But wouldn’t I be sure if it was him? Even at only a glance, wouldn’t I know him? The way he moves, the set of his shoulders …
Disappointment turned to gall. She swallowed painfully and forced herself to breathe again. That man did not move like Abramm, was too big to be Abramm, and the hand … It was no scribe’s hand, certainly.
Her gaze caught upon a figure in garish Thilosian costume-yellow and blue and red-standing at the foot of the ramp. He was facing her but staring intently in the direction taken by the Pretender, and the dark aristocratic features were startling familiar. It was Danarin, Captain Kinlock’s former first mate.
She had only a glimpse of him, hardly long enough to register the face, before he disappeared into the crowd, and though she hurried down to the main corridor after him, she didn’t see him again.
Questions tumbled through her head. They had left Danarin back in Vorta almost eighteen months ago. What was he doing here? Did he, too, suspect the Pretender of being Abramm?
Hope stirred.
Reason tempered it. If it really was Danarin-she was no longer certainhe must be Ray’s man, assigned to kill Abramm and Trap Meridon.
She thought again of the man who had passed by her, tried to dissect the image of that painted face, tried to find in it something familiar. But all she saw were a jester’s laughing lips. And the hand.
Abramm had long fingers. And if he had been trained to fight—
The reality finally dawned on her. Not just fight. Kill.
She turned back to the gate where the arena crew now brought in the vanquished-Esurhite soldiers and professional gladiators who gasped and moaned and cried, or made no noise at all, victims of the Pretender’s blade.
“He is a killer. A born warrior,” Cooper had said. “Do you really believe little Abramm could have become this man?”
The mist was back, blotting out the crowd, encircling the bloodied, moaning soldiers. Pressure closed her throat.
`Abramm died on the galley ship.”
She had not dreamed in almost two years. Not since Qarkeshan. And that last dream … that fiery dragon, that flare of awful pain, the screaming, and then … death?
A hand clasped her shoulder. She turned, looked up into Cooper’s sad, dark eyes, and let the tears come.
C H A P T E R
21
Abramm slid his ivory archer three spaces on the diagonal and forced Katahn’s shield bearer into the game board’s central pit, exposing the Esurhite’s king to attack. Then he looked up. “I believe you are besieged, sir.” He spoke in fluent Tahg now, thanks to eighteen months of Shettai’s private tutelage.
Katahn scowled at the board. “Khrell’s Fire? How did you do that?” Abramm had captured or cut off every one of his pieces, leaving Katahn’s king with nowhere to go. It was a gambit he’d only recently thought updaring and risky but, if one’s opponent wasn’t anticipating it, devastatingly effective. He’d won in six moves.
Katahn continued to study the board in disbelief as Abramm leaned back on his pillows, glancing around for the first time since the game had begun. The spacious top-story, four-chamber suite was one of only six in the entire amphitheater. Darkened, bead-curtained doorways stood to right and left, beside clusters of intricately beaded skulls. At his back, the cool night air wafted in from an open window overlooking the city. Directly across from him, ceiling-high potted palms framed a colorful mosaic of the goddess Laevion breathing life back into the stitched-together pieces of Khrell’s dismembered body.
When Abramm had returned to his quarters following his impromptu evening matches, his Sorite slave had stripped off his ruined costume, washed away the blood, sweat, and paint, and dressed him in fine black woolen trousers with a silk undershirt and stiff, knee-length tunic of violet brocade. He was then brought up to Katahn’s quarters, where food and wine and nubile, half-clad young women awaited his pleasure.
Left alone with them, he had nibbled the spiced meat and oranges they offered, chewed soft bread, and sipped fine wine. He had listened to them sing and watched them dance to the music of pipe, drum, and kit’el, their curves sliding provocatively in and out of their veils, their dark eyes watching him with seductive intensity.
Though the intent of it all seemed clear enough, it still left him baffled. Brogai custom forbade the indulgence of one’s lusts on the eve of battle, and tomorrow he faced the biggest battle of his life. He could not afford to be sick or muzzy headed.
