Upon hearing the news, Kwasin became distraught. In his wanderings, he had spread his seed far and wide with little thought of consequence for either mother or potential offspring. But now Kwasin began to feel differently, and a great worry seized him at the possibility that Minruth would murder his future son or daughter, or worse yet, raise the child as his own. He was not sure what had changed in him to cause these unfamiliar pangs of conscience, but the more he thought of the danger looming over his unborn child, the deeper also seemed to grow his feelings for the child’s mother. That realization shook him more than anything. Kwasin, while always a great lover, had never known love. Always had he been a free spirit, eager to share his insatiable desire with as many women as he possibly could. Why then should his heart gallop like a crazed rhino at the merest thought of Awineth? With perhaps the exception of the fair Lalila, the woman was as beautiful as any he had known—but the world was full of beautiful women! And besides, Awineth was a bitch, a she-devil like none other! Still, though the mind argued, the heart—always the strongest of beasts—won out. He could not deny that, against his better judgment, he had somehow lowered his emotional guard to the woman.

  The hearsay from the palace only made Kwasin work harder to grate his bronze chains against the granite walls of his prison as he attempted to saw down his fetters. Once he had weakened them enough, he would wait for an opportune moment. Then he would strike and, even if he did not escape, at least many guards would die before he was killed or subdued.

  Kwasin also learned through the grapevine that the newly ordained order of Kho, propped up in Awineth’s name, had all but caused the College of Priestesses to collapse. This did not prevent the priestesses’ network from going underground and operating in clandestine fashion among the common people. Vague murmurings of the network’s existence came occasionally to Kwasin through his fellow slaves, though he received no direct communication from the priestesses. Then one day something happened that made him realize he had merely been too deaf to hear the priestesses’ messages. It also made him reevaluate the worth of Bhako, that constantly chattering, ever bothersome bard.

  Kwasin had been single-handedly pulling a massive granite block up one of the great ramparts of dirt that angled up along the walls of the Great Tower, trying to ignore the dozens of spectators who congregated on a large wooden viewing platform and often volleyed insults at him. Minruth had ordered the platform to be constructed atop the massive stone wall penning in the tower workers, desiring to broadcast to the island, and indeed the entire empire, that the once mighty Kwasin was now his slave. The King of Khokarsa had gone so far as to issue travel vouchers to anyone who wished to come from afar and see his famous captive. That Minruth had placed a heavy tax upon the vouchers, one which served to cancel out any benefit to the travelers, was not advertised. In fact, many of those ensnared by Minruth’s voucher program now resided in the capital as indentured servants, forced to become slaves themselves because they had spent too many nasuhno on their trip and gone into debt. In this way, Minruth increased his already great number of stonemasons, brickmakers, carpenters, foundrymen, ropemakers, surveyors, artisans, stevedores, warehouse workers, scribes, bakers, brewers, and cooks contributing to the effort to finish the tower.

  But on this day, without warning, all work on the tower suddenly halted. The guards yelled up at Kwasin to leave the granite block he had been hauling where it lay. This despite the fact he had dragged his burden only halfway up its rampart and stopping now might cause the block’s wooden sledge to become lodged on the dirt-and-gravel concourse. Cursing because he knew he would later be the one ordered to get the block unstuck, Kwasin slipped out of his harness—though not his heavy bronze chains—and joined the other slaves who were being herded back to their pens. Kwasin was escorted under heavy guard to his pit, where he was lowered down by the crane and shackled to the usual wall inside his cell.

  “Is that your stink I smell, bard?” Kwasin yelled up at the ventilation shaft in his cell’s ceiling.

  “Yes, but I am surprised you can smell me, O King, over your own spicy excretions,” Bhako replied from his own cell.

  Because Kwasin wanted an answer from the nosy bard, whom he had come to rely on for much of his gossip, he held back a crude retort and asked, “Why have all the slaves been given reprieve from today’s labor? Surely you’ve heard something?” “The word among the workers,” Bhako replied, “is that a number of traitors loyal to the Goddess have been planted among the camp guards. The traitors are here, the gossipers say, not to free the slaves, but rather to transmit intelligence from the network of priestesses.” Then Bhako laughed and said, “But they only have it half right.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Perhaps I have already said too much,” Bhako said. “What if guards have been stationed outside to eavesdrop on our conversations?”

