Traitors' Gate (Crossroads) by Kate Elliott Read Free Book Online

After all, what could they do? If they drew their swords and cut him down, they were still trapped in the midst of—or underneath!—a building so vast Kesh could not visualize its proportions. Anyway, there might be traps. He tried to observe what he could see of the long scene, perhaps a representation of a tale unfolding along the walls, yet his thoughts turned and turned Eliar’s words. How deep ran Eliar’s regret? Could Keshad suggest to Eliar that his precious sister might be released from the marriage into which she had been forced? That they could work together to save her?
    Or was Eliar one of those who spoke words of regret but didn’t really mean them if it meant he had to give up the privilege that came from another’s sacrifice?
    A line of light appeared ahead like a beacon. They crossed under a lintel and into a round chamber faced with marble. Kesh looked up into a dome whose height made him dizzy. A balcony rimmed the transition from chamber to dome; red-jacketed soldiers stood at guard beneath lamps hung from ironbrackets. The amount of oil hissing as it burned made it seem as if a hundred traitorous voices were whispering in the heavens.
    A person dressed in a plain white-silk jacket and the loose belled trousers common to wealthy empire men sat in a chair carved of ebony. He was a man, but odd in his lineaments, his face looking not so much clean-shaven as soft like a woman’s, unable to bear the youthful burden of a beard. Yet his posture was strong, not weak, and his hands had a wiry strength, as if he’d throttled his enemies without aid of a garrote.
    He said, in the trade talk, to the soldier in the red jacket, “These are the two?”
    “Yes, Your Excellency.”
    His voice was a strangely weightless tenor, but his words rang with the expectation of authority. “I’ve interrogated four others already this morning, and they were not the ones I am seeking.”
    The captain frowned in a measuring way, not an angry one. “What are your names?”
    Eliar opened his mouth, and Kesh trod on his foot.
    The soldier smiled, just a little.
    The man in the chair spoke. “You are perhaps called Keshad? Sent to spy in the empire at the order of my cousin Anjihosh, son of Farutanihosh out of the barbarian princess?”
    All the market training in the world, all those years as a slave, had not prepared Kesh for being called out deep in the bowels of an imperial palace by a man he did not know but who was, evidently, one of Captain Anji’s royal cousins.
    His surprise and silence was its own answer, even as his thoughts caught up with his shock and he cursed himself for a fool. He’d been warned about the empire’s secret soldiers, known as the red hounds, fierce assassins and spies in their own right. Anji had warned him, yet it appeared their intelligence gathering was more formidable than anyone suspected.
    Too late now.
    When cornered, you can choose submission and surrender, or you can leap to the attack and hope the fierceness of your resistance will give you an opening for escape.
    “Begging your pardon, Your Excellency. But if you and your brother have only recently defeated the Emperor Farazadihosh in battle, how comes it that you are privy so suddenly to the secrets that could have been brought south only by agents of the red hounds? Who are sworn to serve the emperor? Not his rivals.”
    “An interesting question,” agreed the man, with a nod of acknowledgment.
    “And furthermore,” continued Keshad, feeling really borne up now on a high tide of reckless anger at being trapped so cleanly and easily, all his hopes wrecked, “if it is true that the cousin of Farazadihosh has taken the throne, and therefore the right to be named as emperor, through victory on the field of battle, then how comes it that a brother of that man—as you imply yourself to be—remains alive? The heir of the ruling emperor has all his brothers and half brothers killed in order that none shall contest his right to