The Steel Remains

Most of Archeth’s attention was on the woman. Like a lot of the harem, this one was a northerner, long-limbed and pale-skinned. Large, well-shaped breasts, not yet marked by motherhood. It was impossible to make out hair color or facial features—the black muslin wrappings of the harem veil covered her from the neck up—but Archeth was betting she was from the rather erroneously titled free mercantile states. The Yhelteth markets had seen a lot of this type recently, as the northern economies tottered and whole families were sold into slavery to pay their debts. From what Archeth heard on the trade-route grapevine, the free cities were fast becoming home to a whole new class of slavers; canny entrepreneurs who made their rapid fortunes acquiring the local flesh at knockdown prices and then selling it on southward to the Empire, where the centuries-old tradition of servitude made for a massive established market and a never-slaked hunger for exotic product. A woman like this one might easily increase her initial sale value by a factor of fifty on the long march south into imperial lands. With profit margins like these, and war debt in most cities still largely unpaid, it was hardly a surprise that the League had rediscovered its enthusiasm for the trade. Had neatly and cheerily rolled back nearly two centuries of abolition in order to facilitate the new flow of wealth.

The Emperor looked up from what he was doing.

“I require an answer, Archeth,” he said mildly.

Archeth wondered briefly if Jhiral planned to hurt the woman while she watched, to punish the alleged lack of respect by proxy. A calmly rational rebuke for the intensely black woman before him, while the milk-white woman in his lap suffered the physical cruelty like some kind of inverted avatar. Archeth had seen it done before, a male slave lashed bloody for some trumped-up infraction and, against the backdrop of tortured cries and the wet slap of the lash, Jhiral remonstrating gently with one of his chiefs of staff. He was not and never would be the warrior his father had been, but Jhiral had inherited the same shrewd intelligence and with it a depth of court-bred sophistication that Akal Khimran, always in the saddle at one end of his empire or the other, had never troubled to develop.

Or maybe the woman was simply there to tantalize. Not much was secret in the imperial palace, and Archeth’s preferences were widely whispered of, if not actually proven or known.

She cleared her throat and lowered her eyes deferentially.

“I was working, my lord. In the shipyards, in hope of some progress that might benefit the realm.”

“Oh. That.”

Something seemed to shift behind the emperor’s eyes. He withdrew his hand from between the pale woman’s thighs, sniffed delicately at his fingers like a gourmet chef, and then clapped her on the rump. She coiled out of his lap with what looked like schooled decorum, and crept out of the imperial presence on her knees.

“You may rise, Archeth. Sit near me. You two.” He nodded at the courtiers, who might have been made of wood for all the life they showed. “Get out. Go back to . . . whatever valuable tasks it is you usually fill your time with. Oh, and—” Upturned hand, a regal gesture of magnanimity. “Well done. There’ll be a little something in the new season’s list for you, no doubt.”

The courtiers bowed out. Archeth seated herself on a cushion at Jhiral’s left hand and watched them go, torn between envy and scorn. As soon as the veils had fallen behind them, Jhiral leaned across and gripped Archeth’s jaw tightly in his hand. His fingers were still damp, still scented with the white woman’s cunt. He pulled Archeth to him and stared at her as if her skull were a curio picked up from some bazaar stall.

“Archeth. You really must get it through your head, the Kiriath have gone. They left you behind. You do accept that, don’t you?”

So here was the punishment after all. Archeth stared away over Jhiral’s shoulder and said nothing. The Emperor shook her jaw impatiently.

“Don’t you, Archeth?”

“Yes.” The word dropped out of her mouth like rotten meat.

“Grashgal refused to take you with him, and he said they wouldn’t be coming back. The veins of the earth will take us from here as once they brought us. Our time and tasks are done.” Jhiral’s voice was kindly, avuncular. “Wasn’t that it, the An-Monal valediction? Something like that?”

Her throat lumped. “Yes, my lord.”

“The Kiriath age is over, Archeth. This is the human age. You’d do well to remember that, and stick to your new allegiances. Eh?”

She swallowed hard. “Majesty.”

“Good.” He let go of her jaw and sat back. “What did you think of her?”

“My lord?”

“The girl. She’s new. What do you think? Would you like me to send her to your bedchamber when I’m finished with her?”

Archeth forced down the scalding behind her eyes and managed a dry, self-possessed voice.