Make sure you keep Denil with you at all times and that he knows to keep his blades sharp. Mainlanders virtually leash and muzzle their females and feel entitled to offer insult to any woman not so constrained. We would certainly advise you not to seek recreation with any mainlander; they have simply no idea how to conduct themselves. Their customary use of liquors and narcotics curdles any sense of decency.

Nevertheless, we await news of your trip with great eagerness and wish you every success.

I stood, leaning against the wall for as much support as I dared, and felt the sweat trickling down between my shoulder blades. Although 1 was trying not to move, I must have somehow betrayed my discomfort and that earned me a swift glance of displeasure from Laio’s dark eyes. I tried to concentrate instead on the rhythms of the little fountain playing in a broad ceramic basin set into the middle of the white marble floor. An insect whined somewhere and I tried to spot it, not wanting the bastard to add to my already impressive collection of itching bites.

“So you see, my lady, there is no consistency to the thread. It jams on the loom or breaks, the quality of the cloth shames me greatly.”

The weaver was an old man, white-haired and skinny, wearing only a crisply laundered loincloth, kneeling in abject supplication in front of this girl young enough to be his granddaughter.

Lucky bastard, I thought, my shoulders aching viciously from most of a day spent standing around in chainmail, doing nothing more useful than looking war-like for the benefit of Laio’s workers. Still, at least I was standing upright.

“I understand your problems and there will be no penalties,” Laio interrupted the old man’s complaints, as well she might. We’d been hearing the same thing all day in various forms; I could have told her myself what he was going to say.

Her brisk and efficient manner still struck me as incongruous, as she sat there in a filmy silk dress that left few of her charms to the imagination. Bright paints all but obscured her face and she was adorned with more jewels than the entire House of D’Olbriot at a Sieur’s wedding.

I closed my ears to their conversation and stared out of the open shutters, across the lush grounds of Shek Kul’s palace compound. Precisely tended gardens surrounded the central residence, slaves’ dwellings beyond them and, looming over those, the high black walls patrolled day and night by keen-eyed sentries, always with double-curved short bows to hand. I looked at the green pennant lazily flickering in the breeze above the tower over the main gate and, in the far distance, the dark green hills of the next island in the domain, hazy in the moist heat. So far I’d found as little prospect of getting beyond those gates alone as stepping through a rainbow to meet an Eldritch-man.

Dark clouds were boiling up above the steep conical peaks of the far islands and I wondered when the rains that Laio had been promising for days would actually arrive. Would it get any cooler? I was just about getting used to being covered in a permanent film of sweat. As long as there was some breeze, it was tolerable, unless I was wearing this cursed hauberk, that was. On those days or when the air hung still and heavy, I felt as if I were walking around wrapped in a warm, wet blanket and I found myself dreaming about fresh, salt-scented winds off the ocean at home.

A knock on the door brought me back to my present duties. I opened it to reveal Gar Shek, her golden eyes dancing with delight, Sezarre impassive as always behind her.

“Laio, my dear, I have some wonderful news for you,” Gar smiled sweetly, her customary expression concealing whatever mischief she was trying to foment. “The pigeon-master has just brought me a message from Kaeska. She arrives home on the afternoon tide. Isn’t that perfect; she’ll be here for the birth!”

Laio looked up with a wide smile of untroubled pleasure. “Thank you for letting me know so quickly.” She glanced at the complicated arrangement of toothed and interlocking metal wheels that I had been startled to learn served her as some kind of calendar. The senior wife, Kaeska, hadn’t been due back for a couple of days.

Gar nodded and then looked at the weaver, who was kneeling, forehead to the floor, in what I had learned was the appropriate manner and very hard on the knees.

“Are your workers still having trouble with that yarn you traded from Tani Kaasik?” asked Gar, all innocent concern and missing no opportunity to remind Laio of her lapse.

Laio shrugged. “It’s of no consequence and I had to do something for the poor girl. With that amount of overproduction, she was at her wit’s end.”

Perhaps, but the youngest Kaasik wife had still had the wit to offload the poorest quality cotton on to Laio. I recalled the meeting where Laio’s eagerness to increase her own production and reap the attendant benefits had got the better of her good sense. She had failed to check the yarn for herself and I had garnered a severe slapping when Laio had discovered her error and come looking for an outlet for her frustrations.

“I’m sure you will find a way to resolve the situation,” smiled Gar warmly.

“I have a market in mind for the cloth,” Laio assured her confidently. I would have been completely convinced if I had not seen her storming around her chambers the previous day, volubly lamenting the fact that she had no such thing.

Gar smiled sweetly once again, turned on her heel and swept lightly down the corridor, Sezarre clinking softly behind her. For all that she never missed a chance to needle Laio, I had recently heard Gar assuring some noble visitor that Laio had known exactly what she was doing, generously helping the hapless Tani Kaasik out of the difficulties stemming from the girl’s deplorable inexperience. In the course of a day, I reckoned an Aldabreshi lady wore more different faces than an actor in a Soluran masquerade.

“You are all dismissed!” Laio nodded at the weaver and the line of others waiting patiently in the corridor. They dispersed without a murmur and I looked after them with no little disdain.

“You are looking puzzled. What is it?” demanded Laio as we climbed the stairs to her apartments on the top floor of the palace. I should have remembered that Laio had a talent for spotting every nuance of expression or tone that would even put a professional gambler like Livak to shame; years of training for the complicated life of a Warlord’s wife, no doubt.

“Your slaves, the weavers, they are very obedient,” I said, somewhat lamely.

Laio clicked her tongue in exasperation. “They are not slaves, they are free Islanders. You must learn these things. A slave is one who has been purchased from the mainland or traded from another domain.”

Personally I would call anyone a slave who was entirely dependent on a Warlord and his wives to trade the product of his labors, to keep a roof over his head and to give him permission to marry, raise children or do pretty much anything beyond eat, sleep and breathe. I nodded obediently and added this to the ever growing list of things I had to remember. We reached the top floor and I hurried to open the door to Laio’s bedroom. She was already stripping off her dress as she crossed the threshold, dropping it carelessly on the polished and patterned wooden floor. I had seen her naked too often to react much by now, and simply went to the stairs to send one of the ubiquitous pages for some hot water.

Laio was cleaning off her face paints in the tiled bathroom when I returned with a steaming jug.

“Come here,” she commanded. “I need to speak to you.”

I emptied the ewer into a broad basin and Laio waited while I mixed in some cold water.