Prisoner of Fate (42 page)

Movement among the closer buildings caught his attention and he watched three rabbits hop across a street.
I will catch a male and female and take them with us back to Port of Joy
, he decided. The rabbit hunters had given them a brace to cook and eat last night and he enjoyed the savoury flavour so much that he saw the potential in raising and selling them to the Port of Joy markets. Besides, his men enjoyed the sport of shooting them, so he could see that they would be a source of fun and shooting practice. His main concern was how effectively they would breed in a new environment. It would be a shame to waste such an opportunity.

He glanced at the two personal guards who were waiting patiently for him to decide where he was going next. He planned to search the city for at least eight days and probably wait another five in case the people he was hunting were still on their way. If there was no luck after that, he would order the return journey to commence, perhaps by zigzagging across the Ashuak countryside in the hope that they might spot the fugitives from the air. With any luck, this long-winded mission might enable him to be absent from the Kerwyn kingdom during the hottest season and that would be a bonus. He squinted as he gazed across the ruins towards the thin, eroded spires of what must have been a huge temple. He knew nothing of this old culture.
Were they followers of Jarudha
? he wondered. Then he motioned to the guards and headed down the slope towards the heart of the abandoned Ashuak capital.

S
eer Prayer stood on a small dais with his acolytes outside the temple in the Southern Quarter, surrounded by a crowd of the Jarudhan faithful. The people were swaying and laughing under the influence of euphoria that the acolytes had freely distributed, while they watched soldiers ransack taverns and brothels along the street. The business owners foolish enough to protest were savagely beaten, arrested and dragged away. Prostitutes were hurled into the street and forced to don undyed hessian smocks, before their heads were publicly shaved to the wild amusement of the drug-crazed onlookers.

‘This is how we punish the filthy sinners who flout Jarudha’s teachings!’ Prayer bellowed, his face beaming joyfully. ‘The time for repentance is upon us! Paradise is coming! Paradise is coming! Cleanse the city and yourselves! Purge the sinners and the faithless from your midst! Purify the earth! Jarudha is among us! All praise Jarudha!’

The soldiers hauled every bottle, jar and keg of alcohol they could find into the street and smashed them, pouring the newly forbidden alcohol into the earth. Then they ritualistically set fire to each targeted
building, while Prayer continued his diatribe against sin and sinners, crying, ‘Purify the earth! Cleanse the unholy with fire! Do not let the sins of infidelity and lechery, driven by these infected women who flaunt their skin to tempt men, be among us! Be clean, my precious people! Be clean and be blessed!’

Taunted, bruised, beaten, terrified and humiliated, the girls and women driven from the brothels ran for their lives through the mad crowd, while taverners and innkeepers dropped to their knees and begged for mercy.

‘Paradise is coming!’ Prayer screamed above the chaos and violence, encouraging the crowd to take up his puritanical cry.

King Shadow stood beside His Eminence, Seer Scripture, on the parapet of the palace wall, the rising west wind ruffling his dark hair. Under the Seers’ guidance and Warlord Fist’s authority, his soldiers were undertaking the cleansing operation that he’d promised to institute after his coronation and he was admiring his initial handiwork as smoke rose from the Quarters. ‘I’m getting cold,’ Seer Scripture muttered.

‘I like the synchronicity,’ Shadow replied, without shifting his eyes from the city. ‘An unexpected storm is coming to cleanse the kingdom.’

‘There will be resisters,’ Scripture warned.

‘Of course,’ Shadow agreed, turning to the Seer, ‘and they will be ruthlessly punished. Jarudha is a vengeful god when the unholy dare to oppose His will. Any resistance will be brief.’

‘There will be a lot of work to establish the New Order,’ Scripture reminded him. ‘There are the laws of your predecessors to revoke and the new ones to introduce. There will be schools to create to teach the young how to follow the teachings of Jarudha and women will have to learn their correct role.’

‘I’m sure you and your colleagues will handle that,’ Shadow said. ‘I will provide the support of the army to ensure that those who are not convinced the New Order is for a better world will quickly change their minds.’

‘And the matter of the euphoria supplies?’

Shadow grinned. ‘Resolved, Your Eminence. You will have full and free access to the crops grown on the Fallen Star islands. The Joker has decided to relinquish her involvement in business matters. It seems she has generously donated her euphoria crops to Jarudha’s Paradise.’

