The headache set in fast this time—crowded places like this would always do it, but this one got to me quicker than usual. I remained close to the walls, leaning against them like some poor-sighted woman too wrapped in silks to see a thing, mumbling timid apologies to those I tripped over.
It didn’t take long to make it to the Thorn Palace. Tarkan had coined the name when he took over Vasai. Some twenty years ago, it had been called the Mansion of Roses. I was far too young to remember what it must have looked like then, but I could imagine it—probably gleaming and polished. Then Tarkan came and renamed it as a mockery to the regime that came before his—a reference to the many spears, swords, and bolts that jutted from the outer walls as a result of the brutal onslaught that had earned him his throne. He didn’t take the weapons down after the exchange of power. Instead, he added to them, turning a symbol of nauseatingly elegant beauty into a grotesque monument to death. Sometimes, a notable criminal’s execution could mean hanging on one of the palace’s “thorns” until the birds picked the carcass clean.
Places had souls. The Thorn Palace’s soul was ugly and covered in death. A place where thousands of threads were severed.
The stairs to the entrance of the palace were poorly maintained marble, littered at the bottom with trash and limp, barely conscious bodies. I staggered up the stairs slowly, step by step. I could sense the awareness of the guards at the top, two men who watched me with vague, amused curiosity and made no move to help.
“Your business?” one of the guards grunted, once I finally reached the top.
I panted behind my veil and smoothed my skirts around me—the act of a disgruntled concubine who was frustrated and trying not to show it.
“Is it not obvious?” I crooned, motioning to myself.
“Where is your handler?”
“He was ill. Had terrible runs.” I twisted my lip in disgust and let them hear it in my voice. “Nothing fit for the presence of his excellency, of course, but he summoned me today and it was important to me to be here as he commanded.”
The guards stared at me for too long. One of them chewed on some Pythora leaves he seemed like he had been working on for quite some time. They were high out of their minds, of course, though they held it far better than the townspeople crumpled at the base of the stairs did.
Tarkan’s men were unskilled and replaceable. The ones I really had to worry about would be further into the castle, guarding Tarkan himself. These would be easy to fool. I doubted either of them had held this post for longer than a few months.
They exchanged a glance.
“Fine,” the chewing one grunted. “I’ll take you in.”
He extended his arm to me, and I took it as if I was very grateful to finally have someone who could actually see to lead me around.
The guard escorted me into the palace. It was warm and stuffy inside, the air damp. Someone desperately needed to open some windows. Still, it was far cleaner than Aaves’s pit of depravity—Tarkan, at least, had a more sophisticated idea of power than Aaves’s indiscriminate obsession with furs, silks, and drugs. Tarkan, like the Pythora King himself, controlled his followers with their addictions, but never partook himself. Smart men knew better.
There were a lot of people on the first floor of the palace, mostly the chosen few of Tarkan’s followers who were allowed to enter. Primarily men. A few women. Many were teenagers or younger, hands at crude weapons hung by their hips that they seemed overly eager to use. They’d probably be dead the day they did.
I didn’t make small talk with the guard as he led me up the grand staircase, and he didn’t try. Instead, I stretched out my awareness, feeling the threads around me.
Only clusters of presences down here—blurry, out of focus, their own awareness dulled by the drugs. I reached up, to the floor above. A few more of those types, faceless guards with unsharp minds, but not many.
I stretched further as we reached the top of the stairs. It was far to sense, most auras distant and difficult to read. But Tarkan’s… he was easy. A shard of glass in a pile of feathers.
The guard led me down the hall, the presences of the others growing more distant. Tarkan kept his inner circle small—he’d allow his followers to the ground floor, but few of them any higher. Even the grand staircase wouldn’t lead up directly to his suite. Hence why I was being taken down a deserted hallway, to a smaller stairwell. A set of windows ahead, at the end of the hall, overlooked Vasai’s sparse eastern slums and the rocky plains beyond them, all bathed in the silver light of the moon.