This is a terrible plan and I am most certainly going to die, I thought, as I strode purposefully up the palace steps.

  The only question was: when Dreadwolf found me out and cut me to pieces on the floor of the palace, would it stop there, or would the Demon hunt down and kill my entire family? Maybe I should have sent a note to warn my father.

  Beneath the moonlight, I had been able to hear the whinnies of a herd of spirited horses crammed into a courtyard somewhere nearby and the guard at the gate had been so drunk he had to squint at me through one eye in order to recognize me.

  As I entered the palace itself, told an attendant my business, and followed them toward where the Prime Minister was spending his evening, I looked around to see that the palace did indeed seem understaffed, but not quite as deserted as I had hoped. At least this plot didn’t call for me to skulk in like an assassin. I walked into the Imperial Residence with my head held high, my purpose and my position better camouflage than any cover of darkness.

  Wait, the Imperial Residence? As I stood outside the massive – and recently repaired – wooden door adorned in five golden dragons with five-colored sets of eyes I paused and turned to the attendant.

  “I asked to see the Prime Minister, not the Emperor,” I said.

  The attendant nodded and bowed to hide a stricken look on his face.

  “Dreadwolf is in the Imperial Residence?”

  The man nodded and bowed lower.

  “The Emperor?” I asked.

  The man shook his head vigorously, his head almost touching his knees.

  “Ok,” I said, trying to understand how ashamed the palace staff must be to witness Dreadwolf ousting the Emperor from the Imperial bedchambers. “Thank you, you may go.”

  The man turned to go, still hiding his face.

  “Wait,” I said before the man disappeared down the maze of corridors.

  He paused without turning.

  Making a calculated risk, I said, “Our business may take some time. You won’t be needed until at least the next watch.”

  The man paused, clearly considering this order, and if it might be possible to follow it given his other duties. Then he nodded, and I dare say as he turned a corner I saw on his face… excitement? Perhaps morbid glee?

  Not very sly, I thought to myself bitterly. I had basically gone and confessed the plot to the first attendant I saw. But that person would either run straight to a superior and report me, or had already decided to leave me to my devices.

  For the first time, I felt I was getting a glimpse at just how powerful attendants, servants, and chambermaids could be. For the first time I understood how the Ten Imperial Attendants had so thoroughly snatched power away from the men with massive armies and powerful Mandates. For the first time, I understood just how valuable River’s eyes in the palace truly were, whoever they might be.

  Alone in the corridor before the grand double doors of the Five Dragon Quarters, I looked to the only other person in attendance, a giant of a man, slumped on a stool in the corner by the door. I walked over and plucked the jug from his hands. It was fine porcelain decorated in blue cloud motifs. Skylands wine. And – seeing no cup nearby – I surmised the man had been drinking straight from the jug.

  He grumbled, and without opening his eyes snatched at the wine.

  I chuckled grimly as I handed it back to him. “To your health then, my friend.”

  The giant raised one arm – it might have been thicker than my waist – and tipped the jug back, throat bobbing until it was empty and he smashed the fine porcelain on the ground. He did all of this without opening his eyes and then folded his mammoth arms across his massive chest to settle back into his slumber.

  I reached for the Imperial knocker, still unsure if I would be able to follow Celestial Master’s plan, still unsure if I would ever leave this place alive.

  My hand shook, my pulse pounded, my ears wrung like the high-pitched spinning of coins in the Hall of Sixty-Four.

  I paused and placed my head to the door. By happenstance my forehead rested on the cool golden body of a dragon with eyes of jet, while I sent up a prayer under my breath. “Heaven, Black Star, let me make it out of here and return to my River. If Celestial Master is right, let me slay this beast. And if he is wrong, let the wolf be none the wiser.”

  With that, I stepped back, composed myself, and lifted the knocker to drop it with a resounding boom. I waited in silence.

  The eventual response was somewhere between a grunt and a gurgle. “Ugh. Enter.”

  I shoved on the door, watching the massive guard to see if he stirred – he did not – and then closed the door behind me afterwards. I was just thinking that it was no wonder that he kept such a muscular man at his door, when I looked up to pause at the scene before me.

  I had been in this room, of course, back when Noble Lion and I had thought to rescue the former Emperor from the abduction of the Ten, but where we had once seen a dragon couch comically large for a little boy, now I found it filled to capacity.

  There were perhaps two dozen writhing bodies, pale limbs and… other extremities… entangled to such a degree that I could not make out one body from another, or man from woman.