  Kwasin would not normally egg on the gregarious bard, who never seemed to tire once he began talking or singing, but now Bhako’s words piqued his curiosity. “I can see the crane through the iron grille in the door of my cell,” Kwasin said. “The guards who brought me here all stood upon the crane’s platform when it was last lifted above. There are no guards to overhear us.”

  When Bhako did not reply, Kwasin cried, “Now you choose to remain silent, when you might actually have something of value to say! I am your king, as you ceaselessly remind me—never mind that I reside in a slave pit, fettered and hobbled so that I must shuffle about like an old woman. And as your king, I order you to speak!”

  Kwasin was about to threaten the bard with an unpleasant accident the next time they were assigned to the same work gang when suddenly Bhako spoke up.

  “I only hesitate to confide in you, my king, because if we are overheard, the well-laid plans of the network of priestesses will have all been for naught. And besides, you’ve been receiving their messages anyway—through me! Haven’t you wondered why I’m such a good gossip? It’s not from listening to the rumormongers or even traitorous guards. No, the secret communications come instead from the very spectators Minruth so vainly parades before us! But King Minruth and his guards are too stupid to understand the messages, even though they are transmitted in plain sight. Or I should rather say within earshot, for the messages come to me through my chosen medium, that of song. Certainly you have heard the women who often come to hector us workers with their derogatory rhymes? But while the insults of the women are only the shallowest sort, much deeper beneath their verse lies a secret message, coded in a type of rhyme, allusion, and meter that only a bard would understand.”

  “You’re saying the priestesses have hidden a message in the obscene limericks hurled at us by the spectators?”

  “Precisely, O King! It is another legacy left by Awines, Dythbeth’s favorite son, and I only know of the secret language because I was once employed by the Temple of Kho in our native city. The priestesses know this, and only today I received a new message from them, one which bears great hope.”

  “Out with it!”

  Bhako paused, and then with joy ringing clearly in his voice proclaimed, “The priestesses say that Awineth has given birth to your child, a boy who because of the thunder of his cries she has named Deth!”

  Kwasin felt as if a god had struck him. “Has it been that long?” he said, his breath suddenly short and his extremities tingling with shock.

  “Indeed! In fact it has been longer than nine months since our imprisonment as slaves to the tower. Queen Awineth gave birth a full month ago, but Minruth has clamped down so hard that the network of priestesses dared not send any messages, even in code.” The bard went on to relate that, on the night of the birth, Minruth had sent two women to take the newborn away from its mother. Awineth’s attending priestesses, however, killed the women and attacked the guards, slaying them. Though most of the priestesses were killed in the struggle, they managed to get both mother and child out of Awineth’s locked room, spiriting them from the palace through secret passageways and tunnels known only to the initiates of Kho.

  “Minruth flew into a rage when he found out,” Bhako continued. “He immediately threw a cordon around the city and began a house-to-house search. But now, a month later, he has still found no one, or at least not those he was looking for.” “What do you mean?” Kwasin shouted up at the shaft. His heart pounded and he had broken into a sweat, notwithstanding the fact that the edges of the great pit shielded their enclosure from the hot glare of the sun and left it relatively cool.

  “You’ve noticed the influx of new slaves of late?” Bhako asked. “They’re the most shameful lot of humanity I’ve ever seen, but now I understand why. The new slaves are composed of the criminal rabble Minruth rounded up during his search of the city. Slaves by nature make poor workers, which is one reason it has taken so long to build the tower—that and the efforts of the priestesses over the centuries to slow its construction. But criminals make even worse slaves than—”

  “Save your philosophizing!” Kwasin bellowed. “What do you know of the queen?” “Sadly, nothing more than I’ve already told you,” Bhako replied. “Even the priestesses who delivered the intelligence to me know nothing. It’s assumed that she is being concealed in a house, or possibly beneath one in an underground room, somewhere in the city. Minruth is still patrolling the city’s residential districts and suburbs, and he has sent spies everywhere, even among the tower workers. No one can be trusted, my king, absolutely no one.”

