"Of course, if you let Xanda be a minion, you'll have to make Travin one, too," Adham warned Damin as they traversed the dark lane. "And probably Kalan, 'cause she's such a bossy little thing, she'll never let you rule the world unless you cut her in for a piece of the action. Rorin might come in handy, too, being a sorcerer and all."

"And Rodja can be your bookkeeper," Xanda suggested. "All evil empires need someone to keep the books. I mean, how do you know what spoils you've collected if you haven't got someone like Rodja to count it all for you?"

"And don't forget Starros," Damin reminded them, getting right into the spirit of things. "He'll have to be my chamberlain. Do you think he'll get upset if I tell him I want a eunuch for the job?"

They reached the end of Fisherman's Lane. Across the street, a line of litter bearers waited patiently for the patrons of Madam Leska's to conclude their business. He turned at the sound of someone falling. Behind them, the drunken Denikan had followed them but had slipped and lay facedown in the lane. Dismissing the foreigner as inconsequential, he turned his attention back to Madam Leska's, which seemed to have the total attention of his stepbrother and his cousin. A line of flaming torches lit the path leading to the rather grand foyer some thirty feet from the edge of the road and they could hear the music and laughter from across the street.

"Maybe," Adham suggested thoughtfully, "we should take a quick look inside?"

"Or maybe not, my lords," Goren informed them, glancing back over his shoulder at his three charges.

Adham glared at the big man impatiently. "When Princess Marla hired you, Goren, did she advertise for a bodyguard or a killjoy?"

"A babysitter," Goren replied bluntly. "Stay here. I'll organise some litters."

"We only need one for Xanda," Damin pointed out.

"The others are for you and Master Tirstone, my lord. It's time you were getting home, too."

"Ha!" Xanda barked triumphantly. "I might have a wife waiting to kill me when I get home, but at least I'm not still answerable to my mother."

Adham burst out laughing at that. Damin wasn't nearly so amused. Even drunk, he was painfully aware of the truth in Xanda's words.

"I'll have you know-," he began, but he didn't get a chance to finish the sentence. The drunken Denikan had picked himself up and staggered into their midst.

"Whoa there!" Clem said, grabbing the sailor before he could lay a hand on the prince. "Go sleep it off somewhere else, eh?" He shoved the man clear, but the Denikan seemed oddly determined to approach them.

"You prince?" he asked in broken Hythrun, refusing to be put off.

He sounded desperate, rather than drunk, Damin thought.

"You prince? You help?"

"I told you already," Clem insisted, "there's nobody here for you, my lad. Back to your ship now.

Move along."

"You prince?" the Denikan insisted, pushing past Clem desperately as he tried to approach Damin. He coughed painfully, his spittle flecked with blood. "You help! They say you help!"

"He knows who you are," Xanda remarked in a voice that suddenly sounded remarkably sober.

Adham nodded his agreement. "He followed us from the Lurching Sailor."

"You Prince Damin!" the Denikan cried, loud enough to attract the attention of the litter bearers outside Madam Leska's. "You help!"

"Shut him up, Clem," Xanda ordered, looking around in concern, but the bodyguard didn't need to be told. He already had his hand over the sailor's mouth to keep him quiet. The Denikan struggled weakly against Clem's hold, but either he lacked the strength to fight off the big bodyguard or he wasn't very serious about it.

Damin stepped a little closer and studied the young man curiously. He was, like every Denikan Damin had ever seen, handsome, dark-skinned and muscular, his long dark hair arranged in an intricate series of thin braids threaded with beads. He wore an open vest and his skin appeared bruised beneath it, as if he'd been beaten, quite savagely. Damin indicated that Clem should let him speak. "What do you want with me?"

"You prince? You help?"

He took an involuntary step backward. The man's breath was foul, but it was the stench of sickness, not sour ale.

"He keeps saying that," Adham remarked. "It's like they're the only Hythrun words he knows."

"Do you speak Denikan?"

The young trader shook his head. "Not even a little bit. What about you, Xanda?"

"I know the words for how much and get your hands off my wife," Xanda joked. Then his smile faded. "Some sailor knowing a few words of Hythrun doesn't explain how he knows who you are, Damin."

The Denikan said something in his own language; a rush of words that meant nothing to them.

The outburst appeared to exhaust the young man and he sagged, semi-conscious, in Clem's grasp.

"He's burning up," the bodyguard remarked with a frown.

Damin looked at the sailor with concern, reaching out to check his fever just as Goren arrived back with the litters he'd arranged to take them home.

"No!" he shouted, slapping Damin's hand away. "Don't touch him!"

"What's wrong?"

"Look at him," Goren ordered.

"He's covered in bruises," Adham pointed out, a little puzzled.

"They're not bruises," Goren warned. "He's bleeding into his skin. Did he touch you at all, my lord? Any of you?"

Damin shook his head, wishing it was clearer. "He was asking for me, but Clem stopped him before he got too close. Do you know what's wrong with him?"

