Off they went. I turned to the Shqipetari flunky. “What’s your name?” I asked him.

“I am Skander, your Majesty,” he replied.

“Well, Skander, let’s get these chests locked up.” I handed him some of the keys as I continued, “We’ll leave the strongroom open till Captain Yildirim comes back with the rest of the treasure. Once it’s closed up again, I would like to meet the women of the harem.” Again, I didn’t want to sound as if I were drooling on the carpet. Back in Vyzance, Prince Halim Eddin would have had plenty of women with whom to amuse himself. Back in Vyzance, Prince Halim Eddin no doubt still did. Here in Peshkepiia, so did I.

Skander bowed. “Hearkening and obedience, your Majesty.” There was even a step up from Yes, your Majesty! Who would have imagined such a wonderful thing? Skander went on, “The chief eunuch says your ladies are also eager to meet you. Naturally, I have not presumed to enter the women’s quarters myself.”

“Naturally,” I agreed in what were probably abstracted tones. Halim Eddin would be used to eunuchs. His household doubtless had several. He wouldn’t have the urge to clutch at himself at the mere thought of the most unkindest cut of all. And, because I was he, I wouldn’t either. Or, if I did, I wouldn’t show it.

We waited. After a bit, Skander called to a lesser servant and spoke to him in Shqipetari. The underling nodded and hurried off. He came back with a tray with a large goblet and a small one. Skander took the small one, leaving the larger one for me. “Fruit juice, your Majesty,” he said. “Improved fruit juice.”

Did I need a food taster? In Vyzance, Halim Eddin probably did. As the Hassockian Atabeg’s nephew, he was lucky to have lived long enough to grow up. Here, I didn’t think I did. Murder in Shqiperi looked to be very straightforward. The sword, the knife, the crossbow quarrel-those were worries. Poison? No.

Skander politely waited for me to drink first. I raised the goblet. “Your good fortune, and Shqiperi’s,” I said, and sipped. I had all I could do not to cough. They’d, ah, improved that fruit juice with strong spirits till it had hair on its chest. I flicked out a drop with my little finger.

“Your Majesty is pious.” Skander imitated my gesture. He didn’t bat an eye when he drank.

“Have we got a court wizard?” I asked.

“How could we, your Majesty?” he said. “Up till a few days ago, we didn’t have a court.”

“We’ll have to do something about that,” I said. “How many wizards are there in Peshkepiia?”

“Always plenty of hedge-wizards,” Skander said. That was true. It was true everywhere. It was also useless: what one hedge-wizard could make, another could unmake. He went on, “Wizards of a quality to serve your Majesty? Perhaps four, perhaps half a dozen.”

That was perhaps two, perhaps four, more than I’d expected. Skander probably had lower standards than I did. Were his standards lower than Halim Eddin’s? There I wasn’t so sure. In the past hundred years, wizards from Schlepsig and Albion, from Narbonensis and Torino, and from Vespucciland across the sea have turned the world upside down and inside out. It’s not the same when we’re old as it was when we were young. Take Consolidated Crystal. In a lifetime, it’s spread everywhere. Now anyone can talk to anyone else. Whether he’ll have anything interesting to say is a different question, worse luck.

“Bring one of these wizards before me in the next few days,” I said. “If he suits me, I’ll use him. If not, we’ll try another.”

Skander bowed. “Of course, your Majesty.”

In about an hour, Max returned with sweating soldiers, with three more treasure chests, and with the keys to open them. When I did, I saw they really were full of money, with the odd bit of jewelry in there for variety’s sake. I could live with variety like that. “Is this the lot of it?” I asked.

“It’s everything Essad Pasha coughed up,” Max answered.

His eyebrows said he thought the local governor had more squirreled away somewhere. Mine said I thought Essad Pasha did, too. But what could I do about it? Short of turning him on a spit over a slow fire and rendering him down for lard-which might get me talked about even if he did yield several gallons-not much. I decided that could wait. Maybe I didn’t have all the treasure in Shqiperi. I had plenty for a thousand ordinary men, plenty even for a king.

Which meant…“The harem,” I said.

“The harem,” Skander agreed.

People who’ve never lived in kingdoms where they follow the Quadrate God have funny notions about harems. Painters-mostly Narbonese-use them as an excuse to paint pretty naked women. Far be it from me to deny that any excuse is a good one, but harem girls don’t lounge around naked all the time. For one thing, it gets cold. For another, the master of the harem mostly isn’t in. Do they show off for each other, then?

In the Hassockian Atabeg’s harem, maybe they do. He has more women than he knows what to do with. Well, no-he knows what to do with them, but with most of them he doesn’t do it very often. He has his favorites. The rest make do with one another, or with the eunuchs. Some eunuchs can keep a woman happy with what they have left, and she never needs to worry about having a baby. The ones who can’t do that have other ways.

But in most harems the women work when they’re not summoned to, ah, entertain. They spin. They sew. They weave. They raise children-and the only people who say that isn’t work are the ones who’ve never done it.

The door to the harem was barred from the outside. The king’s chosen women weren’t about to go off on their own. After I took down the bar and leaned it against the wall, I discovered the door was barred from the inside, too. Nobody was going to sneak in there and fool around, either. Well, I didn’t need to sneak. I knocked on the door: a loud, authoritative knock.

Max coughed. He does that every so often, whether he needs to or not. Sometimes it doesn’t mean anything. Sometimes it does. You have to know which is which, and how to translate. I had no trouble this time. If you think you’re going to be the only one in there having a good time, you’re out of your tree-that was what he was telling me.

I was tempted to think, Too bad for you, pal. Something told me that wasn’t a good idea. Most plots against kings start with their nearest and allegedly dearest. I couldn’t promise Max his share in Hassocki. Skander would have been scandalized. I couldn’t do it in Schlepsigian, either. Skander would have wondered why I switched languages, and I didn’t know he didn’t know mine. So I tipped Max a wink. That did the job.

The door opened. A eunuch bowed to me. A lot of eunuchs are fat; some are immense. This fellow was skinny enough to make up for three of them. He looked mean-and who could blame him? He bowed. “Your Majesty,” he said, his voice somewhere in that nameless range between tenor and contralto. “I am Rexhep, your Majesty.”

“Pleased to make your acquaintance, my good Rexhep,” I said. My good Rexhep’s eyes, black as the inside of a bear, said he wasn’t one bit pleased to make my acquaintance. “I have come to meet the women of my household.”

“Of course, your Majesty,” Rexhep said, while those glowing black eyes said something else altogether. I got the feeling Rexhep couldn’t do a woman any good with whatever equipment he had left. Was that why he looked mean? Lots of people are curious about such things. Me, some details I’d rather not know.

I walked through the door. The eunuch closed it after me. He barred it from his side, and I heard Skander bar it from the other. I knew that was the custom, but it made the hair stand up on the back of my neck anyhow. Was I King of Shqiperi or a prisoner?

As long as I acted like a king, I was one. If I’d learned anything coming from Dooger and Cark’s Traveling Emporium of Marvels in Thasos to the royal harem in Peshkepiia, that was it. When people think you believe it, they’ll believe it, too. If you want to tell me I’m wrong, think about Essad Pasha. He’d fought Vlachia and Belagora to a standstill, to say nothing of running a province full of Shqipetari for years. But he knocked his head on the ground to a down-at-the-heels Schlepsigian acrobat-because he thought I was a king.