‘You have been very thorough, Your Highness,’ Scripture replied, using Shadow’s formal title. ‘I admit that I did underestimate you at times.’

Shadow smiled and bowed his head briefly. ‘The past is the past, Your Eminence. Now we can create the future.’

‘In Jarudha’s name,’ Scripture added and made the holy circle in the direction of the burning city.

Back and shoulders screaming with agony, his arm muscles bulging and filling with lactic acid, Hunter closed his mind to the pain and heaved on the oars, the little fishing skiff bobbing and bucking over the choppy waves. An unseasonal storm was building on the horizon and he would be hard-pressed to beat it to safety if he dared to ease up. The malicious westerly wind slashed the stinging salt spray across his face and saturated his hair and clothes, but he gritted his teeth and pulled with dogged rhythm, steadily crossing the harbour mouth towards the southern bluff. The life of his semiconscious passenger, wrapped in a tarpaulin and rocking in the sludge in the bottom of the skiff, depended on his determination.

He wanted to intervene when the soldiers came to arrest Mrs Merchant, but she refused him the right to
defend her. ‘They’ve come for me,’ she said as the soldiers thumped on her front door and demanded that she go with them, ‘not you.’ She pulled Hunter into her lounge, away from Lin and Apple and Cook who were frantically trying to collect important documents and possessions. ‘They don’t know about him,’ she whispered quickly. ‘That’s why you have to take him away from here, take him somewhere the king and the Seers won’t go looking. His life is in your hands. I can’t help him anymore.’ He protested, but she pleaded with him to do her bidding. ‘You can’t save me, Hunter, but you can save yourself and him. Go. I’m ordering you to go. If you are as faithful to me as you say, then you’ll do what Shadow least expects. Save Inheritor.’

Confused as to why the Joker would sacrifice herself and all that she owned for a man she barely knew, he reluctantly left her to her fate. He found the overturned old skiff pulled up inside the smugglers’ cave, but cursed when he discovered the skiff’s sail was rotted. He lugged his mumbling passenger out of the cave and stowed him in the bilge, and rowed into the path of the storm that was sweeping towards Port of Joy.

News of the coup in the foreign country fascinated him because it had been relatively unexpected. His advisors always kept him well informed regarding the political stability of the places he visited, so he knew in advance that the Kerwyn king was an ill man. Consequently, he had ordered his emissaries to visit Port of Joy to begin the economic invasion of the country because the time was ripe to apply pressure to the ailing kingdom. However, circumstances had rapidly changed. Within days, King Hawkeye was dead, and his eldest son had risen to the throne, only to be rapidly supplanted by the next prince in line within a few weeks. Two dead kings in short succession—the Kerwyn kingdom appeared to
be crumbling. He knew otherwise, however, because his spies had already assessed the merits of King Shadow and the Seers and reported that the new order had all the hallmarks of a tyranny—a strong and ruthless leadership. That pleased him immensely. While it meant that the original plans to gradually white-ant the Kerwyn kingdom through trade deals and political agreements would have to be patiently modified, he knew that tyrannies inevitably self-destructed as the enmity of the common people grew against the cruel leadership. Then the Ranu armies could invade as heroes, overthrowing the tyrant to save the people and establish democracy.

He gazed into the mirror to adjust his collar and straighten his white tie. He smoothed his neatly groomed silver hair that matched his equally trimmed silver moustache and beard, and smiled, satisfied that he was ready to meet the public. He waited for his servant to bring his coat and help him put it on, adjusted the gold chain attached to his fob watch, and strode towards the door.

As he stepped onto the deck into the daylight, he heard a voice call, ‘The President!’ and saw the lines of sailors and soldiers in their crisp white uniforms snap to attention, eyes averted. His personal aide, Sharzeer, a broad-shouldered, pot-bellied man dressed in the traditional Ranu robes, bowed and ushered him along the ranks. Ahead, swaying slightly in the ocean breeze, the white fabric of a Ranu dragon egg filled the sky, waiting to launch from the deck. He was oddly conscious of his boots clunking across the metal deck, but he knew that his heavy steps stamped his authoritative presence on the minds of his people. He walked, he spoke, he smiled, he dressed always aware of the impact of his image on those who served him. Thirty tears of Ranu politics and countless years of
political experience in a long-forgotten place a thousand years beforehand meant that he understood exactly what was needed to be both popular and effective as a leader. That he had led the Ranu nation in its years of inexorable expansion across the world also ensured that he would be its president until he died.

