Bad news, Your Holiness,” Neph Dada said as he came into the Godking’s bedchamber. A young Cenarian noblewoman named Magdalyn Drake was tied to the bed and whimpering into her gag, but both she and the Godking were still dressed.
Garoth was sitting on the bed beside her. He caressed a knife up her bare calf. “Oh, what is it?”
“One of your spies in the Chantry, Jessie al’Gwaydin, is dead. She was last seen in the village of Torras Bend.”
“The Dark Hunter killed her?”
“I assume so. Our man said that Jessie was planning to study the creature,” Neph said.
“So she went into the wood and never came back.”
“Yes, Your Holiness,” Neph said. He rubbed his stooped back as if in pain. It wasn’t only to remind the Godking of his age, but also of the burdens Neph bore in serving.
With a savage motion, the Godking stabbed the mattress so high between Magdalyn’s legs that Neph thought he’d stabbed the girl. She squealed through the gag and bucked, trying to get away. Heedless, Garoth cut toward her feet, shearing her dress to the hem and sending feathers into the air.
Abruptly, he was calm once more. He left the knife sticking out of the mattress, folded the cut dress back and put his hand gently on the girl’s naked thigh. She trembled uncontrollably.
“It is so hard to get spies in the Chantry. Why do they insist on throwing their lives away, Neph?”
“For the same reason they join us in the first place, Your Holiness: ambition.”
Garoth looked at the Vürdmeister wearily. “That was a rhetorical question.”
“I have some good news as well,” Neph said. He straightened a little, forgetting his back. “We’ve captured a Ladeshian bard named Aristarchos. I think you’ll want to interrogate him personally.”
“Why?”
“Because I Viewed him, and what he’s seen is remarkable.”
Garoth narrowed his eyes. “Out with it.”
“He believes he has seen the bearer of a ka’kari. A black ka’kari.”
“Stop looking at me!” Stephan said. He was a fat cloth merchant, some former lover with a grudge who swore that he could tell Vi who the Shinga was. Either the Shinga was a woman, or Stephan had little preference which field he plowed, because this had been his price.
Vi lay under him. She moved with the dexterity of an athlete and the skill of a courtesan trained by Momma K herself, but her eyes were utterly dispassionate. She wasn’t moaning, wasn’t making faces. She wouldn’t pretend pleasure and it was giving Stephan problems. Like most men, he was three-quarters talk and one-quarter cock. A little less than a quarter, at the moment.
He pulled back and cursed his limpness. He was sweaty and he stank under the smell of his fine oils. Vi couldn’t help but give him a condescending smile. “I thought you were gonna give it to me good,” she said.
His face flushed, and she wondered why she was sabotaging him. He was no more or less than any man, and she still needed to learn what he had to tell her. Taunting him was only going to make this take longer.
“Let your hair down,” he said.
“Forget my hair.” Nysos, couldn’t they leave one damned thing alone? She rolled over and shimmied her hips, reaching out with her Talent to grab him. Then she did things to help him forget.
When she was fifteen and Master Gibbet had taken her to Momma K, the courtesan had watched the wetboy bang her, then said, “Child, you fuck like you don’t even feel it. Do you?”
There was no lying to Momma K, so Vi had admitted it. Her sex was totally numb. “Well,” Momma K had said, “you’ll never be the best, but it’s nothing we can’t overcome. The oldest magic is sex magic. With your tits and all the Talent you’ve got, I can still make you into something special.” So Vi used her skills now, cursing the effete asshole in a whisper—the words didn’t have to match her intent, but like all Talented women, she had to speak to use her powers.
Stephan moaned like a dumb animal and in moments he was finished. While he was still in a stupor, as a little fuck-you, she wiped herself clean on his fine cloak and sat cross-legged on the bed in the armor of her nudity.
“Tell me, fat man,” she said, looking at his pale rolls with such distaste that he covered himself in shame. He turned away.
“By all the gods, do you have to—”
“Tell me.”
