Nicci nodded. “I will come when I can, then.”
The old Sister ambled on down the hall, deep in thought, already thinking about the lesson. Nicci didn’t know if she would live to take the lesson.
After she had watched the old Sister vanish around the corner, Nicci entered a quiet room lit by myriad candles and lamps. The high ceiling was edged with a painted leaf-and-acorn design. Plush couches and chairs upholstered in muted browns were set about on thick carpets of rich yellows, oranges, and reds, making them look like a forest floor in the autumn. Heavy drapes had been pulled closed across an expanse of windows. Two Sisters sitting on a couch leaped to their feet.
“Sister Nicci!” one virtually shouted in relief.
The other ran to the double doors at the other side of the room and opened one without knocking, apparently by instruction. She stuck her head into the room beyond to speak in a low voice Nicci couldn’t hear.
The Sister leaped back when Jagang, in the inner room, roared, “Get out! All of you! Everyone else out!”
Two more young Sisters, no doubt personal attendants to the emperor, burst out of the room. Nicci had to step out of the way as all four gifted women made for the doorway leading out of the apartment. A young man Nicci hadn’t noticed in the corner joined the women. None even glanced in Nicci’s direction as they rushed to do as they were ordered. The first lesson you learned as a slave to Jagang was that when he told you to do something, he meant you to do it right now. Little provoked him more than delay.
At the door to the inner room, a woman Nicci didn’t recognize ran out, following close on the heels of the others. She was young and beautiful, with dark hair and eyes, probably a captive picked up somewhere along the long march, and no doubt used for Jagang’s amusement. Her eyes reflected a world gone mad for her.
Such were the unavoidable costs if the world was to be brought to a state of order. Great leaders, by their very nature, came with shortcomings in character, which they themselves viewed as mere peccadilloes. The far-ranging benefits Jagang would bring to the poor suffering masses of humanity far outweighed his crass acts of personal gratification and the relatively petty havoc he wrought. Nicci was often the object of his transgressions. It was a price worth paying for the help that would eventually accrue to the helpless; that was the only matter that could be considered.
The outer door closed and the apartment was finally empty of everyone but Nicci and the emperor. She stood erect, head held high, arms at her sides, relishing the quiet of the place. The splendor meant little to her, but quiet was a luxury she had come to appreciate, even if it was selfish. In the tents there was always the noise of the army pressed close around. Here, it was quiet. She glanced around the spacious and elaborately decorated outer room, contemplating the idea that Jagang would have acquired the taste for such places. Perhaps he, too, simply wanted quiet.
She turned back to the inner room. He was just inside, waiting, watching her, a muscled mass of fury coiled in rage.
She strode directly up to him. “You wished to see me, Excellency?”
Nicci felt a stunning pain as the back of his beefy hand whipped across her face. The blow spun her around. Her knees hit the floor. He yanked her to her feet by her hair. The second time, she clouted the wall before crashing to the floor again. Stupefying pain throbbed through her face. When she had her bearings, she got her legs under her and stood before him again. The third time, she took a freestanding candelabrum down with her. Candles tumbled and rolled across the floor. A long wisp of sheer curtain she had snatched as she grabbed for support ripped away and drifted down over her as she and an upturned table slammed to the floor. Glass shattered. Metal clattered as small items bounded away.
She was dizzy and stunned, her vision faltering. Her eyes felt as if they might have burst, her jaw as if it had been shattered, her neck as if the muscles had ripped. Nicci lay sprawled on the floor, savoring the strident waves of pain, wallowing in the rare sensation of feeling.
She saw blood splattered across the light fringe of the carpet beneath her and across the warm glow of wooden flooring. She heard Jagang yelling something at her, but she couldn’t make out the words over the ringing in her ears. With a shaky arm, she pushed herself up onto her hip. Blood warmed her fingers when she touched them to her mouth. She relished the hurt. It had been so long since she had felt anything, except for that too brief moment with the Mord-Sith. This was a glorious wash of agony.
