Frentis merely smiled. “News travels slowly, it seems.” He leaned closer still. “There is no Ruling Council now. You are ruled by an empress and, trust my word on this, she will look on and laugh when I raze your city to the ground.”
“Whatever awaits me, I’ll bear it,” Varek said in a tone of complete certainty. “I’ll suffer every torment for a thousand years just for the slightest chance of getting this close to you again.”
“Then you had best invest in some sword lessons first.” Frentis turned to Draker. “Escort the honoured citizen until nightfall. If he takes one backward glance, kill him.”
• • •
Her new body is stronger than the one she left on the beach, leaping and whirling with all the speed and precision she could ask for, and yet . . .
“Feel it, don’t you?” the Messenger asks, lounging in a chair on the balcony. He wears the body of an Arisai, one of the few with Gifted blood, tall and lean. Behind him stand six more, also Gifted, and, although their faces are different, their expressions are identical. She has never met so much of him before and finds it trying, one was always more than sufficient.
She lowers the short sword and straightens from the fighting crouch, naked and sheened in sweat from the practice. If the Messenger finds the sight arousing, there is no sign of it on any of his faces. She is discomforted by the sight of the darkened sky that frames them, realising it was noon when she returned to the Council Tower. Since awakening in this new shell her ability to keep track of time has diminished yet further.
“Feel what?” she asks.
“The numbness. Cold isn’t so cold, heat isn’t so hot. Gets worse with every one you take. These days I can barely feel a thing.” He angles his head, studying her, a small predatory smile on his lips. “Can you hear it this time? You can, can’t you?”
She suppresses a flash of anger, resenting his effortless intuition. The shell’s owner had been older than the first, and not born to slavery, leaving a deep pool of memory that flares into aggravating clarity all too often: . . . playing with her brother on the shore of some mountain lake . . . laughing when her father showed her his tricks . . .
She initially thought the woman’s gift so small it couldn’t be discerned but has come to understand that memory was her gift. Every thought, action and word residing in her head, unchanging and always so bright.
“You said to prepare eight,” she says, pushing the images away. “Yet I only count seven.”
She takes some satisfaction from the sight of them clenching jaws in unison, knowing the Messenger was suppressing his own anger. “Al Sorna has a facility for acquiring useful friends,” he says after a short pause.
