who would welcome Ayaki’s spirit into his keeping during the day’s rites. Incomo elaborated for Hokanu’s benefit. ‘When our Lady brought about Tasaio’s ruin, we expected death or slavery. Instead we were given the gift of days: another chance to serve and gain honor. So each sunrise we offer a prayer of thanks for this reprieve, and for the Good Servant.’

Hokanu nodded, unsurprised by the devotion of these high officers. As Servant of the Empire, Mara was beloved by the masses. Her own staff served her with an affection that bordered upon awe. Indeed, she would need such support for her house to recover from this loss. A ruler disliked by his people might expect a blow of this magnitude to cause hesitation in his staff, as servants from the highest positions down to the meanest slave fretted over whether heaven had withdrawn the luck of the house. Even without divine disapproval, mortal enemies would seize upon opportunity and strike where the ranks were most confused. And so the superstition fed upon the results, since a house weakened would suffer setbacks, and so seem to be in the disfavor of the gods.

Hokanu felt irritation. Too many events in this Empire twisted in upon themselves, until centuries of unbending customs led their society toward stagnation and entropy.

This inbred cycle he and Mara and Ichindar, the Emperor of the Nations, had dedicated themselves to overturn.

Ayaki’s untimely end was more than sorrow and grief; it could become a major setback and be turned into a rallying cry for all those Ruling Lords who were disgruntled by recent changes. If the Acoma showed any sign of irresolution, there would be strife; and at the heart of the faction that had begun to form in rigid adherence to old traditions, the Anasati voice would be loudest.

The funeral guests would not be here to observe the ashes of the departed as they spiraled in their smoky ascent to heaven; no: they would be watching one another like starving dogs, and Lady Mara would be subjected to the most thorough scrutiny of all. Weighed down by dread, for he knew his Lady was too lost in her pain to handle peripheral matters, Hokanu pushed open the ornamental gate and started across the garden. He forgot the two men who walked with him until Incomo said, ‘First Adviser Saric has all in readiness, master. Entertainments have been arranged to divert the guests, and the honor guards of all but the greatest Ruling Lords will be quartered in the garrison across the lake. The pyre has been soaked in oils, and all has been done to keep the ceremony as brief as possible.’

Hokanu found no reassurance in Incomo’s words; that the adviser felt need to stress such points bespoke a sharing of concern. The game would go on, whether or not Lady Mara could rally and cope.

‘We shall not stint in our honors to the departed young master,’ added Irrilandi, ‘but it is my suggestion that you stay by your Lady’s side, and be prepared to interpret her instructions.’

Politely, tactfully, the high officers of House Acoma acknowledged that their mistress remained incapacitated. Hokanu felt a surge of gratitude to these men, who were quietly and staunchly prepared to try to cover for her lapse. He tried to reassure them that House Acoma would not flounder with the currents of misfortune like some rudderless ship. ‘I shall be with my Lady. She is touched by your devotion and would have me say that you should not hesitate to approach if you have any difficulties or concerns.’

A knowing glance passed between master and servants. Then Irrilandi bowed. ‘More than a thousand soldiers have made prayers to Turakamu to take them in the young master’s place.’

Hokanu nodded in respect. Those soldiers would wear arms throughout the funeral ceremony in token of their vow, a strong deterrent to any visiting Lord who might contemplate causing trouble, in breach of Acoma hospitality.

The number was a great honor to Ayaki, the men’s dedication also demonstrated that barracks rumor recognised the political ramifications of what was far more than a personal tragedy. The Lords who came today would gather and circle like jaguna, the eaters of dead meat, to see what prizes could be snatched from the teeth of misfortune.

Hokanu received the departing bows of the two officers, then looked over his shoulder at the lake, where barges were now heading rapidly toward the docks. Banners flew from their poles, and the chant of the oarsmen carried across the water. Very shortly now the quiet estate would become a political arena. Hokanu considered the great stone house that had been the hall of the Minwanabi for centuries. The place had been designed as a fortress, but today even enemies must be invited inside. The priest of Chochocan, the Good God, had blessed the estate, and Mara had seen the Minwanabi natami placed in a dedicated glade, so that a once great house should be remembered. Yet despite these measures and the assurances of the priests that the Good Servant’s acts had earned divine favor, Hokanu swallowed back a feeling of dread. The depths of the eaves seemed to hold shadows in which the spirits of enemies peered out in silent laughter at Mara’s grief.