Jagang’s brutality was able to reach down into the abyss, not only because of the cruelty itself, but because she knew she need not suffer it. He, too, knew that she was there by her choice, not his. That only intensified his anger, and thus, her sensations.
His rage seemed lethal. She merely noted the fact that she very probably wouldn’t leave the room alive. She would probably not get to learn Sister Lidmila’s spells. Nicci simply waited to discover what fate had already decided for her.
The room’s spinning finally slowed enough for her to once more make it to her feet. She pulled herself up straight before the silent brawny form of Emperor Jagang. His shaved head reflected points of light from some of the lamps. His only facial hair was a two-inch braid of mustache growing above each corner of his mouth, and another in the center under his lower lip. The gold ring through his left nostril and its thin gold chain running to another ring in his left ear glimmered in the mellow lamplight. Except for a heavy ring on each finger, he was without the plundered assortment of royal chains and jewels he usually wore around his neck. The rings glistened with her blood.
He was bare-chested, but unlike his head, his chest was covered in coarse hair. His muscles bulged, their tendons standing out as he flexed his fists. He had the neck of a bull, and his temperament was worse.
Nicci, half a head shy of his height, stood before him, waiting, looking into the eyes she used to see in her nightmares. They were a murky gray, without whites, and clouded over with sullen, dusky shapes that stole across a surface of inky obscurity. Even though they had no evident iris and pupil—nothing but seeming dark voids where a normal person had eyes—she never had any doubt whatsoever as to when he was looking at her.
They were the eyes of a dream walker. A dream walker denied access to her mind. Now, she understood why.
“Well?” He growled. He threw up his hands. “Cry! Yell! Scream! Beg! Argue—make excuses! Don’t just stand there!”
Nicci swallowed back the sharp taste of blood as she gazed placidly into his scarlet glare.
“Please be specific, Excellency, as to which one you would prefer, how long I should carry on, and if I should end it of my own accord, or wait for you to beat me into unconsciousness.”
He lunged at her with a howl of fury. He seized her throat in his massive fist to hold her as he struck her. Her knees buckled, but he held her up until she was able to steady herself.
He released her throat with a shove. “I want to know why you did that to Kadar!”
She offered only a bloody smile to his anger.
He wrenched her arm behind her back and pulled her hard against him. “Why would you do such a thing! Why?”
The dea
dly dance with Jagang had begun. She dimly wondered again if this time she would lose her life.
Jagang had killed a number of the Sisters who had displeased him. Nicci’s safety with him—such as it was—lay in her very indifference to her safety. Her utter disinterest in her own life fascinated Jagang because he knew it was sincere.
“Sometimes, you’re a fool,” she said with true contempt, “too arrogant to see what is in front of your nose.”
He twisted her arm until she thought it surely would snap. His panting breath was warm on her throbbing cheek. “I’ve killed people for saying much less than that.”
She mocked him through the pain. “Do you intend to bore me to death, then? If you want to kill me, seize me by the throat and strangle me, or slash me to a bloody mess so that I will bleed to death at your feet—don’t think you can suffocate me with the sheer weight of your monotonous threats. If you wish to kill me, then be a man and do so! Or else shut your mouth.”
The mistake most people made with Jagang was to believe, because of his capacity for such profound brutality, that he was an ignorant, dumb brute. He was not. He was one of the most intelligent men Nicci had ever met. Brutality was but his cloak. As an outgrowth of his access to the thoughts of so many different people’s minds, he was directly exposed to their knowledge, wisdom, and ideas; such exposure augmented his intellect. He also knew what people most feared. If anything about him frightened her, it was not his brutality, but his intelligence, for she knew that intelligence could be a bottomless well of truly inventive cruelty.
“Why did you kill him, Nicci?” he asked again, his voice losing some of its fire.
In her mind, like a protective stone wall, was the thought of Richard. He had to see it in her eyes. Part of Jagang’s rage, she knew, was at his own impotence at penetrating her mind, of possessing her as he could so many others. Her knowing smirk taunted him with what he could not have.