"Not for certain," the big man replied. "But I can make a pretty good guess." He turned his attention to Clem, who was still holding the young Denikan sailor. He had a grim, almost resigned look on his face. The two bodyguards stared at each other for a moment before Clem lowered the Denikan to the ground. Goren turned to face Damin and the others. "I want you to get in those litters and go home, my lords," he ordered. "Now. No argument. No complaints." There was something in the voice of the big, normally taciturn man that warned them this was no longer a laughing matter.

"You'll take care of the Denikan?" Damin asked, brushing aside Adham's puzzled demand for an explanation.

"For all the good it will do," Clem warned, looking up at the prince. He was squatting over the sailor, who appeared to have lapsed into unconsciousness. "He'll be dead soon."

"And what about you, Clem?" Damin asked, acutely aware that he was the one who had put himself between his prince and the danger this foreigner represented.

"I'll take care of Clem," Goren promised. "But he can't go back to the palace."

"Damin? What's going on?"

"Nothing, Adham. Take the litter and go home. You too, Xanda."

There was no trace of frivolity in the young prince's voice. The others looked at him strangely, unused to seeing him so grave, and then did as he bid, turning for the litters with no further argument.

As soon as they were on their way, Damin turned back to Goren.

"You need to get out of here, too, your highness."

"I know," Damin agreed. Then he asked the question he'd been too afraid to voice while his stepbrother and cousin were nearby. "It's plague, isn't it?"

Goren nodded, glancing down at Clem with a frown. Clem knew it, too, and that he was probably going to be its next victim. Across the street, the music and the laughter coming from Madam Leska's continued unabated, oblivious to the danger on its very doorstep.

"Do you think he's been in contact with many people?"

"Hard to say," Goren shrugged. "He's almost dead. He could have been wandering around the city infecting people for days."

"He was asking for me by name."

"Which means someone else in Greenharbour knew what was wrong with him and probably cut him loose," Goren suggested. "And then sent him after you."

Damin shook his head. "Nobody could want me dead so badly they'd risk infecting the whole city with plague, surely?"

Goren shrugged. "It's my job to keep you alive, your highness, not second-guess your assassins.

Now get in that litter, go home, wake your mother and tell her what's happened. And then start packing."

"Packing?"

"If the city is struck down by plague," Goren warned, "you'll be on the first coach back to Krakandar. You mark my words."

Damin stared down at the half-dead sailor for a moment, feeling the weight of his position as Hythria's heir pressing on his shoulders. It simply wasn't fair that such pain and devastation should be let loose, all for the simple purpose of killing one man.

"This is going to get bad, isn't it, Goren?"

"Yes," the big man agreed heavily. "It's going to get very bad, your highness. Very bad, indeed."

Chapter 41.

The King of Fardohnya had much to be grateful for, he knew, but it didn't really help much to count his blessings. Eleven legitimate children and that many again born of his numerous court'esa was proof, surely, that Jelanna, the Goddess of Fertility, was smiling on him.

By the gods, I've spent enough money on her damn temples, Hablet reminded himself, as he stepped into the harem garden. I ought to be her favourite.

But if he was Jelanna's favourite, the goddess had a strange way of showing it-she had blessed him with eleven legitimate children. And not one of them was a son.

Sometimes, on the rare occasions he was feeling reflective, Hablet wondered if this was punishment for killing Riika Ravenspear all those years ago. Although her death was patently Lecter Turon's fault, Hablet's cursed ability to produce nothing but legitimate daughters (in another cruel twist of fate, he had no trouble producing bastard sons) could be easily traced back to that fateful day, almost a quarter of a century ago. He had stood in the hall of his Winter Palace at Qorinipor in southern Fardohnya, in the shadow of the Sunrise Mountains, and let Laran Krakenshield extort three and a half million gold rivets from him, just because Hablet was feeling bad after his chamberlain had inadvertently killed the Warlord of Krakandar's sister.

That entire regrettable episode was, in Hablet's mind, a disaster from start to finish. Lecter's plan to kidnap the newlywed Marla Wolfblade was a fiasco. First, they'd kidnapped the wrong girl. Then they'd killed her before realising she was the sister of the richest and, arguably, most powerful man in Hythria. And then, like a fool, he'd listened to Lecter again and agreed to take Princess Shanita of Lanipoor as his wife, distracted by the notion of all that money (and his brand-new coach) being carried across the border into Hythria.

Hablet's first official marriage had proved almost as calamitous as his dealings with the Warlord of Krakandar. When the Prince of Lanipoor was bribing Lecter Turon and listing his daughter's numerous virtues, he'd neglected to mention that along with her excellent childbearing hips and outstanding beauty she was a spiteful, vindictive and murderously jealous little bitch. A shrieking harpy in the flesh.

Even the praise of her much-vaunted hips had been misleading. After six years and a series of disappointing miscarriages, Princess Shanita had finally given birth to the first of his many daughters within days of Hablet's Hythrun court'esa, Welenara, producing his firstborn-albeit illegitimate-son.