Hokanu wished for a moment he had overridden her bold choice and opted to adhere to the customs of conquest that would have seen this house torn down, each stone carried to the lake and thrown into the deep, each timber and field burned, and the soil of all these lush acres sown with salt. Unlucky ground should nurture nothing, according to the ways adhered to over the centuries, that the cycle of cursed events might be broken for eternity. Despite the beauty of this estate, and the near-impregnable location of its grounds and holdings, Hokanu repressed the cold premonition that he might be doomed never to find happiness with Mara as long as they lived under this roof.

But this was an ill time to brood, with the state guests already arriving. The consort to the Servant of the Empire stiffened his shoulders, prepared for the coming ordeal. Mara must show the proper Tsurani bearing in the face of her overwhelming grief. The death of her father and brother, who were warriors, had been one thing; the loss of her own child, far worse. Hokanu intuitively sensed that this was the ugliest fate that could have befallen the woman he loved more than life. For her he must be strong today, armor against public dishonor, for while he was still the dedicated heir of the Shinzawai, he embraced Acoma honor as if it were his own.

Secure in his resolve, he returned to the terrace outside his Lady’s sleeping quarters. As the screens were not yet opened, he knew that the servants had allowed her undisturbed rest. He slid the panel soundlessly in its track and entered. He did not speak but let the gentle warmth of daylight fall upon his wife’s cheek.

Mara stirred. Her hands closed in the twisted sheets, and her eyes fluttered open. She gasped and pushed herself up. Her eyes swept the room in terror until Hokanu knelt and captured her in his embrace.

Her complexion looked as if she had not slept at all. ‘Is it time?’

Hokanu stroked her shoulder, as servants who had waited outside hurried in at the sound of their mistress’s voice. He said, ‘The day begins.’

Gently he helped raise his Lady to her feet. When he had steadied her, he backed away and gestured for the servants to perform their offices. Mara stood with a bleak expression as her maids bustled to arrange her bath and her dress. Hokanu endured the sight of her lackluster manner without showing the anger in his heart. If Jiro of the Anasati was responsible for causing this pain to his Lady, the heir to the Shinzawai vowed to see the man suffer. Then, recalled to his own state of undress by the admiring stare of one of Mara’s handmaids, he put aside thoughts of revenge. He clapped for his own servants, and suffered their fussing in silence as they arrayed him in the formal robes required for Ayaki’s funeral.

The throng mantled the hills surrounding the Acoma estate house, clothed in the colors of a thousand houses, with red sashes, red ties, or red ribbons worn in homage to the Red God, brother to Sibi, who was Death, and lord of all lives. The color also symbolised the heart’s blood of the boy that no longer flowed to clothe the spirit. Six thousand soldiers stood in columns flanking the hollow where the bier awaited. In front, in polished green armor, stood the Acoma warriors who had dedicated their lives; behind these, the ranks in the blue of Mara’s Shinzawai consort; and after them, the gold-edged white of the Imperial Guard sent by Ichindar to carry the Emperor’s condolences. Next came Kamatsu of the Shinzawai, Hokanu’s father, and then the families who made up the Hadama Clan, all who had blood ties to the dead boy. After them, in a great, sprawling crowd, stood the houses who had come to pay their respects or to indulge in the next round of the Great Game.

The warriors were statue-still, heads bowed, shields held with edges resting upon the ground. Before each lay a sword, points facing the bier, empty scabbard placed crosswise beneath. Behind the soldiers, up the hillside, members of the household kept a respectful distance from the line of march, for the great of the Empire had come to bid farewell to a boy.

