Stephen Hunt - Jack Cloudie

‘I shall rescue you now, I will free you from this life,’ promised Omar, taking Shadisa’s hand. ‘You were not meant to be a slave — you were born the daughter of a freeman. I will buy out your papers of ownership.’

‘Was I free back in Haffa?’ said Shadisa, pulling away from him. ‘A couple of coins a week to work in the great master Barir’s kitchens? Buying food in the market, salting and smoking meats, cooking, washing dishes, serving the men of the house in the evening; up at five, not asleep before midnight. Do you know so little of what my life was really like?’

‘Back in the town, did your father …?’

‘He died too, I suppose,’ said Shadisa, sadly. ‘Unless he got out in one of the fishing boats. There were thousands of people in the harbour, fighting our own soldiers for the chance to escape. Begging, cursing, offering money to the boats that remained. Every man I knew is dead but you, Omar Barir. You have your damn father’s luck, alright. You could be thrown off a slave galley wearing only chains and you would wash up on some island with your shackles slid off, palm trees for your bed, dates to eat and a waterfall to bathe in.’

‘I have whittled my own luck with the tip of a scimitar, my great courage and my epic wits,’ said Omar. ‘And now my luck will be yours, too.’

‘Oh, your epic wits,’ laughed Shadisa, opening the gate to the lifting room as it shuddered to a halt. ‘Everyone in Haffa knew that the House of Barir had attached itself to a dying cause, that it was only a matter of time until the Sect of Razat replaced our own in the Holy Cent. Your father mistook stubbornness for honour, Omar, and our people paid the price with their blood as we always do. Recognizing you as his kin was just another selfish act, easing his conscience for his last few hours, and it should have seen you dead. We all knew our end was coming, but you, you and your epic wits, were lazing about on your water farm. You didn’t know and you couldn’t have cared less if you did.’

‘You are wrong,’ said Omar, stung by her words. ‘About my father and about me. I don’t know how he did it, but I know he saw me placed with the guardsmen. Now I have no house, I serve only the empire and the Caliph Eternal.’

‘Then we are alike,’ said Shadisa, leading them through the library. ‘For I serve a man who serves only the caliph too.’

‘I will set you free, Shadisa.’

‘Free to do what?’ asked the woman. ‘To be the wife of a common guardsman? To sit around on a hemp mat in a fortress cell and cook up a stew for the few days in a year when you’re not off with the army campaigning? I have seen another life here in the Jahan, Omar. A life of luxury; of water that flows out of a tap without an hour’s walk to a well head; of fine gardens and music and colour and splendour. Here,’ she tapped her long ornate tunic. ‘Silk, worth twenty times my slave price. Which of us apart from Marid Barir’s wives could afford to wear such silk back in Haffa?’

‘I would make you free,’ pleaded Omar.

‘A wife of a soldier, or a servant to the grand vizier,’ said Shadisa. ‘Which of those is more free?’

‘You ask the wrong question,’ said Boulous. ‘You should ask which of those is the right course under heaven?’

‘I have only been a slave for a few months, unlike you, little jahani,’ said Shadisa. ‘But I have been a woman for all of my life. I know which is the better course.’

Omar reeled in shock at her attitude. This was not the reunion he had dreamed of during the long, tiring hours of sword practice, during the hard days he had spent cleaning pistol barrels and oiling drak saddles. A grateful Shadisa falling into his arms as he beat off the slavers who had captured her was what he had imagined. How could she have fallen in love with the luxury of the grand vizier’s service so easily? She had never cared about such things back in Haffa. Plenty of the great house’s female servants had made it perfectly clear that a mere slave like Omar could never provide such luxuries and was therefore of no interest to them, but never Shadisa — this was not her. Has the grand vizier, this Immed Zahharl, bewitched her? Had Shadisa fallen under the chief minister’s spell as easily as Boulous had implied that the Caliph Eternal himself had?

He lay his fears for her aside and followed the girl. Shadisa led Omar and Boulous to an archway bordered by towering stone shelves, the copper plates of the spell books looking as if they were slicked by blood in the crimson twilight. She bade them sit on a bench cut into an alcove while she went to fetch Immed Zahharl, leaving the two of them under the watchful gaze of the other two servant girls.

‘So, your pretty friend serves Immed Zahharl,’ Boulous whispered to Omar. ‘Immed Zahharl himself — he should not come to personally collect the blood of a drak rider.’

‘He wants to see me,’ said Omar, speaking softly. ‘To observe what an unbelievingly handsome fellow the last son of the House of Barir is for himself.’ He nodded towards the two slaves standing sentry over them. ‘That pair served in my father’s house too. The grand vizier sends us a message with their presence, don’t you think, Boulous? That a certain quick-witted hero of your acquaintance who currently wears a guardsman’s riding leathers, should really be wearing a slave’s robes, or a corpse’s shroud.’

‘I see that Master Uddin’s teaching has not been totally in vein,’ noted Boulous, dryly.

‘You know the funny thing about playing the fool?’ said Omar. ‘People ignore a slave who is clumsy and stupid. They do not expect much of him. They don’t ask him to achieve anything too complex.’

Boulous grunted, as if in understanding. ‘Master Uddin said something to me in your first week at the citadel. He said, “There, Boulous, goes the best actor who will never appear under the lamps of the imperial theatre company. The very best.”’

Omar shrugged. ‘Have I won your applause?’

‘If you can remember where the actor begins and the act ends, I think it will be very wise for a fool of a freed slave to greet the grand vizier,’ whispered Boulous. ‘Your existence in our order is already an affront to his schemes. Give him a face to match what that slave girl you like so much has probably said about you.’

‘Shadisa would never betray me,’ whispered Omar. He imagined drawing his scimitar and plunging it into the grand vizier’s gut. Nothing personal — no more personal than unseating my house and supplanting our sect in the Holy Cent.

Shadisa returned accompanied by a wiry thin man with an intricately oiled and curled beard hanging off his slim cheeks. By the cut of his expensive purple clothes and Shadisa’s respectful distance behind him, Omar marked this as the man responsible for his house’s destruction. Confirming Omar’s suspicions, both the slaves watching them dropped to their knees, Omar followed Boulous’s lead in giving a low bow to the man.

‘The last son of the House of Barir,’ said the man in a purring, silky voice. ‘And following such a traditional calling, too: the imperial guardsmen. Nobles, always rushing to push their sons forward for the guards.’

Omar stared into the grand vizier’s strangely cruel, calculating gaze. Eyes so wide and intense, but with heavy hoods that looked as though they were trying to press his eyelids down into a sleepy slumber. ‘I like waving a sword about, grand vizier. It is easy work compared to what Master Barir had me doing on his water farm.’

‘And now you’re to wave it about on top of a drak.’ Immed Zahharl’s lips curled in amusement. ‘Down here, everyone prefers to use the title grand mage. Only in the palace above is it grand vizier, or high keeper if I am in one of the Sect of Razat’s temples.’