Few men untouched by the fire of Khrell had ever stood against a Broho and lived. But there were those few-men who had resisted Broho magics, who could not be Commanded, who had shaken off the Veil of Fear. He intended to be one of them. Intended, if he had to die, at least to go out with honor, fighting to his last breath…. Tonight, of all nights, then, he must abstain.
And Katahn offers him his daughters?
The Brogai Gamer had arrived an hour ago with the uurka board and, seeing the mostly untouched food, had reproved him mildly for his abstinence. Then they’d plunged into the game and the matter was forgotten.
The girls had removed the spiced meat and bread. Now all that remained was a basket of fruit, a plate of golden, crescent pastries, and a bowl of green, honeyed cumlaats. They had put away pipe and drum, and only the kit’el player remained, plucking a mournful melody on the taut strings of her gourd-shaped instrument. Her sisters lounged on bright blue and green pillows below the dais on which the men sat, their young faces scandalously bared, their bodies clearly visible through the diaphanous material of their gowns. They watched Abramm with a vulturine intensity.
As he looked at them now, they giggled and whispered and elbowed one another, their dark eyes flashing with excitement. He felt his face flush again, which only set them off the more.
Shettai, who’d come in with Katahn, sat a little way off from them, her high-boned features sharp and dramatic in contrast to the others’ soft, girlish faces. Her glorious hair fell unbound in a river of shimmering dark mahogany down her back. Pearl teardrops gleamed in her ears and on her forehead, and her gown of blue, silver-flecked silk set off the deep honey-gold of her skin to stunning advantage. Had he been in any other frame of mind, he’d be torturing himself with pangs of desire, and even now he wondered idly what Katahn would do if he chose her over the Gamer’s own daughters. He was fairly certain that she would not be pleased.
She alone did not giggle or smile in invitation, though she watched him closely. It was impossible to tell what she was thinking, which, he had learned in their close association over the last year and a half, meant she was probably annoyed. He knew for a fact that she had little love for Katahn’s gaggle of silly girls and even less for being put on display alongside them, for being put on display at all.
“That was very well done,” Katahn said, breaking into his thoughts. The Gamer leaned back from the board, turning a grin of open admiration on Abramm. “I am beginning to think I have created a player I am no longer able to beat.”
`After tomorrow it shouldn’t be a problem,” Abramm said dryly.
Katahn’s dark brows arched in surprise. “That sounds undeniably defeatist, my golden prince. Most unlike you.”
“Unlike you as well, my master.” Abramm flicked his gaze significantly around the room, indicating the girls, the pastries, the wine. “I can only conclude this offer of celebration before the fact of victory means that for me you believe there will be no victory.”
Katahn held his gaze, the ironic smile still in place, though the dark eyes had gone flat and hard. They seemed slightly less alert than normal, and Abramm remembered the wine he’d smelled on the man’s breath when he’d first arrived with the uurka board, remembered that he’d continued to drink throughout the game-which was probably why he’d fallen so thoroughly for that new gambit. But it was also starkly out of character.
The Brogai looked away, the smile twisting at his lips, flaring just slightly and vanishing. He picked up his goblet and, leaning back on his pillows, beckone
d for one of the girls to refill it. As she rose to obey, another glided to Abramm’s side, plucking a cluster of grapes from the basket as she passed it. She pulled one free and held it to his mouth, pressing herself intimately against his arm.
His pulse quickened, but he kept his eyes off her and accepted the fruit stoically.
She seemed to interpret that as acceptance of her as well and leaned more actively against him, toying now with the gold rings in his left ear. The ear was still tender from the insertion of his third ring last week, an unprecedented honor he suspected sprang more from political and monetary considerations than any deservedness on his part. Though he and Trap had beaten fairly the greatest non-Broho champions in the land, three rings were not normally attained in less than five years. Katahn’s son Regar, having but two rings of his own, had reacted to the promotion so hotly he’d joined the priesthood in protest the very next day-an irony only Abramm fully appreciated.