Trumpets blew to begin the procession. In the shade of the outer portico where the Acoma advisers and officers gathered to march, Mara fought the weakness in her knees. She felt Hokanu’s grip on her elbow, but the meaning of the sensation did not register. The eyes half hidden behind her red veil of mourning were locked on the litter that held her motionless son. His body was encased in fine armor; his white hands clasped the grip of a rare metal sword. The hand that had been crushed in the fall was decently clothed in a gauntlet; the mashed chest, hidden behind a breastplate and shield emblazoned with a shatra bird in rare gold leaf.

To the eye, he seemed a sleeping warrior, prepared at a call to arise and fight in the glory and honor of his youth.

Mara felt her throat close. No prior event, not placing the mementos of her father and brother in the family’s glade to mourn them, not enduring her first husband’s brutality, not losing the first man with whom she had discovered the passion of love, not the death of her beloved foster mother – nothing compared to this moment for sheer horror.

She could not believe, even now, far less accept the finality of her firstborn’s death. A child whose life had made hers endurable, through her unhappy first marriage. An infant whose carefree laughter had weaned her from despair, when she had faced enemies greater than the means of her house to defend. Ayaki had given her the courage to go on. Out of stubbornness, and a fierce desire to see him live to carry on the Acoma name, Mara had accomplished the impossible.

All would be consigned to ashes, this day. This accursed day, when a boy who should have outlived his mother would become a pillar of smoke to assault the nostrils of heaven.

A step behind Mara, baby Justin fretfully asked to be carried. His nurse cajoled him to stand hushing his noise. His mother seemed deaf to his distress, locked as she was in dark thoughts. She moved like a puppet to Hokanu’s guidance as the retinue prepared to start forward.

Drums beat. The tattoo thrummed on the air. An acolyte clad in red thrust a dyed ke-reed into the Lady’s unfeeling hands; Hokanu’s fingers clasped hers, raising the reed with her lest she drop the religious symbol.

The procession moved. Hokanu gathered her into the crook of his arm and steadied her into the slow march. To honor her loss, he had forsaken the blue armor of the Shinzawai for the green of the Acoma and an officer’s helm. Vaguely Mara knew he grieved, and distantly she sensed the sorrow of the others – the hadonra, who had so often shouted at the boy for spilling ink in the scriptorium; the nurses and teachers, who had all borne bruises from his tantrums; the advisers, who had sometimes wished for a warrior’s sword to knock sense into the boy’s mischievous head by whacking the flat on his backside. Servants and maids and even slaves had appreciated Ayaki’s quick spirit.

But they were as shadows, and their words of consolation just noise. Nothing anyone said or did seemed to penetrate the desolation that surrounded the Lady of the Acoma.

Mara felt Hokanu’s hand gently upon her arm, guiding her down the low stairs. Here waited the first of the state delegations: Ichindar’s, clad in blinding white and gold. Mara bent her head as the regal contingent bowed to her; she stayed silent behind her veils as Hokanu murmured the appropriate words.

She was moved on, past Lord Hoppara of the Xacatecas, so long a staunch ally; today she presented to him the manner she would show a stranger, and only Hokanu heard the young man’s graceful expression of understanding. At his side, elegant as always, the dowager Lady of the Xacatecas regarded the Good Servant with something more magnanimous than sympathy.

As Hokanu made his bow to her, Lady Isashani lingeringly caught his hand. ‘Keep your Lady close,’ she warned while she outwardly maintained the appearance of offering a personal condolence. ‘She is a spirit still in shock. Very likely she will not recognise the import of her actions for some days yet. There are enemies here who would provoke her to gain advantage.’

Hokanu’s politeness took on a grim edge as he thanked Lord Hoppara’s mother for her precaution.

These nuances passed Mara by, as well as the skill with which Hokanu turned aside the veiled insults of the Omechan. She made her bows at her Lord’s cue, and did not care as she roused whispers in her wake: that she had shown more obeisance than necessary to Lord Frasai of the Tonmargu; that the Lord of the Inrodaka noticed that her movements lacked her characteristic fire and grace.

She had no focus in life beyond the small, fragile form that lay in final rest upon the litter.

Plodding steps followed in time to the thud of muffled drums. The sun climbed overhead as the procession wound into the hollow where the pyre had been prepared. Hokanu murmured polite words to the last and least of the Ruling Lords who merited personal recognition. Between the litter and the pyre waited one last contingent, robed in unadorned black.

