“He’s not different from them, Tomaz. He’s one of the Children.”
“Heisdifferent,eshendai,” he said, “in all the ways that matter! In all the ways that make them monsters. In all the ways that leave him as nothing more than a scared boy, trying to fill a role he never wanted.”
“I know you, Tomaz, and for all your talk of changing the Empire that is not why you are doing this. What is it about him that affects you so?”
The giant paused.
“A debt I owe to the man who saved my life,” he said finally.
“What debt?” Leah asked. “I know your entire life’s story, Tomaz. But I know of no debt that would ask this loyalty from you.”
“I will tell you when the time is right. As you said, you know me. And you know I would not keep this from you without good reason.”
Leah was about to protest, but she had seen the look in his eyes before and knew that she would get nothing more out of him.
“Fine. So what do we do now?”
Tomaz held out a hand, which she grasped. He pulled her to her feet and handed over her daggers. As soon as she grasped the hilts, the enchanted Spellblade metal soothed the ache in her head and calmed her stomach.
“We rescue a Prince,” he said.
Chapter Nine: The Path of Light
The sun had just begun to set by the time the Prince made it to the city of Banelyn. His heart was pounding furiously, and sweat had formed on his brow and under his Commons clothing. The entire journey through the mountains had been nerve-wracking, and a few times the Prince had thought he might go mad with paranoia. He had been certain that every snapped twig or rustled leaf was Tomaz ambushing him from behind a tree, and every flash of light off a shiny rock the girl’s daggers whistling through the air to strike him down.
But finally he had made it. Banelyn.
He kneed the pack horse sharply and was soon galloping down the long dirt path—a hunting trail that he had come upon—that led to the wide paved northern road that ended at the massive Lerne Gate.
As the city came closer, it spread out to cover the horizon, and he became flushed with emotion, feeling certain that he would find answers here to the kidnapping, to the Death Watchmen, to all of it. With each step he felt assured that it had been all a test.
He needed to find the Seeker of Truth. It was a title given to the heads of the Empire-wide information gathering organization that had agents placed in every town, village, and city within the borders of the Empire. It was their job to seek out traitorous activity and report it to Symanta, as well as to the Ear of the Empress. But what was more important to the Prince was that they were only allowed to act on direct orders from the Empress, as conveyed through one of the Children, and they did not participate, on pain of death, in any Imperial politics. They were immune to the games of the Children, and the Empress gave them relatively free reign. But they were, in all cases, required to answer the Children’s questions to the farthest extent of their full and oftenconsiderable knowledge. In most cases, Seekers were summoned into the presence of one of the Children, but in certain instances the Children would visit a Seeker if a situation required urgent attention.
The Prince made his way into the Lerne Gate town, quickly losing himself in the crowd of Commons that were coming and going there. Once he was a few blocks in, he reined the horse in and jumped off. He crossed to the side of the street and tied the animal to a large stake and left it there, assuming that sooner or later a horse thief would come along and take it. Ramael had always told him there were only two kinds of Commons: arsonists and horse-thieves.
He hurried along the street, almost running. His heart pounded in his ears, and his skin prickled with every touch of wind, the hairs on the back of his neck trying to stand on end at the sound of every unexpected noise. He pushed his way through the crowded, narrow streets, between rickety wooden buildings painted offensively bright colors—purples, yellows, greens, reds—and past merchants loudly hawking wares at chattering groups of Commons.
But while he saw all of this, he took no real notice of it. All of his attention was focused on finding a single golden flower, hung upside down, and tied to seven green shoots of long-bladed grass with a black ribbon.
The triliope.
The Seekers remained in a position of power partly because they existed in the collective consciousness of the Empire as omniscient, omnipresent phantoms. No one knew what a Seeker looked like, no one knew who could be working for one of the Seekers, no one knew anything at all but that a Seeker might be anyone, anywhere, in any station or level of society, and could, with a single word, take away all that you held dear.
Each of the Children knew the way to find a Seeker, should they need one, and it always began with the triliope, the symbol of the Empire. Peace, the golden flower; prosperity, the seven green blades of grass; and security, the black ribbon that was the Empire’s borders. The triliope was the first sign onthe Path of Light, a path that led devoted followers and those seeking enlightenment to the Seekers.
Tiffenal, Prince of Foxes and Lord of Formaux Province, had a less glamorous name for the path, detailing a certain orifice into which the Seekers’ precious light should be placed. But the Seekers did their job well, and the Children let them have their little religious games.
Looking for the triliope, the Prince’s mind began to work so quickly that the world blurred and spun about him, as he recorded, distilled, and discarded thousands of sensory details. The Raven Talisman’s powers expanded his mind and allowed him to filter through every facet of life, every swirling eddy and current of sensation. Flashes of color, sounds, shifts in the flow of air, jumbled voices, smells of cooking meat, baking bread mixed in with fertilizer and the rank stench of too many unwashed bodies crammed into one place for too long—it all passed in and out of his mind in a raging torrent that he managed to harness and direct. Record, distill, discard. None of it was important—only the first marker was. There were seven in all, and had the Prince known where the seventh was, he would have gone straight there and relied on his title to gain entrance. As it was, he had to start at the beginning, and he would go step-by-step to keep his identity concealed as long as possible.
The Prince rounded a corner, still far from the Black Wall that described the borders of the actual city of Banelyn, and found what he was looking for.
The triliope was hanging outside of an herb shop amid various other dried plants and flowers. He let his connection to the Raven Talisman fade, and the world slowed down again as the markings on his shoulders and back fell cold. He moved toward the triliope, but instead of going into the herbalist’s shop, he turned to the building across the street. By this time, the sun had well and truly set, and it appeared that the Commons were going home for the night. In the distance a loud set of bells clanged—a curfew, perhaps?
The building across from the triliope was a three-story affair, made of old wood that was warped and faded almost to a worrying degree. Looking up, the Prince saw that the building was unadorned but for two windows on the second floor, closed simply but securely with iron bars that shone dully in what light came from newly lit streetlamps that lined the boulevard at irregular intervals. There was a guard standing next to the door, but the Prince ignored him, and the man, after the first menacing glare, ignored him too. Had the Prince been in his official capacity he would have had the man whipped for looking at him like that… but now was not the time. Instead, he walked to the door and knocked twice.
After a moment or so, a small wooden peephole opened at the Prince’s eyelevel, and a voice rang out clearly.
“What do you seek here?”