Stephan covered his eyes. “He used to get runners. They knew to come to my house. I sometimes overheard bits and pieces, but he was always so careful. He burned the few letters he got, always went outside to talk with the runners. But the night of the invas—the liberation—he got a runner, and he wrote a note here.” Stephan grabbed a robe and pulled it around himself before walking over to his desk. He pulled out a sheet of Ceuran rice paper and handed it to her. It was blank.
“Hold it up to the light,” he said.
Vi held the paper up in front of a lantern and could see faint impressions on it. “Save Logan Gyre,” it read, in a neat, tiny script, “and the girl and the scarred woman if you can. I will reward you beyond your wildest dreams.” Instead of a name, it was signed with two symbols: a heavy-lidded eye circumscribing a star, drawn without lifting pen from paper, and beside it a nine-pointed star. The first was the glyph of the Sa’kagé; the second the symbol of the Shinga. The two together meant every resource the Sa’kagé had was at the recipient’s disposal.
“He left after that,” Stephan said. “And never came back. I told him I loved him and he won’t even see me.”
“His name, fat man. Tell me his name.”
“Jarl,” he said. “Gods forgive me, the Shinga is Jarl.”
In one of her poorest safe houses, all darkness and rats and roaches like everywhere in the Warrens, Jarl and Momma K were meeting with a dead man. He smiled as he pulled himself into the room. His right leg was bound with splints so he couldn’t bend his knee, and his right arm was in a sling. Blood had seeped through the bandages around his elbow. He had a crutch, but instead of tucking it under his arm, he had to hold it in his right hand. The injury to his elbow kept him from using the crutch on the side his knee demanded, so he more hopped than limped. He had short-cropped gray hair, was muscular in a stringy-tough-old-man way, and though his face was drawn and gray, he smiled.
“Gwinvere,” he said. “It’s good to see that the years have respected you at least.”
She smiled, and rather than commenting on his appearance—he looked like he’d been sleeping in gutters, his fine garments were soiled, and he stank—she said, “It’s good to see you’ve not lost your silver tongue.”
Brant Agon hopped to a chair and sat. “Reports of my demise and all that.”
“Brant, this is Jarl, the new Shinga. Jarl, this is Baronet Brant Agon, formerly Lord General of Cenaria.”
“What can I do for you, Lord General?” Jarl asked.
“You’re too kind. I come here as little more than what you see: I look like a beggar, and I’ve come to beg. But I am more than a beggar. I’ve fought on every border this country has. I’ve fought in duels. I’ve led squads of two men, and I’ve led campaigns with five thousand. You’re facing a fight. Khalidor has scattered our armies, but the power in Cenaria is the Sa’kagé, and the Godking knows it. He’ll destroy you unless you destroy him first. You need warriors, and I am one. Wetboys have their place, but they can’t do everything—as you saw a few weeks ago, they might only make things worse. I, on the other hand, can make your men more efficient, more disciplined, and better at killing. Just give me a place and put me in charge of men.”
Jarl rocked back in his chair and tented his fingers. He stared at Brant Agon for a long time. Momma K schooled herself to silence. She’d been Shinga for so long, it was hard to risk letting Jarl make missteps, but she’d made her decision. Let Jarl take the life and the power and the gray hairs. She would help until he didn’t need her help anymore.
“Why are you here, Lord Agon?” Jarl asked. “Why me? Terah Graesin has an army. If you’d had your way, the Sa’kagé would have been wiped out years ago.”
Momma K said, “We heard you were killed in an ambush.”
“Roth Ursuul spared me,” Brant said bitterly. “As a reward for my stupidity. It was my idea that Logan Gyre marry Jenine Gunder. I thought that if the king’s line were assured, it would prevent a coup. Instead, it just got Logan and Jenine killed, too.”
“Khalidor would never have let them live,” Momma K said. “In fact, it’s a mercy for Jenine. She could’ve been taken for Ursuul’s entertainment, and the stories I’ve heard—”
“Anyway,” Agon interrupted, unwilling to hear any absolution. “I crawled away. When I got home, my wife had been taken. I don’t know if she’s dead or if she’s one of the ‘entertainments.’ ”
“Oh, Brant, I’m so sorry,” Momma K said.