Touched by awe, Hokanu forced his next step, his hand tightening upon Mara. If she realised she confronted five Great Ones, magicians of the Assembly, she gave no sign. That their kind was above the law and that they had seen fit to send a delegation to this event failed to give her pause. Hokanu was the one to ponder the ramifications, and to connect that of late the Black Robes seemed to have taken a keener interest than usual in the turnings of politics. Mara bowed to the Great Ones as she had to any other Lord, unmindful of the sympathy offered by the plump Hochopepa, whom she had met at the occasion of Tasaio’s ritual suicide. The always awkward moment when Hokanu faced his true father was lost on her. The icy regard of the red-haired magician who stood behind the more taciturn Shimone did not faze her. Whether hostile or benign, the magicians’ words could not pierce through her apathy. No life their powers could threaten meant more than the one Turakamu and the Game of the Council had already seen fit to take.

Mara entered the ritual circle where the bier lay. She watched with stony eyes as her Force Commander lifted the too still form of her boy and laid him tenderly on the wood that would be his final bed. His hands straightened sword and helm and shield, and he stepped back, all his rakishness absent.

Mara felt Hokanu’s gentle prod. Numbly she stepped forward as around her the drums boomed and stilled. She lowered the ke-reed across Ayaki’s body, but it was Hokanu’s voice that raised in the traditional cry: ‘We are gathered to commemorate the life of Ayaki, son of Buntokapi, grandson of Tecuma and Sezu!’

The line was too short, Mara sensed, a vague frown on her face. Where were the lists of life deeds, for this her firstborn son?

An awkward stillness developed, until Lujan moved at a desperate glance from Hokanu and nudged her around to face the east.

The priest of Chochocan approached, robed in the white that symbolised life. He shed his mantle and danced, naked as at birth, in celebration of childhood.

Mara did not see his gyrations; she felt no expiation for the guilt of knowing her laxity had caused disaster. As the dancer bowed to earth before the bier, she faced west when prompted, and stood, dull-eyed, as the whistles of Turakamu’s followers split the air, as the priest of the Red God began his dance for Ayaki’s safe passage to the halls of the Red God. He had never needed to represent a barbarian beast before, and his idea of how a horse might move had been almost laughable had it not ended in the fall to earth that had crushed so much young promise.

Mara’s eyes stayed dry. Her heart felt hardened to a kernel incapable of being renewed. She did not bow her head in prayer as the priests stepped forward and slashed the red cord that bound Ayaki’s hands, freeing his spirit for rebirth. She did not weep, or beg the gods’ favor, as the white-plumed tirik bird was released as symbol of the renewal of rebirth.

The priest of Turakamu intoned his prayer for Ayaki. ‘In the end, all men come before my god. The Death God is a kind Lord, for he ends suffering and pain. He judges those who come to him and rewards the righteous.’ With a broad wave of his hand and a nod of his skull mask, the priest added, ‘He understands the living and knows of pain and grief.’ The red wand pointed to the armored boy on the pyre. ‘Ayaki of the Acoma was a good son, firmly upon the path that his parents would have wished for him. We can only accept that Turakamu judged him worthy and called him so that he might be returned to us, with an even greater fate.’

Mara clenched her teeth to keep from crying.

What prayer was there to be said that would not be tainted with rage, and what rebirth beyond being son of the Light of Heaven himself could await that was more honorable than heirship of the Acoma? As Mara shivered in pent fury, Hokanu’s arms closed around her. He murmured something she did not hear as the torches were lifted from their brackets around the circle and the aromatic wood was set alight. A cold band twisted itself around her heart. She watched the red-yellow flames lick upward, her thoughts very far from the present.

As the priest of Juran the Just approached to give her blessing, only Hokanu’s surreptitious shake prevented her from screaming curses at him, demanding to know what sort of justice existed in a world where little boys died before their mother’s eyes.