An entourage of officials greeted him at the door to the dragon egg carriage, ambassadors, politicians and his military general, Harem el Jaza. Jaza saluted and smiled as he climbed the three steps into the carriage and took his seat. The officials followed him in and respectfully took their allotted places and then the elite Ranu bodyguard, ten soldiers trained to protect the president, settled in readiness for the flight.

He had not lost his love for flying. Ever since his first experience in a dragon egg, he had relished every opportunity to go aloft. Though it could never compare to the power and majesty that he remembered from his experiences on the back of a dragon, or his abilities to take the shape of a peregrine falcon and fly with absolute freedom, to be above the earth and gazing down from a dragon egg was as close to a religious epiphany as he could imagine. He had flown over every city of every nation he had conquered, the first time always as a visiting dignitary as he was now and always the last time as its leader. It was a ritual he observed, beginning with his first flight over Lightsword in Central Andrak more than thirty years ago.

The dragon egg shook and shuddered as it gained height, and the pullers droned softly as they drove the windwheels. He leaned against a window and looked down at the horseshoe bay and the northern bluff where the Kerwyn palace and the temple of the religious leaders clustered within their surrounding wall designed to keep out the people. It was thirty or more years since he’d briefly visited the palace, arriving
through one portal and leaving by another. Then, the Kerwyn were the invaders. Now, they were about to be invaded.

‘President Ki?’

He looked up at his aide, Sharzeer, whose fat face sometimes reminded him remotely of another bloated Ranu who’d visited his Ithosen tower in the desert a long, long time ago.

‘President, I will brief you on some intelligence we received just before we took flight,’ Sharzeer politely explained.

‘Go ahead,’ A Ahmud Ki said, but he only halflistened to his aide’s information because it was something to do with the religious reforms taking place in the city and he wasn’t particularly interested. The Kerwyn culture was barbaric and it would be changed when the Ranu took over. He understood that the religious zealots would make it difficult in the early stages, opposing Ranu initiatives and requests to establish military bases, but they’d already called upon Ranu military aid to dethrone Inheritor so they’d established a precedent that would eventually be their undoing. They were an inconvenience, not a threat.

When Sharzeer finished, A Ahmud Ki returned to gazing out the window at the sprawl of Port of Joy. By standards in his adopted country, and even across the Ranu empire, Port of Joy was a tiny city, hardly worthy of recognition, but its importance lay in being a strategic gateway to the eastern continent. So it had to fall, according to General Jaza. He was satisfied with his general’s strategies. In ten years, Jaza had never lost a single battle. Nor had he made a strategic error in preparing to invade an area. Port of Joy would fall when Jaza declared it ready.

The sight of the palace ushered in memories of the red-haired beauty with whom he’d fallen in love in their
frantic escape across the strange land thirty years ago. He’d hoped to find her when his armies captured Andrak, but she had long vanished and his efforts to track her down resulted in nothing. The dream he’d harboured when he parted from her—to find his own amber relics and return to her as a Dragonlord—had never come to fruition. Instead, escaping by chance from Se’Treya through a portal that led to the mountains in Ranu Ka Shehaala, he had discovered a different form of power in Ranu politics. Using his charm, his innate ruthlessness, his naturally handsome and exotic features, his intelligence, his rhetoric and his knowledge of the Ranu culture from the distant past, he quickly established himself as an astute representative of the people and his rise to prominence with the support of his political colleagues saw him nominated for the presidency of the Ranu People’s Republic in a very short time. ‘Power is formed in its own image,’ he murmured, recalling a prayer to Berak N’eth, once considered the most potent god in the ancient Ranu pantheon. He knew that he was always destined to be powerful. In the old time, he had almost become a Dragonlord but for Mareg’s and Dylan’s interference. Times had changed. Now he was a president.

‘President Ki?’ Sharzeer interrupted. ‘We are about to land.’

A Ahmud Ki nodded and smiled at his aide. He was about to meet King Shadow, a minor potentate ruling a backward nation. The new king should be grateful, because he was about to meet the most powerful being in the world.