Unfortunately for Gharek, she’d just set him up to fail. The only question was how long he could stave off the foregone conclusion of his execution with false promises and lies. “My understanding is the dragas were hunted to extinction in the Empire long ago, though I know your spies to be skilled in uncovering information. Have they found one hiding in your territories?”
Her thin smile warned him he trod dangerously close to the bootlicking she found so annoying and which had gotten more than one courtier’s head removed from his shoulders. “Not yet, but I expect we will soon.” The sweet chime of her laughter at his raised eyebrows didn’t fool Gharek. She sounded the same when she laughed at someone’s disemboweling. “And you’re right about my spies. I hire the best, and I send them even farther afield than I send you on occasion.” She glanced at the book, the flare of some emotion enlivening her empty blue eyes for just a moment before dying. “The Empire might not have dragas, but some of the kingdoms across the Raglun Sea do. They hide there in plain sight, disguised as humans most of the time, but dragas will be dragas, and some people have witnessed them transform and fly, raid farms to take cattle and sheep or steal treasure.”
He could believe that, though he wondered just how truthful these witnesses were and how much was simply storytelling twaddle more entertaining than accurate. Surely the empress’s spies didn’t believe every font of nonsense that reached their ears? Surely the empress didn’t believe everything her spies told her.
Something in his expression must have given away his doubt, for Dalvila’s gaze once more turned serpentine. “You believe me a fool, Gharek?”
The fact that his stomach made no sound as it plummeted to the floor at her words surprised him, but not enough to make him speechless. “Not at all, Your Greatness,” he replied smoothly. “If you say there are dragas in the kingdoms across the Raglun Sea, I believe you. Wholeheartedly. I need only to understand what you wish for me to do with this information.”
If Dalvila told him the moon was blue and covered in fish scales, Gharek would find a way to believe that, too. His life depended on it. His daughter’s life depended on it.
Satisfied with his answer, she settled back in her lofty chair once more. “Draga bones, at least fake ones, show up in the markets as regularly as lice infestations. I think even one of my handmaidens had a set of teeth made for her husband from bits of draga bone. But it’s dead bone, of no real value except to a collector.” Her sublime features took on a demonic avarice that almost made Gharek take a step back. “I have a spy planted in the Maesor market, one who’s heard rumors that someone has arrived on our shores in possession of a mother-bond to sell. A real mother-bond with the glow mark of a living offspring still on it.” The old draga tales had mostly faded over time, with the exception of the tale of the Sun Maiden, and even that one expounded more on the exploits of the hero Kansi Yuv than on the draga he fought and slew. Dalvila was right that draga bones were popular trade items, even the fake ones, but the Maesor market wasn’t an average market, and nothing sold there was fake, nor was it cheap. He’d never heard of a mother-bond, but if someone believed they could sell it on the Maesor, it was both highly valuable and highly outlawed in the Empire.
Dalvila smiled her venomous smile. “I forget sometimes that you come from gutter-rat stock instead of nobility so probably never had access to the libraries.” Gharek didn’t flinch at her offhand insult. She spoke the truth. He’d earned his current place in Empire society; he hadn’t been born to it. “Dragas,” she said, “are creatures of magic. Not only were they said to have wielded sorcery; it was in their very nature. Woven into their veins, their blood, and their bones. A mother-bond was a draga offspring’s birthright bequeathed to it by its dam. The dam bit off a piece of her body, bespelled it, and used it to force her hatchling into the guise of a human child to protect it from being hunted and killed while it matured. Once it reached adulthood, it used the mother-bond to reclaim its true state and all the power that belongs to a draga, including the sorcery that makes its blood so valuable.”
“The long life and wound healing you mentioned,” he said. Gharek dared not refer directly to Dalvila’s own maiming injury or even glance at it. To do so courted death.
The empress’s features froze, and his heartbeat froze with it. “Thanks to those Savatar mongrels, I don’t even have Golnar’s bones to display any longer. I want that mother-bond, and I want the draga it belongs to.” Rage seethed in her voice, still burning as hot as the old capital where she’d lost her husband, her arm, and her dignity.
Kraelag, once the Empire’s capital and crown jewel, still burned in places, months after the steppe savages laid siege to its gates and summoned their equally savage goddess to destroy it with holy fire. Even the famous bones of the draga Golnar hadn’t withstood the tidal wave of flame that reduced the capital to charred rubble and scattered heaps of molten rock and metal. The emperor had died while his empress had survived, though not unscathed. A Savatar archer, under the command of a Savatar general who had once been the Empire’s most famous slave gladiator, had fired an arrow from an impossible distance and struck the empress. Not a kill shot, at least not an immediate one.
Dalvila had barely survived. The wound to her shoulder had poisoned, turning putrid. Each lancing performed by the court leeches only made it worse. As the infection spread and the empress sickened, her closest advisers turned to other measures.
All within the summer palace and half of Domora, the Empire’s new capital, heard Dalvila’s shrieks as her surgeons sawed off the rotting limb and cauterized the mutilated flesh and exposed bone left behind. In the days that followed, court nobles who had escaped the destruction of Kraelag maneuvered for positions of power while the empress hovered at death’s threshold.
To the relief of some and the disappointment of many more, Dalvila survived. Her surgeons’ brutal actions had saved her, and she repaid their efforts in kind. Gharek had witnessed that repayment firsthand. Dalvila had ordered the three men brought before her, all in a show of pomp and praise. Still pale and drawn, she thanked each man with flowery plaudits uttered in the sweetest voice, before ordering them bound and forced to their knees before her.
The court held its collective breath, no one daring to come to the surgeons’ defense as they questioned the reason for their punishment and begged for mercy. The empress only smiled.
Sometimes Gharek still dreamed of her reply, syrupy and completely devoid of any humanity, any compassion.
“You enjoyed the sound of my agony. Now I will enjoy the sound of yours.”
The court torturers in her employ knew how to entertain the cruel and prolong the victims’ suffering. They cut off the surgeons’ hands first, then their forearms to the elbow, and finally the rest of their arms at the shoulder. And they didn’t stop with one arm. The three men lost both arms, their screams echoing throughout the receiving chamber over and over until they could only squeak their agony.