The Prince of Shadow Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  PART ONE - PEARL ISLAND

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  PART TWO - FARSHORE

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  PART THREE - THE ROAD TO SHAN

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  PART FOUR - SHAN

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Teaser chapter

  “The memory is buried deep.”

  Without warning, Master Jaks reached back with his right hand and slipped a Thebin blade from a sheath at the back of his neck. He threw, his aim perfect and centered on Llesho’s heart. Instinctively, Llesho adjusted his stance, and when the knife approached, he had turned his side to it and stepped out of its way. In the same motion, he plucked the knife out of the air and sent it spinning back at the thrower. Jaks was prepared for the move, but still the blade nicked him midway up his bicep before embedding itself in a wooden beam in the wall. If Jaks had not moved when he had, the knife would have pierced his heart, the same target he had aimed at himself.

  Master Jaks clenched the fingers of his left hand over the wound in his right arm. “Den’s been working with him,” he said, “But he came to us with that and other equally deadly moves for close work in his bag of tricks. As far as I can tell, with a knife he knows only how to kill.”

  Don’t miss any of the exciting books in Curt Benjamin’s Seven Brothers:

  The Prince of Shadow

  The Prince of Dreams

  The Gates of Heaven1

  Copyright © 2001 by Curt Benjamin

  All Rights Reserved.

  DAW Book Collectors No. 1195.

  DAW Books are distributed by Penguin Putnam Inc.

  All characters in this book are fictitious.

  Any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.

  First paperback printing, September 2002

  eISBN : 978-1-101-15748-0

  DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED

  U.S. PAT. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES

  —MARCA REGISTRADA

  HECHO EN U.S.A.

  S. A.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  Many thanks to the gang—

  Barbara Wright, Tom and Cathy Ward, and

  Leroy Dubeck, for the roving restaurant

  brainstorming sessions. Llesho lives because of you.

  PART ONE

  PEARL ISLAND

  Chapter One

  “LLESHO! Has anyone seen Llesho!”

  The healer Kwan-ti stuck her head out of the thatch-and-bamboo longhouse and scanned the slave compound. Waves of pale gold sand lapped the shed where the pearl washers worked to the pounded rhythm of their feet on the wood floor and some chantey song of lovers and pearls, but Llesho’s voice was not among them. At the edge of the sandy clearing where the camp was raised, pearl sorters crouched under the broad fronds of palm trees, shaking their baskets in a steady circular motion, but Llesho did not sit among them. He was not abed in the longhouse, nor did she see him in line for his lunch with the cooks and their cauldrons.

  No Llesho. Old Lleck lay dying on his pallet in the longhouse, calling for the boy in his fever, and Llesho was nowhere to be found. She rested her strained eyes on the distant but ever present cloud bank where sky met the bay, but the murky slate of the rain-drenched horizon offered no solutions. Lord Chin-shi didn’t bother to shackle his slaves, which made him a better master than many, but sometimes she would have made an exception for Llesho, who could disappear faster than a magician when the rent was due.

  Still, the boy couldn’t have gone far. Pearl Island was not much more than a handful of palm trees and scrub that covered the gentle hill of crumbling coral at its center, but no slave had ever escaped it. The sea, dark and cruel, brooded just beyond the bay that cradled the wealth from which Pearl Island took its name. An arm of that great sea separated the island from the mainland to the West, the vast, unreachable sweep of the empire nothing more than a thin line of darker gray on the horizon at the farthest limit of a sailor’s eye. Even a Thebin like Llesho would drown before he reached that shore. Kwan-ti knew that some desperate souls sought rest in the jaws of the great sea dragon, but Llesho, for all his difficult arrogance, would never choose the dark path of death and rebirth this early in his life. He had seen only fifteen summers, and cruelty still had the power to surprise him.

  Figuring where Llesho was not didn’t help find him, however, so Kwan-ti tucked a lock of faded hair back into its knot and stepped out into the drizzle. “Have you seen him, Tsu-tan?” she asked the man squatting under the protective shelter of a coconut palm with a pearl basket in front of him.

  “He’s tending the beds, old woman.” Tsu-tan didn’t bother to look up from the flat basket in which he was sorting pearls by size. “You won’t see Llesho on dry land until his quarter-shift is done.”

  “That will be too late.” Kwan-ti smoothed her tapa printed skirts with worried hands. Although the pearl beds lay well beyond sight, Kwan-ti stared in their direction as if she could conjure them—and the boy, Llesho. Which perhaps she could, if she wanted to take a swim with an anvil chained to her neck. Chin-shi, the Lord of Pearl Island, frowned on conjuration, however, so no one knew for certain whether Kwan-ti had such powers or simply followed her mother’s recipes for medicines like a good Islander.

  “Always too late,” she muttered under her breath.

  Tsu-tan, shaking his basket in gentle circles, paid close attention to Kwan-ti’s muttering even though he pretended otherwise. He did not know what she meant, what other time Llesho had been too late, or if the old woman thought that she had come too late to call the boy, or to cure the old man’s fever. Still, it was one more clue. He hid it away with the others in the puzzle box of his mind he reserved for witch-finding, which was his true calling.

