She gasped, putting a hand over her mouth.
Havec shrugged off her horror. “They killed everyone else, but me, they took. Made a beeline for the border, where they handed me over to Talak, who conveniently happened to be waiting.” Another sidelong look, and he added, “The bonding-broker. I thought it was all a dreadful, incomprehensible nightmare for about a day before I realized it was set up in advance. As soon as Talak had me, he got the hell away from Moritia and anyone who might know I had gone missing or recognize my face. I wasn’t kept in the loop, but I guess he sent out feelers for all the richest perverts he knew. Even in a place like this, it can’t be every day you see a foreign prince on the auction block.”
Qanath stopped in her tracks. When he turned around to give her a questioning look, she said, “Prince?”
“You didn’t see that coming? Do you not have fairy tales?”
“Huh?”
“Fairy tales? You know, stories for little people?”
She rolled her eyes as she went to join him. “If we didn’t have fairy tales, there wouldn’t be a word for it in our language, which we’re speaking.”
He grunted. “I suppose. I’d just never heard anything like in the years I was here. But Xar never did like to be reminded I was a kid back when I was a kid, so I guess that tells me nothing.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” she demanded, adding eagerly, “A kidnapped prince.”
“Oh, I’ve thought more than a few times how it all sounds like a story. The just king dies too young and his wicked brother sees his chance to take the throne.”
“You have an evil uncle?”
“With a son my age, you should note. We were always the best of friends, me and Hemell, he must have been broken up when I disappeared.”
“Really?”
He shot her a startled look, and she braced for his derision; nothing provoked sarcastic people like failing to pick up on their jokes, it was the conversational equivalent of dripping blood in shark-infested waters. It surprised her when, after a moment of complicated silence, he said simply, “No.”
“Does that mean you’re the rightful king?”
He scratched at his butchered hair, lips drawing back uneasily to reveal his teeth. “One thing at a time, okay? The first order of business is to find out if my mother survived. Then I’ll finally gut my uncle and,” he shrugged broadly, “we’ll see where it goes from there.”
***
They made their way that day through terrain that was staggering in its tameness, lacking in any real hills, enlivened only by myriad birds and the occasional herd of antelope. They never encountered a copse of trees that could be described even generously as woodland. The scattered weathered monuments and perfectly-engineered bridges carrying their empty highway across the smallest of streams contributed to the foreignness of the environment. Havec found it fascinating.
His homeland was mountainous and heavily forested, and if he couldn’t always recall what it had felt like, he had a great trove of images he carried in his mind. This was his first real chance to see the Empire and contrast it to what he knew; he made the journey south mostly locked in a trunk, and when they did let him out to eat and crap, he was too busy shouting at his captors and trying to bite them to take in the scenery.
He was astonished by just how empty it was. The impression was helped along by the flatness of the terrain and the lack of trees, giving every panorama a sense of breathtaking expansiveness. It wasn’t just the land, though: it was the lack of people. He had understood that Tabbaqera was massive, not only in geographic scope, but in population. There were supposed to be millions of people in this country, in cities so vast they stretched as far as the eye could see.
He wanted to ask his companion about that but hesitated. She was already too keenly aware of his ignorance. He wasn’t sure how she had figured it out in a span of hours, while Havec himself was only beginning to see, but she certainly seemed to know that everything he knew about the world, he had learned by the age of fifteen.
As a child, he had the finest tutors available in his homeland, but he had done nothing in the last six years but hone his new martial skills and hate the man who taught them to him. In all that time, he had looked upon his hatred for his master as a source of motivation; only now did he realize how totally it had distracted him. He thumbed through the few facts he knew while he walked, acutely aware of how unhelpful they were.
Tabbaqera’s government was a convoluted tangle, even if he couldn’t remember most of the details. There was the Scolate, the military, and it enforced the laws. The Illiumate decided what the laws were, and the Illiumate was a monster with a hundred heads, made up of multiple bodies of representatives. Then there was the Hakam, and the Hakam didn’t do anything in its own right; it got to decide what the Illiumate and Scolate were allowed to do.