Katahn took a long swallow of wine, then wiped his mouth on the shimmering, gold-embroidered sleeve of his tunic. He gestured with the goblet. “Drink, my prince. You must be thirsty after your exertions of the evening.”
“Wine steals the spirit and muddies the mind,” Abramm said flatly, quoting the Brogai proverb to the Brogai himself. “I have a battle tomorrow.”
The girl was kissing the corner of his jaw just under his ear, her breath a light, fluttery tickle on his neck that inexplicably stimulated even as it annoyed.
Katahn snorted. A battle which you’ve already admitted you’re going to lose.” He took his own advice and drank again, then sat staring distractedly into the vessel, his face seeming more wrinkled and weary than usual. It finally occurred to Abramm that Katahn was no happier over the prospect of tomorrow’s match than Abramm. And well he shouldn’t be. When it ended he would have lost the two biggest money-makers he’d ever owned-with little chance of replacing them.
Katahn’s daughter was becoming decidedly distracting. She had undone the buttons and loops on his tunic’s high collar and was now kissing his throat, the flowery scent of her hair oil making his head spin. Katahn said something, but at the moment he could hardly breathe, much less think and speak.
Shettai was staring at him, as were the other girls, as was Katahn himself. Abramm’s face burned, and he knew it must be bright red. He shifted away from her, but the girl only pressed at him more insistently. Some of her sisters smirked, while Shettai’s lips tightened with disapproval. He knew what she was thinking. “Men are goats,” she liked to say. “Only interested in one thing.”
He’d always taken pride in proving her wrong in that, but at the moment, his treacherous body was hotly ignoring the dictates of pride.
Katahn alone seemed oblivious. He spoke again, irony heavy in his voice.
Grimly Abramm tried to wrench his mind to order. “I … I …”
Katahn frowned at the girl as if he had just noticed her. He waved a beringed hand. “Sabine, that will do.”
She drew herself off Abramm and turned to pout at her father.
“Later you may have him if he chooses. For now, return to your place. Your behavior is unseemly.”
She heaved a dramatic sigh and flounced back to her sisters.
Katahn smiled at Abramm. “She likes you. They all do. It’s that blond hair and blue eyes. More than that, it would bring a woman great status to lie with the White Pretender. Even greater should she conceive his child.”
Abramm’s flush spread down his neck and over his chest. He knew only enough of Esurhite sexual mores to be appalled by them. Though great indignation would arise should a woman venture into public uncovered-and any female caught in adultery would be summarily executed-within his own home a man could loan his wives, mistresses, slaves, or daughters to whomever he wished. Still, Abramm thought loaning them to a slave must be highly irregular.
“Did you know Beltha’adi is my cousin?” Katahn said, apparently returning to what he’d been saying when Sabine had been at her most distracting. “He is my father’s father’s father’s father’s … brother.”
He set down the goblet and took up one of the crescent-shaped pastries. “That makes us cousins. And, since he’s never in all his two-hundred-sixtysome-odd years managed to produce a son who lived, it also makes me his heir.” He chuckled again, then bit off half the pastry.
Abramm regarded him sharply. Katahn might be just this side of drunk, but Abramm did not believe it prevented the man from choosing his words with care.
Katahn waved the remaining pastry half. “But then, he doesn’t need one, I guess, with Khrell keeping him forever young. The priests say even if he’s slain, he’ll live again. That Laevion will breathe life into him just as she did Khrell after Ret hacked him up.”
Ret, consumed with jealousy, had laid a trap for his brother Khrell, and afterward called the winds to blow the pieces of ruined body to the far corners of the world, never to return. The birds told Laevion of it, and she sent them after the remains, which she then sewed back together with her own hands. It was a gruesome story, typically Esurhite.
“I understand you northerners have your own resurrection mythology,” Katahn said. “Wasn’t your Eidon killed and then resurrected?”
“‘Twas not Eidon,” Abramm said. “Eidon cannot die. It was his son Tersius. And he wasn’t resurrected-he gave his blood and body to form the Holy Flames that stand against the Veil and burn at the heart of Mataian temples.”