  The Prime Minister himself was not so entangled, but lounged in a nearby, secondary couch in nothing but a single-layered robe. He didn’t bother to tie it as I entered, nor did he deign to interrupt… whatever he was doing to himself.

  Needless to say, I was horrified. It was not just that a minister had taken over his Emperor’s quarters, nor that he had defiled them so. These of course were an affront to tradition and possibly even to Heaven itself. But I was also personally, physically horrified by the man that sprawled before me. Dreadwolf had been built like a warlord when I had first seen him a year ago, lithe and powerful in his armor and furs, but now… well, how to put this… now he was a fat man with a flaccid little prick.

  Every crisp robe of office he wore in court, every armor plate and pelt layered on at parade, every patterned, billowing robe he wore while walking the palace, they had all been designed to hide his lack of virtue, but here he was, debauchery incarnate, laid bare for me to see.

  Dreadwolf finally gave up on what he was doing with his hands and turned to me.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  “Ah, Sparrow,” he said, reaching for a cup instead. A chambermaid – clothed but only just – filled it for him and retreated. “Drink?”

  I could not refuse. He eyed me as I drank, but I knew this game already and emptied my cup along with him.

  “Good lad,” said Dreadwolf. “You like what you see?” He gestured magnanimously over the Five Dragon Couch, men and women sighing and moaning before us.

  “My lord, I-”

  “Oh, relax Sparrow!” Dreadwolf said. “You could do with a woman… No? A man? Ever had a man, Sparrow? Boy, maybe? What is it you do with yourself? I’m told you always go straight back to your house from the Ministry of Finance. You’re not married, I know. Maybe you have a few secret concubines, eh.”

  Was that a question? If so, was it rhetorical? Surely that was rhetorical. When the silence stretched too long, I said, “Um, no my lord.”

  I wasn’t sure to which of the questions that answer applied, but I thought perhaps a general “no” to just about everything he had said would suffice… And be too vague for a True Sight Mandate to pinpoint.

  He peered deep into my eyes after I answered, as if peering into a well. I did my best to hold his gaze and keep my mind from River, if somehow that was how his Mandate worked.

  Finally he laughed, throaty and fat.

  I myself let out a breath of relief, and allowed myself a polite, uneasy smile. He had not spotted any lie. River remained safe, as far as I could tell.

  “I was wondering who he’d send,” said the fat man as he turned his attention back to the writhing bodies in his bed and resumed his grotesque self-administrations.

  He? I thought. Oh, yes. I looked down to the purpose of my visit, or the supposed purpose of my visit: Noble Lion’s sword. I was meant to be delivering it to the wolf as a sign of the lion’s subservience. Right. I lifted the sword as if seeing it for the first time.

  SEVEN BODY SWORD

  TYPE: Straight-sword

  WEAPON RANK: 17th

  LORE: Forged in the time of the Dark Interregnum, from starmetal of all five roving stars, and blessed by the sun and the moon simultaneously, this blade was wielded in defense of the true Emperor and is a sacred heirloom of the Golden Lion clan.

  LAST KNOWN OWNER: Noble Lion of the Golden Lion clan

  It was a valuable treasure in and of itself and I was perhaps the only conspirator who wondered what sort of price it might fetch. Was it enough to set me and River up for the rest of our lives, rankless in the Land of the Shepherds or beyond?

  To men like Lion and Wolf, it was a trifle, a symbol only. To Dreadwolf it meant only dominance over a rival, nothing more. Perhaps that was why he hadn’t realized he had been inviting an armed assassin into his bedchambers, when he had demanded the sword be delivered.

  Or perhaps he was that desperate for a sense of legitimacy that he would allow the breach in security if it meant earning an heirloom from a storied clan.

  In any case, now was the time to strike.

  The wolf was distracted, his back to me, unguarded and unarmed, and I could see the rolls of his neck-fat sweating and exposed as he tried to masturbate. I unsheathed the sword, and though many of the orgy participants no doubt placed the sound of rasping steel, and could have easily looked up to spot me, they were all well trained in the art of pleasure and chose not to be distracted. Dreadwolf himself however would have recognized the sound of a sword being drawn anywhere. He had at one time been a battlefield commander, a conqueror, a warlord, after all. His gaze flicked to me and he grunted a question.

  I kept my eyes fixed firmly on the blade in my hand as I turned it over.

  “You know,” I said as I held out the naked steel to inspect the length of it, “He never let anyone hold it but him. Until you ordered him to relinquish it, that is.”

  He grunted and turned back to the orgy as I gave Lion’s sword a few test cuts through the air. Only then did I turn my attention back to the fat man and where I would strike. I was only two paces away. Two quick steps and a cut I had practiced a million times then it would all be over. The Emperor could rule once more and the Land Under Heaven could return to normal.