The flames crackled skyward, then sheeted over the pyre with a roar of disturbed air. The treated wood spared the sight of the boy’s body twisting and blackening in its embrace. Yet Mara looked upon the sight with every fiber of her body braced in horror. Her imagination depicted what lay at the heart of a brightness too dazzling for sight; her mind supplied the screams the boy had never uttered.

‘Ayaki,’ she whispered. Hokanu’s hold upon her tightened with enough force to recall her momentarily to propriety: to the stiff-faced mask that as Servant of the Empire she was expected to show in public grief. But the effort of holding her features immobile was enough to cause her to tremble.

For long minutes the crackle of flames vied with the voices of the priests who chanted their various prayers. Mara fought to control her breathing, to stave off the monstrous reality of her dead child vanishing into a roil of smoke.

For the death rite of one of lesser station, this would be time for the guests to file away, leaving those closest to the departed to a time of private mourning. But with the passing of the great, such courtesies were forborne. Mara was allowed no reprieve. At the forefront of the public eye she remained, while the acolytes of Turakamu threw consecrated oil upon the flames. Waves of heat rolled off the pyre, reddening Mara’s skin. If she shed any tears, they dried upon her cheeks in the face of that cruel furnace. Above writhing curtains of flame, the thick black smoke coiled skyward to draw notice from heaven that a spirit of high honor had departed.

The sun added to the blaze, and Mara felt sick and dizzy. Hokanu turned his body to shade her as he could. He dared not glance at her too often in concern, for fear of betraying her weakness, while the time dragged by as torture. Nearly an hour passed before the flame subsided; then more prayers and chanting followed as the wood-ashes were spread to cool. Mara all but swayed on her feet when the priest of Turakamu intoned, ‘The body is no more. The spirit has flown. He who was Ayaki of the Acoma is now here,’ he said, touching his heart, ‘here’ – he touched his head – ‘and in Turakamu’s halls.’

The acolytes braved the smoking embers as they picked their way to the heart of the mound of decimated fuel. One used a square of thick leather to drag out the warped blade of Ayaki’s sword, quickly passing the bundle to another who waited to quench the hot metal in wet rags. Steam rose to mingle with the smoke. Mara endured with deadened eyes as the priest of Turakamu employed an ornate scoop to fill the waiting urn with ashes. More wood than boy, the remains would become the symbol of the body’s interment in the glade of his ancestors. For the Tsurani believed that while the true soul traveled to the halls of the Red God, a small part of the spirit, the shade, would rest alongside its ancestors within the stone that was the natami of the house. That way the essence of the child would thus return in another life, while that which made him Acoma would remain to watch over his family.

Hokanu steadied his wife as two acolytes arrived before her. One offered the sword blade, which Mara touched. Then Hokanu took the twisted length of metal while the other acolyte surrendered the urn. Mara accepted the ashes of her son in trembling hands. Her eyes did not acknowledge what she held but remained fixed upon the scattered, charred wood that remained in the circle.

Hokanu touched her arm lightly and they turned as one. The drums boomed out as the procession veered around and resumed its march toward the Acoma contemplation glade. No impression of the walk registered upon Mara beyond the stony cold of the urn in her hands, warmed at the base by the still warm ashes inside. She set one foot before the other, barely aware of her arrival at the scrolled gateposts that marked the glade entrance.

The servants and Hokanu paused in deference to her; for the only one not of Acoma blood who was permitted to step through the arch and make his way along the stone path that led within was the gardener whose life had been dedicated to tend the glade. Here even her husband, who was still a Shinzawai, could not enter, upon pain of death. To allow any stranger admittance was to offer insult to the shades of Acoma ancestors, and to bring lasting disharmony to the peace that abided in the natami.

Mara stepped away from Hokanu’s embrace. She did not hear the murmur of the nobles who watched, pitying or predatory, until she had moved beyond sight behind the hedges. Once before, upon her family’s old estate, she had undertaken the terrible task of consecrating the shades of close family to the natami.

