Chapter 4

Yalet

The Empire of Nejim

Mount Thayl

Anoth sneered as Mount Thayl loomed in the distance, nearing ever so slowly.  For nine hundred years, the mountain had stood defiant against him, powerless to spurn his advances yet refusing to flinch even after it had been stripped of its vegetation and topmost soil, exposing every curved and craggy crevice.  The inselberg knelt in crumbling silence, enduring each intrusive penetration without giving up what Anoth sought above all else.  Despite all this, Anoth smiled.  He had a good feeling about today’s encounter.

When the palanquin carriers finally set him down outside the encampment at the base of the mountain, he emerged through the curtains to survey the Naltite slaves that swarmed across the brittle rock face several hundred feet away.  It was obvious which thralls had been taken during the most recent raids in Zaidna.  Their bodies still carried some flesh, unlike the slaves whose bodies were scarred and withered.  But regardless of tenure, every one of the slaves held the same familiar hopelessness in their eyes.  Davim had trained them adequately.

As Anoth moved through the camp, hunting for the slave master, he heard a grating cacophony of loud laughter.  He clenched his fists.  There would be no mirth in this place; the slaves who dug for the Orb would do so with reverence, not joy.  All would mourn with him until the Orb was finally recovered.

He increased his pace only to discover that the source of the laughter was Davim, the slave master, who continued to laugh obliviously in the midst of the barracks.  Zalas, the emperor of Nejim, stood close by, smirking rather than laughing as Davim called lustily at a young, gray-skinned girl, who carried a jug of water atop her shoulder.

Anoth’s scowl deepened.  Surely there were plenty of Naltite slaves who needed to be put in their place.  Why were these idiots wasting their time on a beshtat?  Unlike the Naltite imports, beshtats were native to Yalet and proved to be decent workers, as well as much easier to pacify than the Naltites because of their lack of ormé.  While there were still plenty of independent beshtat colonies outside of Nejim, the Anotites had captured more than enough of them to keep things running smoothly.  Most male beshtats worked alongside the Naltites to excavate for the Orb, even if they weren’t the most efficient, while their women catered to the carnal needs of male Anotites all throughout the empire.

Davim, who had managed to convince the beshtat girl to walk over to him, grabbed her arm.  After a brief struggle, he threw her to the ground.  Her water vessel shattered and the parched earth quickly drank up its contents.  Seeing their prey humiliated on the ground, Davim chortled once more and kicked the dust about her as Zalas grinned approvingly.

As the girl crawled to retrieve the pieces of the broken jug, Anoth finally made his presence known.  “Is this how you seek out the Orb when the hadirs aren’t watching you?”

Davim and Zalas spun around to face him, startled.  “Master Anoth!” Davim sputtered, staggering back a few steps.  “I was not expecting—the raids—I didn’t think you were back yet.”

“Fools,” Anoth spat.  “If you insist on abusing the natives, wait until spring.  We’ll need them to shoulder more of the labor when the Naltites start dying come winter.”  He kicked at the slave, who abandoned the shards of her vessel and fled.

While this slave had looked weak, most of the beshtats were already acclimated to the extreme temperatures at this altitude of Nejim.  Anoth was forced to corral the Naltite slaves into the deep mines at the end of fall to avoid them dying in large numbers during the winter, but the beshtats could largely remain out in the elements year-round, chiseling endlessly at the rock face in search of the Orb.

Anoth’s sneer turned upward.  “Unless your merrymaking is because you’ve recovered the Orb?”

Davim’s lip twitched, and he hesitated before saying, “No, not yet, Master Anoth.  We would have made more progress if those sneaky engstaxis hadn’t planted an explosive by the barracks last week.  The hadirs should just squeeze those bulbous red eyes of theirs from their skulls before sending them here.  Engstaxis cause nothing but trouble.  If I could just kill—”

“Excuses!  You have not broken the engstaxis sufficiently.”

“But the engstaxis are impossible to break,” Davim complained, his beady eyes widening.  “I’ve had them flogged and beaten, starved and even stripped of their coverings and made to sit in the sunlight until their skin bleeds.  They’d rather remain out in the sun and die than submit.  I don’t know where this particular engstaxi managed to gather the materials for his explosive, or how he assembled it without any privacy.  I moved all the engstaxis into the same housing so we can keep a better eye on them at all times.”

