Tigana by Guy Kay (novel24 txt) 📕

folds of his elephantine white robe. The sun shining through the arch of a window behind him glinted distractingly from his bald head.

‘I do not recall that stone among our treasures,’ he murmured in his high, disconcerting voice. It was a voice so utterly inconsequential that it might lead one to underestimate the speaker. Which, as a good many people had discovered over the years, was a serious, sometimes a mortal mistake.

‘It isn’t,’ Dianora replied cheerfully. ‘Though after we return this afternoon may I ask you to guard it in my name among the other treasures?’

Scelto’s suggestion, that. Vencel could be corrupt and venal about a great many things, but not when it came to the formal aspects of his office. He was too clever for that. Again, a truth some had paid the ultimate price to discover.

He nodded benignly now. ‘It seems a very fine stone from this distance.’ Obediently, Dianora stepped nearer and inclined her head graciously to let him see it more clearly. The scent of tainflowers that he always wore after winter’s end enveloped her. It was too sweet, but not unpleasant.

She had feared Vencel once—a fear mixed of physical repulsion at his grossness and rumours of the things he liked to do with the younger castrates and some of the women who were in the saishan for purely political reasons, with no hope of ever seeing the outside world or the west wing of the palace and Brandin’s chambers. Long ago though she and the saishan head had reached their understanding. Solores had the same unspoken pact with Vencel, and out of the delicate balance achieved thereby the three of them controlled, as best they could, their enclosed, over-intense, incense-laden world of idle, frustrated women, and half-men.

With a surprisingly delicate finger Vencel touched the gem on her brow. He smiled. ‘A good stone,’ he said again, this time in judgement. His breath was fragrant. ‘I must talk to Scelto about it. I know about such things, you see. Vairstones come from the north, you see. From my own land. They are mined in Khardhun. For years and years I used to play with them as trinkets, a monarch’s toys. In the days when I was more than I am now. For as you know, I have been a King in Khardhun.’

Dianora nodded gravely. For this too was a part of the unspoken terms of her relationship with Vencel. That however many times he might speak this wild fabrication of a lie—and he said it many times a day, in one variant or another—she was to nod knowingly, reflectively, as if pondering the message hidden in the grandeur of his fall.

Only in her rooms alone with Scelto could she give way to fits of girlish giggling at the very thought of the vasty saishan head being more than he was now, or at the subversive, deadly imitation Scelto could give of Vencel’s speech and gestures.

‘You do that wonderfully,’ she might say innocently, as Scelto dressed her hair, or polished her curved slippers till they shone.

‘It is a thing I know about, you see,’ he would reply if certain they were alone, his voice pitched high above its normal range. He would gesticulate slowly, expansively. ‘For as you are aware, I have been a King in Khardhun.’

She would laugh like a little girl who knew just how naughty she was being, the more out of control because of that very fact.

She had asked Brandin about it once. His Khardhun campaign had been only a marginal success, she learned. He was frank with her about such things by then. There was real magic in Khardhun, in that hot northern land across the sea, beyond the coastal villages and the desert wastes. A magic far greater than anything in the Peninsula of the Palm and equal to the sorcery of Ygrath.

Brandin had taken one city and established a tenuous control over some lands that lay on the fringes of the great desert stretching north. There had been losses though, serious losses, she gathered. The Khardhu had long been celebrated for their skill in battle, nor was this unknown in the Palm: many of them had served as well-paid mercenaries in the warring provinces before the Tyrants had come and made all such feuding irrelevant.

Vencel had been a herald captured late in the campaign, Brandin told her. He’d already been unmanned: a thing they did to messengers in the north, for no reason Brandin had understood. It had been manifestly evident where the castrate belonged when brought back to Ygrath. He had already, Brandin confirmed, been enormous.

Dianora straightened as Vencel withdrew his finger from the red gleam of the vairstone.

‘Will you escort us down?’ she asked. A ritual.

‘I think not,’ he said judiciously, as if actually giving thought to the matter. ‘Perhaps Scelto and Hala can manage that office between them. I have some matters that need my attention here this afternoon, you see.’

‘I understand.’ Dianora glanced over at Solores and each of them raised a spread palm in respectful salute. In fact, Vencel hadn’t left the saishan wing in at least five years. Even when he toured the rooms on this floor it was on a cleverly contrived rolling platform of cushions. Dianora could not remember the last time she’d actually seen him stand upright. Scelto and Solores’s Hala attended to virtually all the formal out-of-saishan duties. Vencel believed in delegating.

They went down the stairway that led out from the saishan to the world. One flight below they accepted the scrutiny—respectful but careful—of the two guards posted outside the heavy bronze doors that barred access to and from the level where the women were. Dianora responded to their cautious glances with a smile. One of them returned it shyly. The guards were changed often; she didn’t know either of these two, but a smile was a start at bonding and a friend never hurt.

Scelto and Hala, dressed unobtrusively in brown, led the four women out of the saishan wing