Furious her achievement had been overshadowed by a slave-and a foreign slave at that-when the child was only days old, Shanita arranged to have both the court'esa and her newborn poisoned.

Fortunately for Welenara and her son, the princess had few friends in the harem. One of Hablet's other wives learned of the plot and betrayed her, no doubt hoping to replace the Lanipoorian princess as his senior wife. Hablet had beheaded Her Serene Highness, the Princess Shanita of Lanipoor, when her daughter was a mere two months old and anybody who did not wish to share the late princess's fate had wisely made no mention of Hablet's first wife in the hearing of Fardohnya's king since that day.

Her legacy, however, was still causing him grief. It was in search of Shanita's only child that Hablet had come to the harem gardens this morning.

Following the sound of shouts and laughter, he rounded a bend in the gravelled path and discovered a number of his children-both legitimate and baseborn-engaged in a boisterous game of rope ball on the lawns surrounding a Harshini-style pavilion. In the shade of the white circular podium, with its delicate wrought-iron arches that looked as if they'd been crafted out of spun-sugar, a number of his wives, three of his currently favoured court'esa and several slaves responsible for the care of his many children watched over the game, smiling indulgently. The women sipped chilled fruit juices and watered wine and gossiped about those other wives and court'esa whose absence made them the only reasonable topic of conversation.

Hablet stopped and watched the game for a moment. It was called rope ball because each of the players held a short piece of red or blue coloured rope behind their backs, to prevent them touching the ball with their hands. To drop the rope was instant disqualification and a point to the opposing team.

The ball was an inflated pig's bladder and, with their hands restrained, the only way to move the ball into the goalposts at either end of the lawn was to kick it. This resulted in a great deal of hilarity, much falling over and some none-too-gentle pushing and shoving as the players attempted to gain control of the ball.

He spied his eldest child in the melee, playing for the red side. She wasn't the tallest player or the most skilled, but she was invariably voted captain of their impromptu teams, a disturbing tendency that told Hablet more about his daughter than she probably realised.

The game stopped when Hablet stepped out of the shadows of the flowering hibiscus shrubs on the edge of the lawn. Dropping their coloured ropes, the younger children ran to him when they spied their father, gleefully ignorant of his mood. The elder girls and several of his baseborn sons held back a little, having learned to be cautious of him. That amused Hablet for some reason. He wasn't sure why.

Maybe he just liked the notion that his children could fear him as much as they professed to love him.

"Adrina!" he called over the heads of her younger siblings after he'd greeted them each by name.

She looked up when he called her, revealing her best feature, which was eyes the colour of polished emeralds. They were the eyes of a temptress. Bedroom eyes, Lecter Turon called them, although he didn't mean it as a compliment.

Adrina favoured her mother in looks, which Hablet found rather disturbing. She had a luscious head of wavy, dark hair and a body that would undoubtedly blossom into sinful voluptuousness when she was older. At eighteen, she had yet to outgrow completely the coltishness of youth, but what she lacked in natural beauty or grace, Adrina more than made up for in wit and intelligence.

And that was what made her so damned dangerous.

"Father?" she replied with no hint of fear. She was flanked by her two closest siblings, Hablet's baseborn sons, Tristan and Gaffen.

Tristan was the same age as Adrina. He was Welenara's son, the one Shanita had tried to poison, and tall, fair, blue-eyed and far too popular for the bastard son of a king with no heir. Lecter was already advising the king to throw him in the army and send him south to the Sunrise Mountains. Out of sight and out of mind, Lecter kept saying. And it wasn't a bad idea. At worst, the boy might kill a few Hythrun.

At best, Tristan would be killed himself in the upcoming battle, and the problem of what to do with him would be solved. But Hablet couldn't bring himself to do it. It would break Welenara's heart and, besides, Hablet genuinely liked Tristan. Until he had a legitimate son, he really didn't want to see the boy killed, even in the noble pursuit of Hythrun blood.

Gaffen, on the other hand, was much less of a problem. His mother had been a court'esa, too.

He was also fair-haired (Hablet had a particular weakness for blondes), big and solid and probably the most dependable of his baseborn children. His only ambition was to join the navy as soon as he was old enough and travel the world. His only fault, as far as Hablet knew, was how easily enticed into mischief he was by his half-brother and half-sister. They formed a triumvirate of trouble that Lecter often advised him he would be wise to break up. The closeness of his three eldest children might cost him his throne some day, if he wasn't careful.

Or so his chamberlain was fond of telling him.

"Walk with me, petal," the king commanded. "I want to talk to you."

Adrina stepped forward, smiling. She had to know what he wished to discuss with her, yet she appeared unbothered by it. Falling into step beside him, his daughter slipped her arm through his and led him away from the pavilion and the eager, straining ears of her numerous stepmothers.

"What did you want to talk to me about, Daddy?"

"Don't you Daddy me, young lady," he scowled, as they stepped onto the gravelled path. "You know damned well what I want to talk about."