“You idiot!” Anoth shouted.  “You never put engstaxis together.  For hundreds of years we have kept all engstaxi slaves separated from each other, and you decide to change that now, without consulting me?  You might have them glyphed to blind them to primal matter, but they still have their alchemy!  Don’t you know they can extract the minerals from their own excrement?  When alone, they aren’t a danger, but as a group they could be gathering other components from the mines and building powder kegs under your pathetic, common-bred nose!”

To Davim’s side, Zalas let loose a snort and placed his hands upon his hips, shaking his head.  Davim, on the other hand, fidgeted slightly as he tried to work up a suitable excuse.

“Why are you just standing there?”  Anoth flung his hands down at his sides and bore down on Davim’s silence.  “The excavation of Mount Thayl must be carried out with delicate precision!  Why do you think I don’t just blow the whole damn thing up myself?  The Orb must be protected.  Verahi must be protected.  Any sort of explosion—even the smallest spark on that rock face—would risk everything I’ve worked for.  You will rectify this situation immediately!”

Davim, now several shades paler, bowed low.  “As you wish, Master Anoth!  Surely, the engstaxis won’t cause any more trouble.  They will be separated and punished, and should there be more of their black powder stockpiled, my men will sniff it out and deal with the offenders.  There can’t be much of it.”  Davim then straightened himself and smiled up at Anoth, displaying a row of crowded incisors, before he turned and strode away through the barracks.

“Were your idiot brother-in-law not born under a high house of ormé, I’d have killed him several times over by now,” Anoth growled to Zalas.

Zalas merely shrugged.  He did not seem terribly concerned about Davim’s well-being.  After all, Davim was married to Zalas’s sister, Roet, for the sole purpose of infusing ormé into the imperial bloodline, which was flourishing in numbers but dwindling in ormé.  It was common knowledge, however, that Roet was a whore, and it was already a miracle that she hadn’t borne any children yet, and even unlikelier that she would ever bear Davim’s.

“What are you doing outside of the palace?” Anoth demanded.  “There are documents to draft and advisors to coddle.”  Anoth noted that Zalas had traded his emperor’s robes for a simple brown caftan.  He must have snuck out of the palace to shirk his responsibilities, of which there were many.

Zalas’s expression was civil, but his slanted eyes betrayed his true thoughts.  “A man requires fresh air now and then.  I might ask the same thing of you, though.  Did you come here to check on the Orb or to harass me?”

Anoth refused to be baited.  “I arrived home last night to discover that most of the hadirs had left the city and that you were . . . indisposed.  I came here to see the progress that’s been made for myself.”

“You must excuse me for being indisposed.  My wife is still in childbed as of this morning.”

“Ah, your true motivation for fleeing the palace.”  Anoth tapped his fingers together slowly.  “Although I’m surprised you wouldn’t want to be there for the birth of your first non-bastard child.  That only leaves me wondering where the hadirs have gone.”

“A large nomadic tribe of beshtats was spotted near the border of Nejim.  Most of the hadirs went there to take care of them.  Easy pickings.”  Zalas’s lips morphed into a hard line, and a muscle in his jaw twitched.

“Is there a problem?”  Anoth smiled with amusement.

Zalas didn’t return the smile.  “Don’t try to feign ignorance.  You left me to be sat by Tovam.  I deserve more respect than that.”

Anoth folded his arms across his velvet coat.  “I saw you with that water slave.  If that is how you spend your spare time, I should leave you with a wet nurse as well.”

Zalas dragged an unwilling chuckle from his throat.  “Tovam seems to think that you’re the one in need a wet nurse, Anoth.  He was asking why you might be running off to Zaidna for weeks at a time without telling him.”

“He is a rather protective servant,” Anoth muttered.  He had been careful, but not careful enough about his occasional journeys to the other side of the parting.  It was just as well that Tovam was away on the hunt for new slaves.  When forced to stay holed up in the capital, he became restless and unpredictable, difficult for even Anoth to control.