He continued without looking at her, his face rigid. “I decided to live and make myself useful, Shinga. The noble houses want to fight a regular war. Duchess Graesin will try to wink and flatter her way to a throne. They don’t have the will to win. I do, and I think you do too. I want to win. Failing that, I want to kill as many Khalidorans as I can.”
“Are you proposing to serve me or be my partner?” Jarl asked.
“I don’t give a rat’s ass,” Brant said. He paused. “And I know a lot more about rats’ asses now than I ever thought I would.”
“And what happens if we win?” Jarl asked. “You go back to trying to eliminate us?”
“If we win, you’ll probably decide I’m too dangerous and have me killed.” Brant smiled thinly. “At the moment, that doesn’t bother me much.”
“So I see.” Jarl ran his hands over his dark microbraids, thinking. “I’ll have no divided loyalty, Brant. You’ll serve me, and only me. Do you have a problem with that?”
“Everyone I’ve sworn anything to is dead,” Brant said. He shrugged. “Except maybe my wife. But I have some questions. If you’re the new Shinga, who’s the old one? Is he still alive? How many fronts is this war going to have?”
Jarl was silent.
“I’m the old Shinga,” Momma K said. “I’m retiring, and not because Jarl is forcing me to. I’ve been grooming him for this for years, but now events have forced our hand. The Warrens are our center of power, Brant, and they’re dying. Starvation is already a problem, but pestilence comes next. The Godking doesn’t care what happens here. He hasn’t set up any power structure at all. If we want to survive—and by we, I mean the Sa’kagé, but I also mean Cenaria and every wretched soul in the Warrens—things have to change. We can still get wagons and boats in; the soldiers check the cargoes for weapons, and they demand bribes, but we can survive that. What we can’t survive is what happens once every wagon that comes in loaded with food gets plundered. People are starving and there are no guards to stop the theft, and if one wagon is plundered, every wagon thereafter will be. If that happens, the merchants will stop sending anything in. Then everyone will die. We aren’t there yet, but we’re close.”
“So what are you going to do?” Brant asked.
“We’re going to set up a quiet government. Everyone knows me,” Momma K said. “I can hire bashers to guard wagons; I can adjudicate disputes; I can direct the building of shelters.”
“That makes you a target,” Brant said.
“I’m a target no matter what,” Momma K said. “We’ve lost some of the wetboys, and I don’t mean they’re dead. The wetboys swear a magically binding oath of obedience to the Shinga. The Godking has broken that bonding. I’ve learned that Hu Gibbet told the Godking who I was. Garoth doesn’t believe a woman could be the Shinga, so now he’s searching for the real one. But he might change his mind any day, whether I act publicly or whether I stay in the shadows. I can’t control that, so I might as well do what needs to be done.”
Momma K was as calm as any veteran warrior going into battle. She could tell that Brant Agon was astounded.
“Tell me my part,” Brant said.
Jarl said, “You take your pick of my men and make them wytch hunters. After that, I want you to make defenses we can use if the army comes to the Warrens in force. The Khalidorans have wytches, soldiers, and some of our best people on their side. The only reason I’m still alive is that they don’t know who I am. But welcome aboard.”
“My pleasure.” Brant Agon bowed awkwardly because of his injuries and followed a big bodyguard out the door.
When he was gone, Jarl turned to Momma K. “You didn’t tell me you knew each other.”
“I don’t think I do know this Brant Agon,” she said.
“Answer the question.”
A slight smile touched her lips, amused and a little proud that Jarl was taking command. “Thirty years ago Brant fell in love with me. I was naive. I thought I loved him, too, and I ruined him.”
“Did you love him?” Jarl asked, rather than ask what happened. The question was proof to Momma K that she’d chosen the right man to succeed her. Jarl could find cracks. But it was one thing to admire his ability, and another to experience it.
She smiled a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. It wouldn’t fool Jarl for a second, but after all these years, the mask was pure reflex. “I don’t know. I don’t remember. What does it matter?”