Beyond The Shadows by Brent Weeks Read Free Book Online Page B

keen over their dead where southrons stood silent like they didn’t care. Dorian loved their
     zoomorphic art, the wild woad tattoos of the lowland tribes, the cool blue-eyed maidens with their milk-white skin and fierce
     tempers. He loved a hundred things about his people, but sometimes he wondered if the world wouldn’t be a better place if
     the sea swept in and drowned them all.
    As sacrifices for abundant livestock, how many of those blue-eyed girls had laid their mewling firstborn sons on Khali pyres?
     For abundant crops, how many of those expressive men had caged their aged fathers in wicker coffins and watched them drown
     slowly in bogs? They wept as they did murder—but they did it. For honor, when a man died, if his wife wasn’t claimed by the
     clan chief, she was expected to throw herself on her husband’s pyre. Dorian had seen a girl fourteen years old whose courage
     failed her. She’d been married less than a month to an old man she’d never met before her wedding. Her father beat her bloody
     and threw her on the pyre himself, cursing her for embarrassing him.
    “Hey,” Hopper said, “you’re thinking. Don’t. It’s no good here. You work hard, you don’t have to think. Got it?” Halfman nodded.
     “Then let’s strap this on and you can work.”
    Together, they strapped the wicker basket to Halfman’s back. There were thongs that wrapped around each shoulder and his hips
     to help him bear the great weight of the clay pot full of sewage. Hopper promised to have another pot ready by the time Halfman
     got back.
    Halfman trudged through the cold basalt hallways. It was always dark in the slaves’ passages, with only enough torches burning
     so the slaves could avoid colliding.
    “I’m tired of banging toothless slaves,” a voice said around the next intersection of hallways. “I hear the new girl’s in
     the Tygre Tower. They say she’s beautiful.”
    “Tavi! You can’t call it that.” Bertold Ursuul was Dorian’s great-grandfather, and the man had gone mad, believing he could
     ascend to heaven if he built a tower high enough and decorated it solely with Harani sword-tooth tygres. His madness embarrassed
     Garoth Ursuul, so he’d forbidden the tower to be called anything but Bertold’s Tower.
    Dorian stopped. There was a torch at the intersection and no way he could retreat without being noticed. The aethelings—for
     no one else spoke with such arrogance—were coming toward him. There was no escape.
    Then he remembered. He was Halfman now, a eunuch slave. So he slouched and prayed that he was invisible.
    “I talk how I please,” Tavi said, coming into the intersection just as Halfman did. Halfman stopped, stepped aside, and averted
     his eyes. Tavi was a classic aetheling: good-looking if with a hawkish nose, well-groomed, well-dressed, an aura of command,
     and the stench of great power, despite being barely fifteen years old. Halfman couldn’t help but size him up instantly—this
     one would be the first of his seed class. This would have been one Dorian would have tried to kill early. Too arrogant, though.
     Tavi was the kind who needed to brag. He would never make it through his uurdthan. “And I can fuck who I please, too,” Tavi
     said, coming to a stop. He looked down each of the halls as if lost. His indecision froze Halfman in place. He couldn’t move
     without possibly moving into the aethelings’ path.
    “Besides,” Tavi said, “the harems are too closely guarded. But the Tygre Tower’s just got two dreads at the bottom, and her
     deaf-mute eunuchs.”
    “He’ll kill you,” the other aetheling said. He didn’t look pleased to be having this conversation in front of Halfman.
    “Who’s gonna tell him? The girl? So he’ll kill her, too? Fuck! Where are we? We’ve been walking this way for ten minutes.
     All these halls look the same.”
    “I said we should have gone the other—” the other aetheling began.
    “Shut up, Rivik. You,” Tavi said,