“Now that I am apparently to report to Tovam regarding the affairs of the empire, instead of you, I think I deserve an explanation as well.  Have I failed in any of my duties?  Or are your trips to Zaidna to blame for this change in responsibilities?”  Egged on by Anoth’s silence, Zalas continued.  “Do you prefer the moist climate in Zaidna?  Or perhaps you like the seas.  I can’t imagine there are any other redeemable qualities about our ancestral home, especially when the hadirs bring the best women back here for us.”

Anoth scowled and turned to leave, but found Davim directly in his path, a dalanai slave in tow.

“The matter with the engstaxis has been rectified, Master Anoth,” Davim wheezed, taking an abbreviated bow.  “The engstaxis have been separated, and their sleeping quarters are being torn apart as we speak.”  Behind Davim, the dalanai slave girl didn’t look nearly as winded as he did, although her long legs gave her an advantage over his stout frame.  Like most dalanais, she had the willowy body of a dancer, but this one was exceptionally tall, dwarfing Anoth by at least a head.  Her scanty garments were practically sheer, and though her breasts were bound by the green wrap she wore, the details of her anatomy were still plain to see, including her quivering tail, which she tried to hide with a hand.

Davim tugged on the chain attached to the slave’s collar.  “In recompense for having displeased you earlier, I present to you my most favored bed slave, Kailei, for your personal use.”  He unceremoniously shoved the startled dalanai in front of Anoth for inspection.  It was no surprise to Anoth that Davim would have a bed slave or two on site.  Davim certainly used bed slaves for his personal pleasure, but he was also known to trade them to other nobles in exchange for goods or to curry favor.

Anoth caught the slave’s wrist and pulled her close.  It was not just Davim who flattered him with gifts.  Men constantly offered up their slaves, wives, and daughters to Anoth in return for his blessing, whereas women, both mortal and hadir, threw themselves at him with great frequency just for the challenge.  Long ago, these offerings of the flesh had been an amusing diversion for Anoth, but not so much anymore.  He had other interests now.

“You will find that she is of the finest quality,” Davim continued.  “She has good teeth and gums, is in excellent health, and is even a member of Naltite nobility, as is revealed by the crest she has tattooed there on her forehead.”  Davim gestured with a dry, bony finger at the small, purple diamond at the center of the girl’s creased brow.

Anoth held out his free hand, grasped the woman’s jaw, and pulled her chin down to get a better look at her face.  The dalanai was trembling, and tears had begun to streak her bloodless cheeks.  Most Naltite women wept or became physically ill when they saw him, terrified that the Dread God who was supposedly dead was not only alive, but could touch them with hands that could caress or punish at his whim.  He grinned at the thought of the betrayal they must have felt knowing that their little prophetesses, the Nassés, had lied to them, whispering legends of his ignominious death by Naltena’s bare hands.

The girl winced as Anoth turned her head this way and that.  Despite her blubbering, which had swelled her nose, Anoth had to admit that this slave was quite fine, at least one of the prettiest ones he’d seen in some time.  Her hair, which was tied up in a knot at the top of her head, was the color of a fire within a hearth, and her tear-filled eyes shone like emeralds.  But the more he looked into the girl’s eyes, the angrier he became that they lacked that particular spark that he desired.  The longer he stared at her body, the more her tall, angular figure offended him; the fire of her red hair waned in the shadow of the shining black tresses he coveted.

Anoth finally flicked the slave’s forehead crest, causing her to yelp.  “I wonder.  Are you a noblewoman or a commoner who married into nobility?” 

The dalanai could only answer Anoth with a small whimper.

“No matter.  Your family crest is that of a city magistrate, and whether you were born to him or married one of his bastard sons, you are still filth, dung beneath my heel.”

A disappointed frown sagged Davim’s lips as he pulled Kailei back to him to hold her close.  She shook uncontrollably, breathing hard, perhaps in shock that she had almost been handed over to the Dread God himself.  “I will bring out another slave for you then, Master Anoth, and have this one whipped for offending you.  My other slaves may not be noble, but you might find them more to your liking.”

“Any slave you could bring me would prove to be inadequate,” Anoth snapped, forcing the image of black hair from his mind.  “You can bring me all the captured lesser nobles you wish.  Were I to take a dalanai noble to my bed, only the highest among them would suffice.”