The King's Blood

farewells and walked back to his private rooms, Basrahip at his side.
    “So?” Geder asked. “What do you think of him?”
    “He means the things that he says,” Basrahip answered, “but he chooses what he says very carefully. He is a wise man, but not holy. We will be careful of him.”
    “Good idea,” Geder said. “I agree.”
    “There is another matter.”
    “Kalliam,” Geder said.
    “No. With him, nothing need be said. All his roads have ended. But in his fear of the coming justice, he made the servants of the goddess his targets. His hatred of us has taken its toll. We have lost many, my lord. With the new temples you are sworn to build in these cities that fall before you, I must ask that more of my brethren are permitted to join us.”
    “How many more?”
    “I would send for ten cohorts of ten,” Basrahip said.
    “A hundred?” Geder said. “Is that all? Of course you can. If it’s a question of seeing them with food and shelter, I can send a hundred servants away tonight and not miss them tomorrow. In fact, why not take Kalliam’s mansion? I mean, it won’t be enough space, I don’t think, but there’s a poetry in it.”
    They paused at a small fountain, water pouring over the shoulders of an ancient king and flowing down the half-sized noblemen and women at his feet, and then a miniature horde of carved-stone peasants. Political philosophy as decoration.
    “I am grateful to you, Prince Geder.”
    “You don’t need to be. I couldn’t do any of this with-out you.”
    T
    he fear came with night. He couldn’t think why that would be. Darkness had been the best part of all that had come before, but now when the sun failed, Geder found the face of Dawson Kalliam coming to him. The flash of the blade. The blood on Basrahip’s hand.
    Sitting in his library now, his personal guard discreetly at a distance, he knew he was in no danger. But he hadn’t seen danger in Kalliam’s revel either. If there was one thing to learn, it was that danger came at any time and from any quarter. He fought the darkness with light. Lamps and lanterns and candles glowed in among the papers and piles of books, pressing back the night.
    His own collection, product of a lifetime’s gathering, wasn’t so much as a quarter of what stood in the royal archive, but the archive reflected the tastes and opinions of any number of scholars. It had all the genres in some degree— poetry, moral tales, histories—but speculative essay, his own particular favorite, was thin. And besides that, there was a comfort in reading again what he already read, and he was here for comfort.
    The pillow essays traced back to the reign of the second Queen Esteya and addressed everything from points of court politics and rivalries between people whose names were now otherwise forgotten to speculations on the sexuality of the various races. The dialect was simple enough to follow, especially since he was used to translating from other languages. When he’d read it before, it had been a guilty pleasure. Titillating and embarrassing. What he knew of women and their bodies had, for the most part, come from this book and others like it.
     
It is the nature of women or any race except the Firstblood to be attracted to men most like the original forms of man. The Jasuru find most pleasing men with the thinner scales of colors more near to flesh. Southling women, apart from those given over to being their pod’s breeding stock who need not concern us here, choose men with smaller, lighter eyes. Women of the Yemmu will, given the option, provide themselves to males of slighter frame and more upright stance. Indeed the races would, in time, fade back into a single form if it were not for the masculine drive to explore carnally the exotic.
The scandals of Robbe Sastillin are the classic example. Here was a man of noble frame and blood, a man with real possibilities and prospects in the court who took a series of Cinnae girls to his bed. It debased him and ruined the girls, but in the moment each was acting from the base impulse natural to them.
     
    Geder put a fingertip on the passage, leaning back in his chair. It didn’t seem plausible to him. Not for the first time, he wished that Basrahip and the goddess could speak to the truth of written words as well as those that were spoken.
    Was it true? he wondered. Would a woman of one of the crafted races be drawn to a Firstblood man simply because of his race? Had Cithrin bel Sarcour chosen