Restoration by Carol Berg Read Free Book Online

dignified little mountain kingdom, no structure, no artifact, no animal, and certainly no human with any identifiable drop of Frythian blood. But all that was no matter to the people of Zhagad. Every man and woman of them was convinced that the slave but did Prince Aleksander’s bidding. Certainly those who stood gaping at the grisly remnants of treachery had no doubts about whom to blame.... couldn’t wait for the gods to crown him ... I heard they argued ... threats were made ... Not enough his father let him rule ... the Emperor was ready to revoke his anointing ... I was beginning to think he’d come to manhood ... No rumor of a kanavar, no supposition drifting through the streets that perhaps Aleksander was the target and not the arrow. The finest imperial torturers had succeeded in eliciting only one word from the assassin, so observers said. “Aleksander.” After seven hours they’d had to stop, else there would have been too little of the prisoner left to do sufficient screaming when they disemboweled and dismembered him in the marketplace.
    I needed to fly into the imperial palace of Zhagad. To enter the walled inner ring of the royal city, much less the palace, one needed a Derzhi sponsor, and I doubted Aleksander was available. Despite my dislike of alien cravings and the feelings of vulnerability as the senses I had honed for thirty-eight years were altered, bird form had its distinct uses. So I crammed myself into a deserted alcove—a stifling, nasty place at the end of a beggars’ alley—and considered shifting. Settle yourself, fool, I thought. Find him, warn him, and get away before you kill him.
    As always, I constructed the shape of my desire inside my head, summoned melydda from the deep center of my being, and tried to release my physical boundaries. The change should have happened easily ... an effortless merging of my limbs and torso with the image in my mind, a chilly shudder as I gave off heat, the natural result of shifting to a smaller form, a momentary adjustment of the angles and sensitivity of vision and hearing, and a breathless rippling pleasure as I touched the truest nature of my race. Thus Blaise and Farrol, and others like them, experienced shapeshifting. So I had felt it once when Denas and I had taken wing in the storm-racked demon land of Kir‘Vagonoth. But on that hot morning, I felt as though my bones were cracking, as if my eyes were being squeezed out of my head, as if my skin were being peeled away by a Derzhi torturer’s knife. Three rats hurriedly buried themselves in the rotting refuse, as I sank to my knees in groaning misery and forced myself into the shape of a bird.
    My silent demon lurked within me like the worm at the core of a ripe fruit.
    Â 
    The Imperial Palace was ominously quiet. Its graceful cloisters and cavernous halls should have been bustling with gold-clad chamberlains and leather-clad hunting parties, with legions of slaves and servants, with white-robed warriors newly arrived from the desert, with stewards and clerks, their shoulders hunched with the burdens of running an expansive empire, with weapons makers and tailors, musicians and priests, and everywhere beautiful women dressed in silken gowns. But on that morning, as I fluttered through the latticed courtyards and shaded arbors, perching on balcony rails, listening at windows and doorways, I glimpsed only a few fearful slaves scouring footprints from the tile floors; every one of them had bruises and bloody streaks on face or shoulders. Nervous slave masters have heavy hands.
    Here and there in corners, small knots of courtiers huddled whispering, their verdict the same as in the streets. A slave could never have done such a deed alone. Someone had drawn off the Emperor’s bodyguards and ever-present courtiers. Someone had left a dagger in the Emperor’s bedroom, where weapons were forbidden, and had told the slave where to find it. Someone powerful had