  Returning to the longhouse that served as slave quarters for the pearl fisheries, Kwan-ti made her way to the low pallet she had set up in the corner for the old man. The boy would be too late, of course. Already the old man’s skin had grown ashen and powdery with the dry heat that burned him up inside. He picked fretfully at his blanket and his eyes, long glazed over with the hard white shells of cataracts, wandered in his head as if they could find the boy and see him one more time before he exchanged this life for his next on the wheel.

  “Llesho?” Lleck’s voice rattled in his throat. He gasped for breath, exhausted by the effort it took him to call for the boy. As soon as he was able, he called again, “Llesho! You must find them!”

  “Who, Lleck?” Kwan-ti asked him softly. “Tell me who I must find.” Llesho’s voice had not fully deepened yet; she hoped that the old man might mistake her own vo
ice for the boy he called so piteously.

  “Your brothers.” Lleck grasped her hand and pushed it away again, seeking the longer fingers and callused fingertips of the boy. “You must find your brothers.”

  “I will, old friend.” Kwan-ti took his hand in a firm clasp and stilled its seeking, stroked the forehead burning with dry heat. “Rest easy. I will find them.”

  “Goddess go with you.” With a last whispered breath, the old one cast aside the shell of his worn-out body, leaving Kwan-ti to wonder, what brothers had the boy Llesho, and what mischief might she unwittingly set in motion if she gave the boy his mentor’s message?

  The two had not arrived in the camp together. Thebin, high in the mountains of the mainland, bred a short, sturdy people accustomed to the thin cold air of the heights. The children, if carefully trained in the richer atmosphere near the sea, had the breath to remain underwater for up to half an hour without surfacing to refill their lungs. To the ignorant, the skill was a sign that the children had magical powers born of a sea that the gods had raised higher than the mountains of Shan to make the door to heaven. Pearl ers knew the Thebins to be as human as any man, but with a skill for breathing that made them efficient at scooping pearl oysters out of the bay.

  Llesho had come to Pearl Island in a shipment of Thebin children bought from Harn slave traders for training as divers. The boy had been seven summers in age then, with a dazed expression that soon marked him as soft in the head. He never spoke, and though he followed directions well enough, he could not even feed himself without being told to lift his spoon, and again, lift his spoon. From the start he walked the bay without fear, however, so Foreman Shen-shu considered him worth the effort to train.

  Gradually, awareness of his surroundings had returned to Llesho’s eyes. Then, one day he laughed at one of Lling’s jokes, and his recovery from whatever had stunned his brain seemed complete. If he held his head at too arrogant a tilt or his eyes sometimes glittered with a light too hard and bleak for his youth, a joke or a curse would remind him of his place. Over time he passed out of notice, just another Thebin slave child with salt water in his hair and sand between his toes.

  When Llesho reached the age of ten, Lleck appeared. Chin-shi had purchased the aging Thebin for his claims to understand the special ailments of the pearl divers. Lleck quickly made himself useful about the camp, tending to the needs not only of the Thebins, but of those Pearl Islanders willing to accept the advice of one who, it was whispered, had trained in the secret knowledge of eternal life to be found in the far mountains. From his first day in the camp, Lleck had taken a special interest in the boy Llesho, teaching him to read and write using a stick in the damp sand, and showing him the way of herbs in Thebin healing. Some felt that Llesho must pay for this attention with his body, but the longhouse offered no privacy, and pairings of every kind were both visible and audible to whoever had a bed nearby. No one had ever seen Lleck visit the boy Llesho in the dark, nor had Llesho ever been seen to make nighttime visits to Lleck.

  The women, for the most part, felt that Lleck must be the boy’s true father. Lleck, they reasoned, had followed his son into slavery to protect and raise the boy even at the cost of his own freedom. They admired such devotion of father and son, and while some grew jealous of the two, for the most part the connection between them remained hidden, one of the small conspiracies that all slave compounds nurture in defiance of their masters. And now, Lleck was dead. Kwan-ti remembered the arrogance and the bitterness that lay dormant at the heart of young Llesho, and a shudder of foreboding rippled through her. “Find your brothers.” What was the old man unleashing with his message? How could the boy, tied for life to the pearl beds and the island, obey his mentor’s strange command?

  At that very moment, Llesho had finished his half hour of rest in the pearl harvesting boat, and was returning to the bay for his next half hour in the water. Naked, as were all the pearl-divers, he sat on the red-painted deck of the harvest boat and snapped the iron shackles around his ankles. The collar chain that tethered him to the boat never came off during his quarter-shift, but the shackles around his ankles were his own choice. The extra weight helped to steady him when he walked the floor of the bay. At the end of his half-hour shift underwater, when he had not enough air in his lungs to swim to the surface under his own power, he would run the chain through the shackles and let the winch draw him up by his feet. On his first day in the bay Llesho had scorned the shackles, but he’d only needed to be dragged onto the boat by his neck once to realize the wisdom of using the ankle chain.

