attack the Citadel from within. So he built this. Now, when the shit gets within fifty feet of the bottom of the chute, we switch to a new chute. We let that first one sit until it’s all soil. Then the pit slaves cart it up and the guards sell it for fertilizer. Course, I got to use all the chutes at least once a day so they don’t rust up and so the pit slaves can’t tell where the soil is firm under a few inches of crap and where the soup is deep enough to drown in. When Arry went down, I switched up the chutes so he’d have a chance.”
“How fast can you do that?” Dorian asked.
Tobby tsked and pulled the third and the eighth lever and pulled the last chain. It took him about three seconds.
Dorian whistled, fixing the positions in his mind. “What happened to him?”
“He gave some shit to one of the meisters down there. Can’t say I blame him, after what he’d been through.”
“Sounds like he had a shitty day.” Dorian felt dirty for the pun.
“Uh huh,” Tobby said, not catching it. “Two meisters guard the pit slaves. It don’t make ’em happy. They don’t take no shit. They turned Arry inside out.” He shook his head, somber. A moment later he grinned. “They don’t take no shit, huh? Huh?” He punched Dorian’s arm.
Dutifully, Dorian laughed. I could take two meisters.
When Dorian returned from emptying the crap pots, the concubines were keening. Dorian had never heard anything like it. He set the crap pot down and stared at Hopper.
“It’s the Godking,” the old man whispered, frozen by the sound from the next room. “We just got news. He’s dead.”
Dorian’s heart stopped. My father’s dead.
He wandered into the great room of the harem in a daze. Nearly two hundred women were gathered in the cold marble luxury of the place. They were tearing their clothes, ripping out their hair, beating their naked breasts, scratching bloody furrows in alabaster skin. Black tears rolled from kohled eyes. Some had flung themselves on the floor, weeping uncontrollably. Others had fainted.
In grief as in love and in drink, Dorian’s people were extravagant, but these women’s tears were not for show. They had all lived in awe and terror of the Godking, and few of them would have dared love him. None of his favorite concubines were here. No one would report who had wept and who had not. But His Holiness had been the center around which their lives revolved. Without that center, everything collapsed.
They would be compelled to throw themselves on Garoth’s pyre to accompany him into the afterlife and be his slaves forever. And Garoth had always liked his women young.
Dorian saw one beautiful girl, Pricia. She was barely fourteen and just past her flowering, sitting alone, staring into space. She was still a virgin. Yorbas Zurgah had intended her as a present to the Godking when He arrived home.
“You have a chance,” Dorian told her woodenly. “The next Godking might claim you.”
“All my friends are going to die,” Pricia said, not even looking at him.
Her answer shamed him. She hadn’t been thinking of herself. This place was starting to make him think cynically, like the old Dorian.
The other implications of Garoth’s death pounded Dorian a moment later. The Godking had left no clear heir, and whichever aetheling succeeded him would certainly kill off the others. If the concubines knew of Garoth’s death, the aethelings would soon, if they didn’t already.
Jenine!
Dorian burst into the eunuchs’ room where he’d left Hopper.
“Get them all out of here,” he ordered the old man. “Start with the virgins.”
“What?”
“Hide them in my room. At least one of the aethelings will try to seize the Godking’s harem as a declaration that he should be the next Godking. Or the guards may go crazy. You can’t hide all of them, but at least the virgins will have a chance to be claimed by the next Godking. If they get raped, they’ll die with the others.”
Hopper nodded at once. “Done,” he said.
Dorian ran up the TygreTower. The dreads guarding at the base of the tower were gone, and his heart dropped. He sprinted up the steps three at a time. He heard raised voices as he came up the last twenty steps. “ . . . come, or I hurt you and then you come.”
“All right,” Jenine said, defeated.
The latch had been melted off the door. The fucker. It was Tavi, come to violate