  But that wouldn’t be the end of it for me. That would be the end of the horror and the freak show that had taken over the capital, yes. That would be the end of the cruelty and debauchery in the palace, and that would be the end of the corruption throughout the land. Or at least it would be reduced to its normal ‘acceptable’ levels. That would be the end of the threat to the lands of Lion and Stallion and my own father. Dreadwolf’s slaughter would be the end of the struggle for the palace, the nobility, and the commoners alike.

  But not for me. For the slayer of the Prime Minister, this wouldn’t end here. An assassin could never be tolerated to live, even when they had struck so noble a blow as this. One of these people, naked on the bed and intent on their craft as they were, would talk. Someone would sell me to the highest bidder, or trade the information for a promotion in their own hierarchy, and I would be caught, dragged from River’s side, and summarily put to death.

  There it was.

  Kill Dreadwolf now, and I would never see River again. Kill Dreadwolf now, and the pawn would be sacrificed. No one would cry for one lost piece in a grander game.

  The blade rang as I swished it one more time, then I slammed it back into the scabbard and knelt before the Prime Minister.

  Dreadwolf paused, looked me directly in the eye, and it looked for all the world as if he drew upon a Mandate. But I felt nothing. No scent. No aura. Nothing. He indeed had no Mandate from Heaven, but I had already decided not to be the one to kill him. I had already lost my chance.

  He snatched the sword from my hands and struggled to sit up.

  “Begone! All of you!” he bellowed.

  Like magic, the moaning and sighing halted at the exact same moment and the bodies untangled themselves to flee from the room. It took a moment for the wave of perfumed flesh to recede, and all the while I kept my head bowed.

  Then I did feel an aura, a feral, acrid one that I could only vaguely identify as a gift from the Red Star. What’s more, I had felt this aura before, first at a horrid banquet, but many times over throughout the last year. Many a court minister and would-be assassin had perished horribly, surrounded by this stench of fear.

  The Demon stepped out from behind the Dragon Couch, long halberd in hand, bloodthirsty sword at his hip. And he was armored for battle. His aura washed over me in full.

  A trap? It had been a trap from the first! If I had taken that first step toward Dreadwolf with sword bared, would I now be dragging my entrails across the Imperial Bedchamber?

  “You’ve likely heard that I have no Mandate,” said the wolf. “You likely know my reading and my prophecy, just like the rest of those bookworms and pencil pushers in the courts.”

  He flung a card at me, greasy and stained with wine-rings from his goblet. It was the dossier card the Imperial Minister of Heralds kept on all of the powerful players within the Land under Heaven, but I didn’t linger on it. I knew what it would say.

  Wave after wave of the Demon’s Mandate pounded into me. Fear. His Mandate was pure terror and I was incapable of stopping myself from trembling, just as I had been that first time we locked eyes across a banquet table. I was incapable even from moving my lips to refute Dreadwolf’s claims of my disloyalty.

  “Do you know what my reading was?”

  I couldn’t so much as twitch my head in the affirmative or negative. Surely this question was rhetorical.

  “Inner Truth,” said Dreadwolf. “You’ve heard this haven’t you?”

  Still I could do nought but tremble. Fear. Nothing but acrid animal terror.

  “But it's not the Inner Truth they think it is. Tell truth from lies, read intentions, look into a man’s soul and read their thoughts. Bah!” He waved a hand. “That’s all hogwash. You want to know the greatest power of all? Better than any magic trick from the stars. It's being able to look at yourself and know, without a shadow of a doubt, who you are, and what you are. I know what I am, Sparrow,” said the wolf. “I know what I’m capable of. Can you say the same?”

  The aura of terror began to ebb and I got that sense that I could only shake my head because the Demon was allowing me to.

  Dreadwolf snorted and his stubby finger shot out. “That’s why I’m here and you’re there. And you’ll stay down there for as long as I want you to.” There was a long pause just to prove his point. And he was right. I didn’t move an inch until he smiled, then grumbled, “Now, begone!”

  The Demons aura struck like a lash and it was all I could do to keep my feet as I rose and retreated from the room. After a few backtracking steps I turned and scurried to the door just as all the naked attendants had, and pulled at the heavy latch as if my life depended upon it. I wouldn’t have stopped there – so greatly had I succumbed to the animal urge of flight that I would have flat out run for my life all the way to River’s mansion – had the attendant who had led me here not been waiting within the passage.

  And he held a message.