Empire Ascendant by Kameron Hurley

Author:Kameron Hurley [Hurley, Kameron]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy
ISBN: 9780857665607
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2015-10-05T16:00:00+00:00

31

So this was Saradyn. Not a tall man, but broad, like a tree eclipsed by its fellows that made up for height with girth, crowding out all those around it. Blood rushed down Zezili’s face. She told herself that head wounds were all bluster. She wasn’t vomiting or confused, not any more than usual, but she bled all that first night, trussed up on the other side of the fire from Saradyn, self-styled king of Tordin, and his most intimate familiars. They were all men, which she supposed shouldn’t have surprised her, but she had never in her life been the only woman in a group, and it unsettled her. She was very obviously out of place, and it wasn’t just because hers were the only bound hands.

She saw the Rosh girl occasionally the first few days, but she noticed the girl didn’t come out of the tavern that Saradyn and his lackeys pulled her into at the end of the week. Why hadn’t they just killed her back there on the field? Who was she to them? Zezili did not speak Tordinian, and it put her at a distinct disadvantage. The tall man with the big nose had known who she was, but Saradyn hadn’t seemed to until they had a rapid-fire conversation over her body. She wasn’t sure what that meant. It crossed her mind that Big Nose may have been the same one to take Anavha, or at least the one in Saradyn’s inner circle to recognize who Anavha was and keep him alive for ransom.

But if she, too, was their prisoner, they’d get no ransom from her. Best case, they hoped to sell her back to the Empress, then have her buy out Anavha too. As the blood caked on her face that night, she feared they would find the Empress less than receptive to that offer. A second failure meant death, and though Storm and the rest of the force still had a head start on getting where she wanted them to go, Zezili’s fate was not tied to theirs any longer. She was on her own.

It was a week back to wherever it was they ended up – some no-nothing little town not much bigger than the one they’d just come from. The town stank, like they were still shitting in pots and throwing them into alleys. Plumbing seemed to be a thing of legend. The only evidence of its existence – in the past, at least – was a large, cracked fountain they passed just off the main road. It sprouted up from the center of a tiled floor of what once may have been some grand estate, but now lay in ruins, slowly devoured by the woods. The trees here were big, mostly everpines, and instead of burning out the vegetation on either side of the roads they lined them in big concrete blocks slathered in lye that ate through the concrete as surely as it did the vegetation that tried to survive there.

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