  With the shackles in place, he stood at the edge of the boat and waited for the foreman to hand him the tool he would use this shift. A bag would mean he was collecting the oysters most likely to hide pearls, but this time Shen-shu handed him a muck rake. With the implement in his hand, he took one, two, three deep breaths, and stepped off the side of the boat. When his feet touched water, he raised his arms over his head, the rake held close to his side, and plunged like an arrow to the bottom of the bay. Lling was already there, staking out their piece of the oyster beds and protecting it from the encroaching teams that worked about them. She raked up the muck so that the nutrients filled the water with a roiling cloud. Hmishi followed after, landing almost on top of Lling’s shoulders. Soon Llesho’s two companions had turned the chore into a game of tridents, clashing their rakes together in mock battle while Llesho watched from just enough distance to set him apart from the game. Early in his training his watchful, quiet nature had earned him the fear and suspicion of his fellow slaves. But he spoke to the foreman and guards no more than he did to his fellow divers, and eventually they accepted the distance he kept as part of his personality. Better that than question the dark shadows in his eyes that occasionally blotted out the here and now. The growing acceptance of his fellow captives seemed to creep into Llesho’s bones and make him over as a part of them.

  The mock contest of trident-rakes stirred up as much of a silty cloud as if the combatants had applied themselves to their task with all the seriousness they showed when the foreman Shen-shu dove into the bay to check on them. Today, however, Shen-shu had worn a fresh white robe and shoes on his feet, a sure sign that the workers in the water below would have no surprise inspections on this quarter-shift. That left the Thebin slaves to their contest, and to the more difficult task of making Llesho laugh.

  Hmishi had taken the offensive and tangled the teeth of his rake in those of the tool Lling flung about as a weapon. Lling lost control of her rake and waved her hand in submission for this round. Her eyes burned with the curses bursting to explode from her lips. Llesho winked, giving her the advantage in the second contest: he wanted to laugh, but fought the impulse for the same reasons Lling fought her desire to swear—they needed to conserve air, and Hmishi would not have heard them anyway through the bubbles they would release in the attempt.

  Still struggling against the urge to laugh, Llesho turned away from the antics of his friends. He was shocked to see an old man drifting toward him over the low mounds of pearl oysters. The old man wore many layers of robes and gowns that floated about him like a school of multicolored fish. He had dark hair and clear blue eyes that reminded Llesho of a distant sky, as unlike the sky over Pearl Island as those blue eyes were unlike the hard white marbles of Lleck’s cataracts. That he was Lleck, or some transformed apparition of Lleck, was certain, however, and Llesho gasped in horror.

  The sudden breath should have killed him, since both he and the ghost were floating underwater. Instead of the terrifying pain of drowning, however, Llesho felt only crisp, clean air. Thinner than he had grown accustomed to at sea level, the breath that invigorated him reminded him of home—the mountains, the snow, the overwhelming cold. The spirit in the water drew closer, and Llesho shook his head, refusing to believe the truth this apparition forced upon him: Lleck was dead.

  “Forgive me for leaving you, my prince.” The youthful spirit addressed him in Lleck’s voice, using the ti
tle Llesho had not heard since the Harn had invaded Thebin and sold the princeling child into slavery. Llesho heard the words clearly, as if he stood on Thebin’s high plateau, taking his lessons in the queen’s garden and not among the sea creatures of the bay. He wondered if he, too, had passed into the kingdom of the dead.

  “I had hoped to live to see you grown, to know that you had been returned to your rightful place. But age and fever have no respect for an old man’s wishes.” Did the spirits of the dead feel remorse? It sounded as if the king’s minister might, but Lleck was smiling at him, a wry acknowledgment that life and all its hopes and concerns were behind him now.

  “I have no rightful place,” Llesho answered bitterly, his words as clear as the spirit’s, and he felt no lack of air to argue further. “I am the last of an old and broken house, destined to die at the bottom of the bay.”

  “Not the last,” Lleck told him. “Your father they killed, yes. But your brothers still live, carried into distant provinces and sold into slavery, each told the others had been slain.”

  Since that described Llesho’s own fate, he found his mentor’s words difficult to deny. A new feeling kindled in his breast, so alien to his experience that Llesho did not recognize it for hope.

  “My sister?” He could not look the spirit of the minister in the eye, for fear of what he would see there. As a small and spoiled prince he had hated Ping, the infant who had taken his place in his mother’s lap. When Llesho was five, he had created an uproar in the court by stealing out of the Palace of the Sun with the intent, he informed the gatekeeper, of setting the newborn princess on the mountainside as a gift for the gods. When the guard had advised him that tigers were more common than gods on the mountain, Llesho had informed him that a tiger would do. Ping had been two years old when the invasion had come, of little use to the Harn as a slave or a hostage. With the wisdom that comes of being fifteen, however, Llesho would have given his life to keep her safe.