Page 22 of Sword Dance

Niko looked doubtful. “Don’t you think she, uh, probably already knows?”

“What do you mean?” Rhea asked innocently.

“Well … ” Niko glanced hopefully at Damiskos. “You know what I mean, sir, don’t you?”

He guessed the boy was suggesting that Aristokles and Nione had arranged some kind of tryst. That seemed completely implausible. If they were together, Nione was not there willingly. But she had been seen going out to the vineyard earlier, so kidnapping didn’t seem likely either. And neither possibility explained why Varazda was still here.

Varazda had said, “I must go dress and attend my master.” He didn’t know—or was pretending not to know—that Aristokles was gone.

“I think,” Damiskos said slowly, “that you should go and speak to your mistress—or I suppose it would be more proper for you to report it to the steward. It may be that she knows all about it, but even if she does, I think she cannot fault you for noticing and being concerned. And if she does not know, well—obviously she will be grateful to you for telling her.”

“You go tell Aradne,” said the boy to Rhea. “She likes you better than me.”

“That’s not true, Niko!”

“You know it is. She’s got an anti-whatyoucall, antithesis to men.”

Rhea snorted. “Oh, and you qualify, do you? Fine, I will go tell her. You take that breakfast tray back to the kitchen.”

Damiskos had noticed that Nione’s household was composed mostly of women. He wondered if Aradne had been in charge of choosing the slaves.

Chapter 6

There was no one in the courtyard of the slave quarters when Damiskos entered for the second time that morning. He had gathered from the way Varazda spoke last night that he wasn't lodged in a dormitory but had his own room, or at least a shared room, which probably meant he was in one of the chambers on the upper level of the slave quarters, their doors opening onto a gallery along the front of the building.

Damiskos laboured up the wooden stairs at the end of the gallery, grateful there was no one in the yard to see how much effort it cost him. He was almost at the top when he glanced up at a noise to see a door halfway along the gallery open and Varazda emerge, in green silk patterned with white roses, with a comb in his hand, his hair still unbraided.

Varazda stood still, watching Damiskos finish climbing the stairs, a dubious expression on his face.

“Aristokles left in the night,” said Damiskos quickly, in Zashian, once he had reached the gallery. “Did you know about it?”

He’d intended to spring this on Varazda to catch him off guard, if possible. He also wanted to speak first to shut down whatever dry remark Varazda had been planning to make. “You want something, First Spear? Again? You must want it pretty badly, too, to brave those stairs.”

It worked on both counts. There was, for a moment, a look of complete shock on Varazda’s face. It melted away to be replaced by his usual haughty composure, and there was a tense pause.

“Who told you that?” Varazda asked finally.

“Some of the household slaves—Niko and Rhea. His bed had not been slept in, and his belongings are gone.”

“Couldn’t he have moved to a different room?”

“Apparently not without their knowing about it.”

“I see.”

“Did you attend him last night when he went to bed?”

Varazda looked for a moment as if he was going to remind Damiskos again that this was none of his business. Instead he said, with an air of being very forbearing, “No. My excuse for leaving the dining room to talk to you was that I wanted to go to my own bed. And after our conversation, I did.”

Damiskos considered that and decided that he believed it.

“But the household slaves thought you would be attending Aristokles, so they left him alone. So actually, nobody knows where he went when he left the dining room.”

He almost added, “And it’s too late for you to pretend you do know.” He knew Varazda was thinking it.

Varazda pulled his hair forward over his shoulder and twisted it around his hand to lift it off his neck, as if he was too warm. “First Spear … ” He sighed. In Zashian, he said, “Who do you work for?”

Damiskos blinked. What did that have to do with anything? “The office in charge of provisioning the Phemian army. In Pseuchaian my commanding officer is called the ‘Quartermaster’—I don’t know the Zashian word.”