He had only moments before the guards came for him, and he kept her trapped against the wall as he spoke, the wandering caress of his hand over her shoulder and breast in sharp contrast to his pragmatic instructions. Anyone watching might think the Gladius Prime wooed his plain companion to his bed.
She listened with a close ear and barely checked anger. “It won’t work,” she muttered when he finished, and swatted his hand away from her hip.
“It will.” He cupped her buttock to pull her into him and buried his nose in her hair. “It must.”
The clatter of keys and a thump on the cell door signaled visitors. He kept his back to the door, but the girl’s face had gone a sickly pale shade as she stared past his shoulder at the barred window. Azarion casually turned to find a face leering at them.
“Time’s up, bull. If you haven’t tupped the bitch yet, it’ll have to wait. Herself is wanting you. Now.”
The agacin retreated to a corner as far from him and the guards as she could get. She busied herself with righting her tunic and retying the laces.
The guard gave Azarion a puzzled look. “I saw this year’s offerings. You could have done much better than her.”
Azarion didn’t reply. He almost never spoke to the guards, and they had learned long ago he was far too dangerous to tease without risk. He kept his attention on the second guard, who trained the crossbow on him and held the hated shackles.
That first guard motioned him forward. Azarion held still as the iron collar encircled his neck, growing heavier—tighter—when the guard snapped it closed. A length of chain hung from the iron ring bolted at its center, the links kept short so that he was forced to hunch when the guard attached it to the chain connecting the shackles that bound his wrists and the ones that gripped his ankles. Trussed in irons, he shuffled after his escort as they led him through the door and into the corridor—a broken beast of burden. It was how the empress liked to see him when he first entered her apartments.
He sighed inwardly when no cup of drugged wine was forthcoming. It seemed the empress hadn’t yet had her bloodlust appeased, even after witnessing a full day of slaughter in the arena. He wondered whom he’d be forced to fight and kill for her pleasure before she bedded him.
And kill he would. Again and again. With his freedom at the tips of his fingers, he’d do whatever it took to stay alive and fulfill that dream. He glanced at the agacin huddled against the wall. She stared at him, eyes wide. Frightened. Hostile.
“She’ll still be here for you to enjoy when you return, stud,” one guard said. “That’s if Herself doesn’t take it into her head to geld you just for fun.”
The taunt elicited snorts of laughter. Azarion paid no heed and concentrated on keeping his feet as they navigated the slimy floor toward a set of steps that ascended to street level.
They exited the underground labyrinth and entered an enclosed bailey. The guards shoved Azarion toward a waiting wagon. He half fell into the back and was joined by the guard with the crossbow and another who gripped an ax. The driver whistled, and the wagon lurched forward into the city’s narrow streets.
Night had descended on Kraelag as they traveled toward Palace Hill. Lamplight illuminated signs advertising pub houses and brothels. Revelers made drunk on wine and made poor by pickpockets spilled into the streets, continuing the weeklong celebration of the Rites of Spring.
The hill overlooking the city blazed with light, a beacon of brightness that hid a corruption far fouler than the worst of Kraelag’s middens.
The wagon rolled up the hill, leaving behind the closes for the wide, cobbled avenues lined with gates attended by guards.
Behind the gates, the Empire’s wealthy and noble enjoyed the fruits of their riches. The closer they drew to the hill’s peak and the palace that crowned it, the larger and more lavish the manors became. And the greater the number of soldiers guarding these sanctuaries.
Azarion found it all suffocating. Even with the wider streets, the buildings seemed to loom above him, sometimes blocking the moon from view. Trees grown as privacy barriers were clipped into shapes that defied nature’s hand. Like the manor houses and temples, they towered above him, a green wall threatening to collapse on top of him.
A decade spent as a slave in the Empire’s capital hadn’t dulled his memory of the open steppe, with its wild grasses bent to the ceaseless wind. The Sky Below was an unforgiving land, nor were the nomadic clans that roamed its expanse peaceful, but he missed it. Fiercely. He went to sleep each night with its image behind his eyelids and woke up each morning to its memory. If his plan succeeded, he would ride across its grasslands once more, a free man.
The road finally leveled out as the wagon reached the hilltop and turned onto a paved avenue even wider than the one winding up the slope. More of the ubiquitous trimmed trees lined the way toward the royal palace.
Azarion’s first sight of it when he came to the capital as a slave had stunned him enough that he momentarily forgot his rage. Until then, he’d lived within a culture of wagons and tents, where the biggest shelter was the qara belonging to the chief of the largest Savatar clan, and that was still smaller than the meanest outbuilding surrounding the palace.
They rolled to a stop in front of a plain door that opened to a maze of hallways. Azarion could find his way to the empress’s apartments blindfolded by now. He’d been brought to her more times than he could count or want.
Palace guards took over his stewardship and escorted him up flights of stairs and down corridors lined with statues of the Empire heroes, past galleries whose walls were crowded with portraits of the royal tyrants who had ruled for centuries.
Music and laughter drifted from various rooms along the way, accompanied by the cloying scent of perfume or the acrid smoke of incense.
At last they reached a pair of carved doors burnished in gold leaf that shimmered under torchlight.
Unlike the men who guarded the arena, those who guarded the palace gazed past him as if he were an invisible spirit, their expressions blank masks behind their helmets’ face shields. A pair dressed in full armor and heavily armed stood sentry at the doors. One nodded to the soldier on one side of Azarion before he and his companion pushed the doors open to allow entry.
One of the guards shoved Azarion forward, hard enough to make him stumble.
He straightened as far as the shortened length of chain at his throat allowed, and raised his head to take in his surroundings. The apartments belonging to the most powerful woman in all of the Empire were everything that defined luxury.
A painted ceiling arched above him to create a dome, its curving joists carved and painted in bright colors and more of the gold leaf. Silks and velvets imported from the south graced the walls inset with windows made of real glass. More of the costly fabrics spilled over tufted couches and the grand bed occupying one corner of the room. Animal pelts shared floor space with carpets woven by Velian weavers rumored to shed the blood of their shredded fingers into the very knots of the fibers they warped and wefted.