The size of this garden disoriented her. She paused, the urn clutched to her breast in stunned incomprehension. This was not the familiar glade of her childhood, where she had gone as a tiny girl to address the shade of her mother; this was not the known path where she had narrowly escaped death at the hands of a tong assassin while mourning her father and brother. This place was alien, vast, a wide park, in which several streams meandered. For a second a shadow crossed her heart as she wondered whether this garden that had been home to Minwanabi shades for so many centuries might reject the aspect of her son.

Again in her memory she saw the horse fall, a blackness like evil stamping out innocent life. Feeling lost, she gulped a breath. She chose a path at random, only vaguely recalling that all of them led to the same site where the ancient rock, the natami of her family, rested at the edge of a large pool.

‘I did not bury your natami deep below the Acoma’s,’ she said aloud to the listening air; a smaller voice inside her warned that she talked out of madness. Life was mad, she decided, or she would not be here making empty motions over the remains of her young heir. Her extraordinary display of graciousness in insisting that the Minwanabi natami be taken to a distant place and cared for, so that the shades of the Minwanabi might know peace, at this moment seemed empty folly.

She did not have the strength in her to laugh.

Mara curled her lip at the sour taste in her mouth. Her hair smelled of sweet oil and greasy smoke. The stench turned her stomach as she knelt on the sun-warmed ground. Next to the natami a hole had been dug, the damp soil piled to one side. Mara placed the fire-warped sword that had been her son’s most prized possession in the cavity, then tipped the urn to let his ashes pour over it. With bare hands she sifted the earth back into the hole and patted it down.

A white robe had been left for her beside the pool. On its silk folds lay a vial, and nearby, the traditional brazier and dagger. Mara lifted the vial and removed the stopper. She poured fragrant oils upon the pool. In the shimmers of fractured light that played upon its surface, she saw no beauty, but only the face of her son, his mouth wide with suffering as he struggled to draw his last breath. The rituals gave no release but seemed a wasting wind of meaningless sound. ‘Rest, my son. Come to your home soil and sleep with our ancestors.’

‘Ayaki,’ she whispered. ‘My child.’

She gripped the breast of her robe and pulled, tearing the cloth from her body, but unlike years before, when she had performed the ritual for her father and brother, no tears followed the violence. Her eyes remained painfully dry.

She plunged her hand into the almost extinguished brazier. The sting of the few hot cinders remaining was not enough to focus her thoughts. Grief remained a dull ache inside her as she smeared the ashes across her breasts and down her exposed stomach, to symbolise that her heart was ashes. In truth, her flesh felt as lifeless as the spent wood of the pyre. She slowly lifted the heirloom metal dagger, kept sharp for this ceremony over the ages. For the third time in her life, she drew the blade from its sheath and cut herself across the left arm, the hot pain barely felt in the fog of her despair.

She held the small wound over the pool, letting drops of blood fall to mix with the water, as tradition required. For more than a minute she sat motionless, until nature’s healing staunched the flow. A scab had half dried before she absently tugged at her robe, but she lacked the fierceness of will to fully sunder the garment. In the end, she simply dragged it over her head. It fell to earth, one sleeve soaking up oil and water from the pool.

By rote, Mara unfastened her hairpins, loosening her dark locks over her shoulders. Anger and rage, grief and sorrow should have driven her to pull upon her tresses, yanking handfuls lose. Her emotions only smoldered sullenly, like a spark smothered by lack of air. Boys should not die; to grieve for them in a fullness of passion was to abet the acceptance of their passing. Mara twisted at a few tangles, outwardly listless.

Then she settled back upon her heels and regarded the glade. Such immaculate beauty, and only she among the living could appreciate it. Ayaki would never perform the death rite for his mother. Hot tears erupted unbidden and she felt something of the hardness wedged within break loose. Mara sobbed, abandoning herself to an outpouring of grief.

But unlike before, when such release brought clarity, this time she found herself driven deeper into chaotic thought. When she closed her eyes, her mind whirled with images: first Ayaki running, then Kevin, the barbarian slave who had taught her of love, and who had time and again risked his life for her alien honor. She saw Buntokapi, sprawled on the red length of his sword, his great ham fists quivering closed as the life left his body. Again she acknowledged that her first husband’s death would forever be marked against her. She saw faces: her father and brother, then Nacoya, her nurse and foster mother.

