Read Online Restoration (Rai Kirah) by Carol Berg - Free Book Online

truly love him. No others could he trust to guard his back.
    Derzhi custom required the disposition of a corpse no more and no less than one day after death. Desert life demanded quick resolution, but the gods had to be served, too, and by allowing the sun to rise on the lifeless body, one allowed the gods to see clearly what had come to pass. Perhaps it gave them a chance to intervene if they desired.
    Such speedy disposition precluded most of the powerful from attending Ivan’s rites, as it would take weeks for the principal heged lords to travel from their widespread holdings. But every heged was required to maintain a household in Zhagad and to have at least one male relative in direct line of its first lord living there at all times. These were not hostages, of course; the idea of hostages from their own houses was repugnant to the Derzhi. They were informants, conveyors of the Emperor’s pleasure to their honored families. And each household had its own garrison, sized in proportion to the importance of the house and available to serve at the Emperor’s command. But whatever the reasons and explanations, as a result, all Derzhi families were represented in the funeral procession. As soon as I had shifted into falcon’s form and made accommodation yet again with altered senses, I flew through the deserted palace toward the sound of the singing, hunting for those I needed to know.
    A torchlit procession wound slowly through the streets of Zhagad toward the desert. Following a row of singers and priests rode troops of Derzhi warriors, from grizzled lords to youths with new braids, all of them wearing the patterned scarves or colored tef-coats of their hegeds. Small groups of red-robed women walked or rode alongside the men, as was their heged custom. At the front of the procession came representatives of the Ten—the most venerable of the two hundred or more Derzhi families—the kayeet-crested Fontezhi, the highly traditional, blue-coated Gorusch, the despicable Nyabozzi, who controlled the slave trade, the Marag in their long green-striped scarves, and the rest of them. The Marag were the family of Aleksander’s wife, and it was the Princess’s downy-cheeked, sixteen-year-old brother, Damok, who led the Marag warriors. Behind the Ten rode the remainder of the Council of Twenty, hegeds not so ancient as the Ten, but some of them even wealthier and more powerful, like the Hamraschi. The Council had little true power; the Emperor’s word was absolute in every instance. But every heged had its legions of warriors, and strength was everything to the Derzhi.
    After the Twenty, some fifty or sixty people marched chained together—one for each of the lands and peoples subject to the Empire. The sullen prisoners—some young, some old, all gaping stupidly at the crowds—were people of no significance. The kings and nobles, wisewomen and chieftains of the conquered lands had all been slaughtered, their noble lineage vanished into history. Many of the long-defeated peoples like the Suzaini, the Manganar, and the Thrid were no longer enslaved, and now formed the working heart of the Empire. But the Emperor kept one prisoner of each race, picked at random and held until death in his dungeons as a symbol of his domination, and they were paraded through the streets on occasions such as this.
    The Emperor’s heged, the Denischkari, followed the prisoners. Beside Edik rode the short, square-shouldered Kiril, his face like stone, and a handsome older woman dressed in flowing red—Kiril’s mother, no doubt, the Princess Rahil. Rahil had married for love, so Aleksander had told me, to the younger son of a minor house. The marriage was an intolerable disgrace to her family. On the day Kiril was born, Rahil’s brother, the Emperor, had sent her husband into a battle where the young noble was certain to die. Rahil had never spoken to Ivan again, though the Emperor had lavished on Kiril the father’s fondness he had withheld from