‘Of course, it would be my pleasure, but why?’ Khaled said.
‘You’re questioning me again, my Kontoi. Is that wise, do you think?’ she said without turning around.
‘I merely wish to understand your grand strategy, milady,’ Khaled said.
Neferata smiled briefly. ‘My strategy, dear Khaled, is to learn all that I can in order to ensure that our new kingdom survives longer than the last.’
The door thumped. Neferata turned. ‘Ah. And here comes another source of information now. Stay here. I will see him alone.’
She left her private rooms and entered the audience chamber. She strode swiftly to the door and threw it open, startling the two guards Ushoran had posted in the corridor. They eyed her cautiously, having been part of her predecessor’s guard. They had seen what she had done to Strezyk, and she could smell their fear.
‘Milady, Thane Silverfoot–’
‘Thane Silverfoot wants a drink. D’you fancy a drink, Neferata of Lahmia?’ Razek said, stepping past her into the room. He looked at the barren chamber and snorted. ‘Do you even have anything to drink?’
Amused, Neferata nodded to the guards and closed the door. One of them would doubtless be reporting to Ushoran. She turned to face the dwarf. ‘I believe there’s something in Strezyk’s cabinets, yes.’ She moved to the cabinets and plucked out a clay jug that sloshed promisingly. It had dust on it. She handed it to Razek, who pulled the cork with his teeth and took a swig. He made a face as he swallowed it.
‘Terrible,’ he said.
‘Yes, I expect so. Strezyk seems to have been deplorably lacking in taste.’
‘I heard he had an accident,’ Razek said gruffly. He looked uncomfortable. Neferata knew that the dwarf was still feeling put out. Messages had been sent to Silver Pinnacle, via methods known only to the dwarf himself, letting King Borri know that his son yet lived. There were a number of dwarf traders and not a few itinerant miners in the city and Neferata suspected that one of them, or even several, had been bullied into taking word to Karaz Bryn.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘And you’ve taken his place.’
‘Also yes,’ she said. Razek looked at her. After a moment, he nodded.
‘Good,’ he said simply.
Neferata smiled. ‘Gold,’ she corrected. ‘That is what this is about, I understand.’
Razek stared at the flames. ‘My people are interested in opening proper trade with Mourkain,’ he said.
‘Is it your people,’ she asked, ‘or your king?’
‘Not just him,’ he said.
‘You don’t approve,’ she said.
‘I have a longer memory, even when it comes to gold. We used to trade with Mourkain many years ago as you manlings judge things. Back when Kadon was running the works,’ Razek said. He shuddered slightly. ‘Brrr, he was a bad one, old Kadon. Sour, like a bad patch of tunnel, and touched in the head.’ He tapped his head for emphasis.
Intrigued, Neferata let him talk. Ushoran had been stubbornly close-mouthed when it came to his coup; at least she assumed that it had been a coup. He had always been a plotter, her Lord of Masks. It was just too bad that his plots always unravelled in the end.
‘They said he found something down deep in the dark, and that it spoke to him and broke him,’ Razek said in a faraway voice, as if reciting a children’s bedtime story. ‘Dwarfs know about that sort of thing. We know better than any man or elf what gnaws at the roots of the mountains and what coils in the dark beneath the world.’ He tipped the jug and the contents dribbled into his beard. ‘He used the dead,’ Razek spat. ‘That’s what did it. He forced the dead to serve him. That’s a power no mortal should have, let alone a creature like mad, bad Kadon.’
Neferata sat silently, digesting this new fact. She thought again of the black sun, and the voice like needles on bone. She suspected that it had spoken to Abhorash, but Ushoran? If he wasn’t the cause, what was? The stones beneath her feet seemed to tremble like the flank of a purring cat. It wasn’t a pleasant sensation. ‘But things are different now,’ she said, prodding gently.
He grunted. ‘King Borri feels that what’s done is done.’
‘Not a very dwarf-like attitude,’ she said.
Razek looked at her. ‘Careful, woman, any other dwarf would have taken that for an insult. No, my father is practical. It’s why he made me his hearth-warden, after all.’
‘A prince and a spymaster,’ Neferata said. ‘Impressive.’