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Rathe said, sipping the last of his wine. Until me, he thought.
    The babble of voices and the music of lyre and pipes filled one of a dozen inner halls of Lord Osaant’s palace with an air of festivity. A night breeze poured through terracotta-latticed windows, cooling the guests who strode across glistening white marble floors. Burnished steel mirrors reflected the light of scores of oil lamps, ensuring that no shadows could fall within the hall.
    “Commoners do not rise to legion commander of anything , but here you are,” Thushar countered.
    Rathe could not help but grin. He still found it hard to believe he had risen higher than any other lowborn in the history of Cerrikoth, even surpassing his highest ambition. Despite Rhonaag’s final derisive words a half a month gone, Captain-General Midak and his subordinates had welcomed Rathe into their fold.
    Thushar nodded a greeting to a yellow-robed lord walking arm-in-arm with his concubine. The rotund, hawk-nosed man raised his nose imperiously and quickened his pace, making the ridiculous ostrich plume poked into his dainty blue turban jounce as if in affront. By his lidded dark eyes, swarthy coloring, and oiled black chin beard fashioned into a narrow spike, he was one of the spice-lords from the far eastern isles of Yehute. His buxom paramour, clad in diaphanous rainbow silks caught snugly about her narrow waist with a belt of turquoise and gold, eyed Thushar with more than passing interest.
    After they moved off along a pillared gallery interspersed with potted palms and flowering shrubs, the big Prythian shook his head and laughed boisterously, green eyes alight with excitement. “I must thank you again for promoting me to serve as your aide. May the gods be merciful on my soul for the sins in which I mean to indulge!”
    Rathe laughed with him. While his new position demanded that he suffer incessant court intrigues and a steady stream of pompous buffoons, he could not be happier. Life had never been so good. He would miss his men and the thrill of charging across a battlefield, but not so much that he would ever wish to return to that life of dealing death. I will never again order the destruction of an innocent village. His hope was that King Nabar had a gentler heart than his father.
    A tingle across his shoulders turned Rathe. When he had felt that sensation before, it always presaged danger. Instead of a threat, he found a fiery-haired woman appraising him from the far side of the courtyard’s bubbling fountain. He offered a slow smile, which she returned, before venturing into a clutch of emissaries from various kingdoms, all come to Onareth to secure trading pacts with the new king. Some sought to gain aid in battling common enemies, others to take advantage of the crumbs falling from Cerrikoth’s table. King Nabar and his retinue were about somewhere, doubtless wading through gaggles of sycophants eager to insinuate themselves into his good graces.
    “What do you make of our host?” Thushar asked, nodding to a skinny old man with a bulging potbelly. In no way did it seem the man could have sired Girod. Sipping his wine, Thushar leaned against a pillar carved with playful nymphs, climbing vines, and mythic beasts.
    Distracted, Rathe tried to find the woman again, but the throngs of colorful, strutting highborn made that impossible. Mildly disappointed, he appraised Lord Osaant at Thushar’s request. The man was holding forth near a marble soldier of powerful proportions, yet wearing his own vulture-like countenance. He was a member of a breed Rathe despised, men granted the king’s ear and who always whispered of war and conquest in a bid to stuff their own coffers, but had never swung a sword in anger, and rarely stirred from the comforts of their palaces.
    Before Rathe could say a word, the red-haired woman reappeared on the nearer side of the fountain, where she took a keen interest in the fragrant flowers she found potted there.
    Thushar nudged