“I’m so sorry.”
“It’s not what you think.” Kihrin shook his head. “She probably wasn’t real. She looked so strange. I don’t think she was human.”
“What did she look like?”
“She had red hair,” Kihrin said, after an uncomfortable silence. “Not hennaed red hair, like yours. Her hair was either black or the color of blood, depending on the angle, and she only had a single stripe of it running from her forehead to her neck. Her eyes were fire, all flickering red and orange. And her skin was odd. Most of her body was normal enough, but her hands and feet were black, like she wore gloves and stockings.”
A strange thing happened to Kihrin as he talked about the phantom girl; a faraway look caught in his eyes. He released some of the tension, some of the horror, that had kept him a trembling prisoner. He didn’t seem to notice.
Morea frowned. Just exactly what had that demon done to this poor boy’s mind?
“From the hair I’d say she sounds like a girl from Jorat,” Morea said. “My old master bought a slave girl from that dominion once. Everyone told him not to; they make poor slaves. The old bloods—the ones who trace their ancestry back to the Jorat god-king—they aren’t human anymore. There’s something in them that’s wild, and stays wild, and will not be broken.”*
“What happened?”
“She ripped out my master’s throat with her teeth and took her own life. My master’s daughter didn’t want to own a seraglio, so she sold us off. That’s how my sister and I were separated.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Now you know not to ever buy a Joratese slave.” Morea leaned forward. “Is she beautiful, this demon-brought Jorat-girl?”
His expression faltered for a moment before he smiled. “Not as beautiful as you.”
“You’re lying. I can tell.”
“Jealous?” He was trying to tease, and not succeeding.
“Can’t I be? She is, isn’t she? Very beautiful, I mean.”
“Maybe a little,” he said, looking away.
“Ah, and to think just this afternoon I was the girl who made you blush.”
He looked guilty then, and Morea chided herself for teasing him when he’d had so much horror in his day. “Is that some sort of game?” she asked, looking at the silk-clad block and the dice cup on the table.
“Not at all. Fate cards. Ola uses them.” He picked up the silk pouch and withdrew a deck of cards. Kihrin pulled a card off the top and showed her an intricately drawn miniature of a silver-haired angel flipping a coin: Taja, Goddess of Luck.
“I don’t understand.”
“Ola sells more than sex here.” He shuffled the cards with one hand, flipping them in front and behind each other with nimble fingers.
“You’re good at that.”
“Ola’s better. She’s the one who taught me.” He paused. “She didn’t mean it, you know. About letting me see the General. She’s as set against it as Pappa. I know her too well.” He offered her the deck, fanned out so he couldn’t see the faces. “Take a card. Don’t tell me what it is.”
She smiled and plucked a single card from the deck. “She did seem upset.”
“Mad as old Nemesan.* And I don’t know why. But I know her. Hell, I was her apprentice when I was a kid. She’d never tell me not to do something, not if she was serious about it. She’d just fix the odds. You picked the Pale Lady.”
Morea laughed and flipped the card over, revealing Thaena. “How did you do that?”
“I fixed the odds.”
Kihrin shuffled the cards and dealt, this time dealing cards on the table in a cross pattern with a card in the corners to form a square. He started turning over cards, the scowl on his face only increasing as he did. She studied the pictures with interest, but she didn’t know enough about fate cards to understand what they meant.
“That good?” she finally asked.
Kihrin stared at the cards blank-faced. “You know, I think that’s the worst reading I’ve ever seen. With a day like this, I shouldn’t be surprised.”
“But what do the cards say?”
“Oh, you know, the usual stuff. Death, loss, pain, suffering, slavery, and despair.” He started gathering the cards back up. “Not even a nice reward at the end of it, just this.” He picked up the card in the center: a solid rectangle of blackness. “The cold void of Hell. Nice.” He snorted and put the cards back into the bag. “Now I remember why I hate these things.” He refilled his wine goblet, stood up, and put the wine jug back in the cabinet.
“How do you think Ola is going to fix the odds?”
Kihrin glanced down at his cup of wine. “We’ll find out soon enough if I’m right. Come on. Ola’s bath is through that curtain. We’d best get this over with.”
13: THE DETERMINED WIZARD
(Kihrin’s story)
I jumped up onto the railing and kept myself from falling overboard by grabbing the rigging. “Are those whales? I’ve never seen whales before.”
“Oh, those?” Teraeth looked over the side of the ship with a bored expression. “Nothing but several dozen sixty-foot-long limbless blue elephants going for a swim. Pay them no mind.”
“I’ve never seen so many.”
“Apparently you haven’t seen any, so that’s not saying much.”
I looked out over the ocean, watching the long, elegant forms breaking the surface, hurling themselves into the air to come crashing back down. After a few minutes, I stopped smiling.
“Are they always this jumpy?”
“It’s called breaching.”
“And the blood?” I asked. “That’s normal too?”
“What?” Teraeth turned around. I pointed behind the ship to where the whales jumped and churned. A streak of dark red spread out against the blue tropical water. The whales were racing, panicking, trying to overtake The Misery and swim past her.
They were trying to escape.
The vané knelt on the deck and put both hands against the wooden planks. He cocked his head to the side and closed his eyes.
“What are you doing?”
“Listening.” He opened his eyes again. “Damn it all. Go bring my mother here. The whales are screaming.”
“Screaming? But what could—” My voice died. A tentacle wrapped around one of the whales and pulled it under the waves. The water nearby churned a fresher crimson.
I started to do as Teraeth ordered. He may not have been carrying my gaesh anymore, but just this once I was willing to make an exception. His mother was on a first-name basis with the Goddess of Death herself; she could only be an asset on an occasion like this. Then I stopped, because a second problem had manifested.
“Tyentso’s headed right this way.” I stood caught between the approaching witch and the monster lurking in the ocean behind us.
“I don’t care if she wants to ask me to dance, she can wait—” Teraeth looked up and paused.