  Suddenly Bhako announced he had come to a decision. Though it was forbidden to do so without authorization from the priestesses, he had no other choice than to teach his king the secret metaphorical language of Awines. When Kwasin asked why he must learn the code when Bhako could simply translate for him, the bard replied, “What if Minruth should separate us or something unforeseen happened to me? I might fall from the tower by accident or be murdered by someone in the slave gangs. While I am a sacred bard, we are among many felons who would not think twice about harming me. If I were to be killed, you would have no way of communicating with the priestesses.”

  And so for the remainder of their day off from working on the tower, Bhako prattled on about rhymes and riddles and secret messages. Kwasin tried his best to understand the bard’s explanations and examples but, by Hala, what did the man mean when he said that the intervals between the words often meant more than the words themselves? Frustrated by the depth and sophistication of the ancient code, and also anxious because of the information he had received about Awineth, Kwasin finally gave up. He told the bard he would just have to make sure he did not get himself killed.

  Four months passed while Kwasin waited for further word from the priestesses. Meanwhile Minruth redoubled his efforts to complete the Great Tower, bringing in thousands of additional workers utilizing policies that involved bribery, deception, and frequently outright blackmail. The latter consisted of threatening to shut down crucial trade routes and thus deprive both the local island queendoms and those across the two Kemus of vital supplies. During the civil war, access to the salt mines in the Saasares had been disrupted, forcing the empire’s queendoms and outposts to deplete their stores of this essential dietary mineral. Shortly after the war ended, however, the salt trade had been reestablished, and now Minruth garrisoned the mines, denying salt shipments to any city that did not provide for him a certain percentage of their population to serve as laborers on the tower.

  Kwasin’s guards, talking among themselves but loudly enough to be overheard, said that the king’s advisors feared to question Minruth the Mad, even though his obsession with the tower threatened to bankrupt the entire Khokarsan economy. Minruth had begun to propagate the idea that he, as king, was in fact Resu himself, the sungod incarnate. Therefore anyone who questioned the king’s decisions was in reality expressing their lack of faith in Resu. Under the new order imposed by Minruth and his priests, doubt in the sungod itself was an unlawful and punishable offense. If prosecuted, it could lead to imprisonment, heavy fines, and even a sentence of death.

  The guards also brought news from across the island that only worsened Kwasin’s already black mood. It seemed that the northern mountaineers, who had been allowed to colonize Dythbeth after the Klemqaba were through with their pillaging, had proved extremely poor administrators. Inexperienced in the complexities of running a city, they had run Dythbeth’s former prosperity into the ground while the local population died off by the thousands from famine and disease. One of the guards remarked that it would take another hundred years for the population to expand before the city could be rebuilt and restored to its past glory.

  Kwasin’s heart sank upon hearing of the catastrophic demise of his native queendom, and as he heaved load after load of bricks up the tower’s great ramparts, he began to question what he could have done differently to save his city. Perhaps he should have swallowed his pride and sought help from his cousin Hadon. News had recently spread among the tower workers that Hadon was now king of his outpost city. Further, King Hadon supposedly claimed that, as winner of the Great Games, he was still rightfully the king of kings, and it was said that he was rallying the cities along the southern sea to unite against Minruth and attack the island, although the latter may have just been hearsay. But Minruth, according to Kwasin’s guards, believed the rumor. Even now, as the Khokarsan treasury strained under the weight of the tower project, he was raising an army among the subjugated cities of the Kemu to face the alleged threat from the south. Minruth had also ordered Admiral Poedy and his navy to blockade the Strait of Keth, thus preventing any vessels from entering the northern sea.

  But while all of the coastal cities along the Kemu had been vanquished, one of them would not be assisting Minruth in either his military operations or his mad quest to complete the tower. Mukha’s entire population was said to have been slaughtered in retaliation for having secretly sided with Dythbeth during the war while at the same time outwardly claiming allegiance to Minruth. Old King Qanaketh and the entire royal family of Mukha now resided in the dungeons beneath Minruth’s citadel, awaiting a fate unknown.

