The entire room reeked from the tide of blood mingled with vomit that spilled across the marble floor. The odor of burned flesh joined the stench as the torturers cauterized the wounds, dealing out even more torment to the poor wretches.
Once Dalvila had her fill of their suffering, she ordered the men removed from the room and released her captive courtiers to go about their business. Gharek had strode away from the shaking, gagging crowd filing out the doors, wondering what monstrous creature had birthed the empress from its grotesque womb, because it surely wasn’t a human woman.
If the stories about the draga blood’s benefits were true, and they actually managed to get their hands on and kill a draga, then the Empire faced a long and brutal future under Dalvila’s reign. Gharek briefly pondered the logistics of taking his daughter and fleeing the Empire for a ship that sailed to those faraway kingdoms where dragas might rule the skies but this twisted creature held no sway over the land. He shoved the thought aside. Dalvila’s quest for draga blood revived a dead hope inside him. If draga blood gave Dalvila her arm back, could it not also help his daughter?
“Do you know where the mother-bond is now so I can use it to lure this draga?”
She growled low in her throat. “No, unfortunately. My spies tracked two mercenaries arriving from Winosia who first boasted about what they had; then they went to ground somewhere near a market that sprang up around one of my garrisons.” Her blue eyes burned with a cold fire. “It’s possible they thought it too dangerous to keep and pawned it for next to nothing. That market is full of free trader bands. My spies thought it might be easy to find the mother-bond, or even the mercenaries themselves, among the free trader camps, but so far, nothing.” Gharek wasn’t surprised by the failure to glean information. Free traders were notoriously closemouthed outside their own groups, an insular people who offered hospitality willingly enough but very little information. And it was a sure bet that if a free trader in possession of this mother-bond knew about the Maesor and how to get to it, he also knew not to share his real name with anyone interested in buying what he was offering to sell.
“An item like that won’t sell in the regular marketplace, not even under the table and not for the price whoever has it will want for it. It’s a guarantee they’ll try to get into the Maesor to sell it. If they do, I can track them down, coax them to give up the mother-bond, and find a way to lure this draga to Domora,” he told her. He wasn’t one of her spies. Their value depended on their anonymity. Everyone knew Gharek as the empress’s cat’s-paw and feared him because of it.
“You won’t have to lure it,” Dalvila assured him. “The mother-bond is a lodestone for the offspring, one it’s compelled to find if it wants to live. Find the mother-bond, and you’ll have the draga in your lap soon enough.”
“And once we do?” Gharek had faced and defeated numerous dangerous adversaries in his role as the empress’s chief henchman. This would be a first of its kind, and an unknown that made him uneasy.
“We kill it and butcher it. I’ll have the blood I need to heal and live long and a brand-new draga skeleton to replace the one I lost in Kraelag.”
Either she’d purposefully misunderstood his question or assumed that such a massacre would be an easy thing to accomplish without much thought or planning. He dared not push for more information. Dalvila expected him to figure out the logistics of many of the tasks she wanted him to accomplish without much guidance from her. This was just another, albeit much more difficult, task.
He bowed. “As you wish, Your Greatness. I’ll begin my search for this mother-bond immediately and report back to you as soon as I have something useful.”
She shrugged a lopsided shrug. “Useful will be the mother-bond, Gharek.” A darkness flitted through her eyes, spun up from the abyss where her soul should have been. Gharek stiffened. “How is your daughter? What is her name again?”
“Estred,” he said, forcing the name through stiff lips.
He’d expected it, waited for it, and still her questions ripped the breath out of his chest. She twisted the knife, reminding him that for all his menace and sinister reputation, he had one vulnerability that made him as powerless and as weak as the lowliest street beggar.
“That’s right,” she nearly purred. “Estred. Who knew I might one day have something in common with a gutter rat’s spawn?” The faint smirk hovering around her mouth disappeared, replaced by a scowl that nearly made her attending slave faint in terror. “I don’t like the comparison, Gharek,” she said in a voice that could have frosted the south-facing windows. “Bring me that mother-bond and the draga it belongs to. Don’t fail me. If you do, it won’t be just me you fail, and not only you who pays the price for it.”
At her gesture of dismissal, Gharek bowed once more before strolling out of the throne room as if he didn’t have a care in the world. Outside, the summer sun blazed down on his head. He felt none of it, only the cold grip of terror mixed with fury. Dalvila had given him a task and a warning. If he had to tear down all of Domora stone by stone, he’d find the free trader and the mysterious mother-bond, haul the draga by its tail back to the throne room single-handedly, and cheerfully butcher the thing himself in front of the empress. There would be no failure.
CHAPTER FOUR
The woman with the rain-cloud eyes was prettier in person than in the vision the lightning had shown to Malachus. She possessed a soft, round face framed by wisps of curly brown hair that had escaped her braid, and long dark lashes that almost hid the flash of alarm in her gaze as it swept over him.
He hadn’t expected to find her this soon and certainly not by chance. Malachus had rubbed his eyes just to make sure he wasn’t imagining things when he first spotted her standing in front of a fruit stall purchasing a bag of plums. He’d followed her after that, keeping enough distance away that she didn’t sense his scrutiny.
There was a sense of purpose about her. The people who eddied around her meandered from one stall to another as if carried by the thinning river of humanity surrounding them. She, on the other hand, didn’t waste time browsing, stopping at certain stalls only long enough to ask the vendors a question, inspect an item, then moving on without lingering. He might not have caught up with her had she not stopped long enough to buy the fruit.
She’d nimbly avoided the stream of spittle a man dressed in rich robes spat at her as he passed, neither pausing to confront him nor speeding up to avoid another possible spraying. And while she exhibited no anger at the act, Malachus’s own temper flared at the unprovoked harassment.
He approached her as she stepped away from one of the market’s higher-end stalls, one that sold blank journals bound in embossed leather and filled with lower-quality parchment instead of vellum. Her slender hand had stroked the book she held under the merchant’s hawkish gaze before she put it down as if it were made of finely spun glass.