“Mmm. Your Terstan friend tells a different version.”
“The Terstan serves a different god.”
“He claims it is the same. That he uses the same books.”
“Some of the same books,” Abramm pointed out.
“I have copies of all your sacred texts, if you’d like to show me where you differ.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“Mmm.” Katahn fell silent, watching his hand finger the goblet, his face once more closed and unreadable. The girls murmured and shifted upon their pillows, their bright, birdlike gazes peppering Abramm with almost physical force. He refused to look at them, blushing all over again and wishing Katahn would get this over with.
“I’ve heard some believe Beltha’adi is Khrell himself in human form,” Abramm said finally. “That he cannot be slain at all.” He smiled slightly. “I think it’s a claim that certainly ought to be tested.”
Katahn looked up sharply, his gaze reproving. “You are a fool, Pretender. You cannot beat him. This Dorsaddi madness of your slaying him-it will not happen.”
“I’ve beaten Zamath.”
“Zamath is an excommunicate, a has-been, destroyed by his own madness. You may just as well say you’ve beaten a gnat. He is nothing of what Beltha’adi is. And you certainly didn’t kill Zamath, which is what we’re talking about. In any case you won’t be facing Beltha’adi tomorrow, so the question is moot.”
“I may win tomorrow and so have another chance.”
“You won’t.”
Abramm glanced around. “Some few have resisted Broho magics.”
A few perhaps, but it doesn’t matter, because either way, you will die tomorrow. The people may hope you’ll prevail, and the Underground may talk of rescue, but it won’t happen. In fact, it won’t even be a contest-it’ll be an execution. This Dorsaddi Deliverer nonsense must be stopped.”
“If Beltha’adi thinks my death will stop that-“
“He’s got a full complement of city guardsmen ready to shut down the city and squash any rioting that erupts tomorrow. And two full Hundreds are returning from the Andolen front as we speak. They’ll drive into the SaHal and clear out all the rebel nests that have sprung up in the last decade. My cousin is a ruthless man, Pretender. He’ll do what he must to hold his power. And it all begins with your death.
A death that will be neither swift nor clean. You must not merely be defeated in battle, you understand…. You must be humiliated, crushed … thoroughly broken.” He paused to let his words sink in. “The last thing they’l
l hear from you will be your screams for mercy.”
He paused again, selecting another pastry and examining it closely before dipping it into the bowl. “There is, however, another way. One much preferable for all, I think.” He bit the crescent in half. His dark eyes flicked up to meet Abramm’s. “You could change sides.”
“Change sides?”
“I have persuaded my cousin that it would be more gainful to offer you beneficence than execution.” He stuffed the rest of the pastry into his mouth, then licked the sticky green syrup from his fingers. “If you swear allegiance to him and to Khrell, that would solve everything. And if you participated in the raid on the SaHal, why, clearly you could not be the Deliverer. Indeed, I believe just giving your allegiance would be enough to take the wind out of the whole bloody movement.”
He smiled. “Which would be in all ways the best solution. My cousin has already decreed that you may seek Brogai status at the temple and that he will afterward grant you the privilege of joining the Army of the Black Moon. You would be the first of your northerner race to wear the Shadow’s colors. An unprecedented honor.”
Abramm sat very still, stunned to speechlessness.
Katahn leaned forward eagerly. “I do not offer you your life alone, my prince. I offer you everything you might desire. I suspect he’d even give you Kiriath once he’s taken it from your brother.”
`And the price is merely my own treachery, is that it?”
“Treachery?” Katahn frowned. “To Kiriath? Ast! You belong with them no more than a hawk among finches. Why give your life for a realm of cowards? They betrayed you. You owe them nothing.” He leaned back, fingers steepled beneath his beaklike nose, eyes never leaving Abramm’s. “It is our destiny to rule the world, Pretender. I offer you the chance to ride with us, to share in our glory.”
The girls had gone silent, listening intently for his response. He could feel Shettai’s eyes burning upon him. And he could not deny the offer tempted him.