  The months passed among the tower workers. Twice Kwasin became so frustrated with his situation that he attacked the guards overseeing his work gang, killing three soldiers. Two of the men had been hurled by Kwasin down the face of the tower, while the third soldier’s skull was crushed with a well-slung brick when he made the mistake of removing his helmet in Kwasin’s presence while trying to get at an itch. Normally any such display of violence would have resulted in immediate death for the offending slave, but Minruth had issued orders that Kwasin was not to be harmed.

  Or at least so Kwasin assumed. While he was being escorted back to his pit after the first incident, he asked a guard why he had not been killed on the spot.

  The man, grinning, looked at Kwasin and said, “From what I hear the king has something special in store for you.”

  When Kwasin asked what this was, the man only continued to smile and said no more.

  25

  One day, well over a year and a half into his captivity, Kwasin looked up at the Great Tower and realized much to his surprise that the colossal structure was almost complete. Nearly half a millennium had passed since the first stone of the massive ziggurat had been laid down by King Klakor and blessed by Queen Hiindar. Since that time many thousands of men and women had died working on the monument, not a few of them over the past three years alone. The Great Tower of the Kho and Resu—now simply the Great Tower of Resu—^soared majestically into the heavens, its staggered sides rising well over six hundred feet from the half-mile wide base.

  Kwasin shook his mane of hair, as angered and saddened as he was awestruck at the breathtaking testament of blood, sweat, tears, and obsession. He took no pride in the fact that he had contributed to the tower’s construction. To him it represented only the intense anguish of his captivity and the longstanding suffering of the people. Because of the tower—because of Minruth’s mad quest for immortality—Great Kho had been dethroned, many of Her people slaughtered, and the priestesses and their college propped up in a hollow mockery of their former glory. And yet the world went on. The oracle’s prediction of doom for all the land had not come to pass. The sun and moon continued rise and set, the rains came and went, and the great flocks of birds still winged their way across the horizon.

  Now that Minruth’s great project neared its final stages of completion, the majority of the hired artisans and craftsmen working on the tower, as well as a good number of the skilled slaves and indentured workers, were being redeployed to other critical duties in the reconstruction of the postwar empire. Kwasin and Bhako, however, were not posted away from the tower, but rather assigned to the burdensome and backbreaking task of deconstructing the massive ramparts of earth that squared the enormous ziggurat.

  The vast quantities of dirt that needed to be moved out of the city posed a significant logistical problem for the king and his advisors. As the Year of Wenqath the Hero rapidly approached, Minruth wanted the area around the tower cleared posthaste. There was no time to allow for the dirt to be loaded onto galleys and freighted off, especially when the number of ships needed to do that would have choked off both the Gulf of Gahete and the Gulf of Lupoeth for months, appreciably impacting the influx of supplies and foodstuffs necessary to keep the city operating. Besides, Minruth’s navy had suffered greatly during the war and the majority of his remaining fleet was currently occupied in patrolling the southern Kemu.

  A solution was found when a priest in the royal court facetiously remarked that there was enough dirt left to build another great wall around the capital. Minruth seized upon the idea, immediately ordering his engineers to design a broad and tall earthwork barrier beyond the eastern walls of the city at the bottom of Khowot’s slopes. The volcano had last erupted only three years ago, and at that time a sea of lava had washed over and destroyed the sacred oak grove and inundated the large stone-block Temple of Kho. Many yet feared that a future eruption might belch a deluge of death-dealing lava directly into the Inner City itself, killing tens of thousands. So now Minruth sent out his criers throughout the capital to proclaim the barrier to be his gift for the citizens’ patience during the construction of the tower. But the building of the lava wall only added more aggravation to the citizens weary of both war and their king’s vain engineering projects. For months they would have to put up with disruptions caused by the bearers as they hauled one cartload of dirt after another eastward through the heavily populated commercial and residential district on their way out of the city.