All of them offered her pain. Kevin’s return to his own world was as painful a loss as death, and not one other had died as nature intended; all had been casualties of twisted politics, and of the cruel machinations of the Great Game.

The horrid certainty would not leave her, that Ayaki would not be the last boy to die for the empty ambitions of the nation’s Ruling Lords.

That reality struck her like torture: that Ayaki would not be the last. Howling in hysteria born of agony, Mara threw herself headlong into the pool.

The wetness swallowed her tears. Her sobs were wrenched short by a gasp as cold water sucked into her nostrils, and life recalled her to its own. She crawled back on dry earth, choking. Water streamed from her mouth and hair. She dragged in a hacking breath, then reached mechanically for the robe, its whiteness marred by dirt and sweet oil.

As if she were a spirit wearing the body of a stranger, she saw herself drag the fabric over her wet flesh. The hair she left bunched under the collar. Then the body that felt like a living prison gathered itself up and trudged back toward the entrance to the glade, where thousands waited with eyes hostile or friendly.

Their presence took her aback. In this Lord’s fatuous smile and that Lord’s leering interest, she saw the truth confirmed: that Ayaki’s death would happen again and again, and other mothers after her would howl useless outrage at the injustices of the Great Game. Mara glanced down to shut away the acknowledgment of futility. One of her sandals was missing. Mud and dust caked her bared foot, and she hesitated, debating whether to look for the lost footwear, or to fling the remaining sandal into the hedge.

What did it matter, a far-off voice reasoned inside her. Mara watched her misshod feet with fey detachment as the person that was herself left the glade. Passing between the shielding hedges, she did not look up as her husband hurried forward to take up his station at her elbow. His words did not soothe. She did not want to return from her inward retreat to work at sorting their meaning.

Hokanu shook her gently, forcing her to look up.

A man in red armor stood before her; thin, elegant, poised, he carried his chin at an arrogant angle. Mara stared at him, distracted. His eyes narrowed. He said something. The hand that held some object in it gestured, and something of the biting scorn that underlay his manner came through.

Mara’s gaze sharpened. Her eyes focused on the device upon the young man’s helm, and a deep quiver shook her.

‘Anasati!’ she said, a bite like a whip’s crack to her voice.

Lord Jiro gave back a chilly smile. ‘The Lady deigns to acknowledge me, I see.’

Wakened to a slow, spiraling rage, Mara stiffened.

She said nothing. Hokanu’s fingers wrenched unobtrusively at her wrist, a warning she did not acknowledge.

Her ears rang to a sound like a thousand enraged sarcats spitting in defiance, or torrents of storm-swollen rivers crashing down jagged rock.

Jiro of the Anasati raised the object he held, a small puzzle cleverly cut to a pattern of interlacing wooden hoops. He inclined his head in a formal bow, saying, ‘My nephew’s shade deserves remembrance from the Anasati.’

‘Remembrance!’ Mara said, in a high, tortured whisper. Inside her mind, her spirit howled: Anasati remembrance had sent her firstborn to a bed of ashes.

She did not remember moving; she did not feel the wrench of tendons as she yanked free of Hokanu’s restraint. Her scream of rage cut across the gathering like the sound of a drawn metal sword, and her hands rose like claws.

Jiro leaped back, dropping the puzzle in horrified astonishment. And then Mara was on him, clawing to reach his throat through the fastenings of his armor.

Those Lords standing nearest exclaimed in shock as this small woman, unarmed, dirty, and wet, threw herself at her former brother-in-law in a fit of pure fury.

Hokanu sprang with all his warrior’s quickness, fast enough to catch Mara back before she drew blood. He smothered her struggling body in his embrace.

But the damage by then was irrevocable.

Jiro glared around at the circle of stunned onlookers. ‘You all bear witness!’ he cried in an indignation that held an undertone of wild joy. Now he had the justification he had long wished for, to see the Lady Mara ground under his heel in utter defeat. ‘The Acoma have offered the Anasati insult! Let all present be informed that alliance is dead between our two houses. I claim my right to expunge this shame to my honor, and blood will be called for in payment.’

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