In Moritia, in contrast, there was his father. His father had told him a wise ruler heeded the advice of his councilors and listened to the concerns of his people, but at the end of the day, the decisions were his. Although there had been a time when Havec believed the responsibility would one day fall to him, he couldn’t say he had an opinion on this. Maybe their way was more practical for tiny newborn countries without a lot of cash, and this mind-bending bureaucracy was a luxury suited to civilizations with an almost limitless supply of resources and manpower. Maybe it was the natural result of the Empire’s age, the way an old tree had a million rings.
Or maybe it just didn’t make sense to him because he had become very stupid in the last six years. He glanced at his companion, wishing again that he could ask her opinion. Her mother was one of their politicians, she wanted to join their ranks. She must have valuable insights into the system.
He couldn’t, though. Having told her to go away and been ignored, she was entirely responsible for the situation. He was just passively reaping the rewards. The moment he started asking her questions, he admitted that he needed help. It was a tacit acceptance of a bargain he wasn’t going to make. Having only just begun to grasp how completely he’d been tricked, he wasn’t about to sign up for the same racket again.
It was at this point that he took in what he had been seeing with his frequent sidelong looks. The girl was tight around the eyes, the muscles along her jaw flexed. Her narrow nostrils flared with every breath, sucking wind. Havec was in even more pain than he had been yesterday, and it looked as though the same was true of her.
Glancing at the sky, he said, “It’s probably time to stop for lunch, what do you say?”
She let out a gasp of relief, but said quite casually, “If you want.”
“I guess we should look for a spot,” he began, but he noticed his companion’s eyes were fixed behind him, expression greedy. When he followed her gaze, he saw the broken top of an ancient structure peeking out around a bend in the trail off to their right. They came around the turn a moment later and the building was revealed, a tumble-down old tower of pale stone standing halfway up a shallow rise. It would be nonsensical to get this close to something so interesting and not investigate.
They cut off the road into the grass and began to climb, both of them stifling groans. The closer they got to the tower, the more it shrank, until they found themselves standing at the foot of a two-story ruin without a door. The lower story was covered in a mat of clematis dense as a forester’s beard, heavy with dark purple flowers at this time of year. What could be seen of the structure was curious, a mixture of vertical metal ribs and thin, horizontal slabs of stone that made it resemble a basket. It wasn’t straight-sided, but round and slightly conical, broader at the bottom than the top. The door was triangular, and he frowned at it as he wondered what hallucinogen the architect had been on when they dreamed that up.
“Havec! You have to see this!”
The girl had wandered in through that impractical doorway, and he followed her inside. Within, he found the building lit by more than a thin beam of light peeping through the westward-facing door: the girl had conjured a light of her own with which to explore. He was terribly disappointed when he saw this. He wanted badly to watch her perform sorcery. It wasn’t something his people had figured out how to do and the few items Xar owned were simple household tools. The actual sorcery had been performed elsewhere at an earlier date and he could only look at the results.
“Look at this,” she continued, voice hushed. She grabbed his sleeve, pulling him closer. The light was in her other hand; it looked like a lump of crystal, and he couldn’t tell if she had found it lying on the floor or if it was some special accoutrement of the craft that she carried with her. She held it close to the wall, illuminating a relief of curved or straight-edged shadows. It was, he decided, writing, in an alphabet he’d never seen before.
“I think it’s Senotine,” she added softly, her voice carrying the intimation that this was meaningful.
Briefly, he contemplated bluffing, but he couldn’t think how. “Which is?”
“A language. Very old. The first tongue.” The moment she had said this, she backtracked, making a noise of doubt. “One of the first tongues. We’re so many people at this point, I think probably there are at least four languages that could make the claim.”
“Which is right?”
“Well that depends on where you are, doesn’t it?”
“How do you mean?”
