The Wanderer's Mark: Book Three of Imirillia (The Books of Imirillia 3) Read Online Free Page A

against the white marble, waiting for Shaamil to speak.
    “You miserable wretch.” The words were clipped in the emperor’s mouth. “Get up.”
    Basaal pulled himself to his feet, deliberately throwing his shoulders back as he looked into the eyes of his father.
    “What have you to say to me?” Shaamil asked.
    “As I have told your imperial guard and as I have told the Vestan, I have nothing to say that you do not already know.”
    “Nothing?” the emperor said, his voice sounding as the wind scratching across the rock hills north of the city.
    “I have nothing more to say,” Basaal repeated.
    “The Vestan have no word of your wife, even after hours of searching.” Shaamil’s mouth twisted up. “It’s as if she were swept away like a single grain of sand in a windstorm. Gone. Scattered among ten million other pieces without a trace. I warn you now, if I find you had a hand in any of this, I will kill you outright.”
    Basaal stiffened, the corners of his mouth turning down as he spoke. “I wouldn’t expect any less.”
    “Let us then suppose,” Shaamil said, and his voice rang with accusation, “that you had nothing to do with the queen’s disappearance. Let us suppose that you stand wronged. What is your price?”
    “My price?” Basaal glowered. By the stars, he was so tired.
    “The price of your retribution,” Shaamil explained. “What price do you exact for such a valuable loss? Is it one life?”
    “One life?” Basaal asked, confused.
    “Is it one life?” Shaamil repeated. “Or is it two? The desperate impression you gave was that this woman—this girl, really—meant a great deal to you. And now she has been taken away. So her value must be beyond the cost of just one life. Is it three times as much? Is it four times?” Shaamil demanded. “What would satisfy the debt? The death of a dozen people? Of a caravan? Should a city be ransacked to pay the debt of her loss? A country, even? Answer me!”
    Basaal stood petrified, terrified of what his father might do in his own name.
    “What is she worth to you, Basaal?” Shaamil pressed. “How many thousands must die to atone for her loss? Answer me!”
    “I—I can’t. I don’t deal in such terms,” Basaal said. “To reckon the value of any loss with the death of the innocent is madness.”
    “But you must learn!” Shaamil yelled. “As a prince of Imirillia, every action you take reverberates endlessly into the lives around you. You cannot make a decision without having some act to balance it. You try—you have always tried—to tip the scales, not expecting repercussions or consequences. But that is not how this world works. That is not how this empire works, the Imirillian Empire, which you have sworn yourself to in the highest rituals of honor. So, yes, the disappearance of the Aemogen queen carries a price, and it very well may be of every man, woman, and child in her country.”
    “Father!”
    “What? Is it too much for you? The thought of every wretch in Aemogen dead. Would you rather I find someone closer to blame? The palace guards, perhaps? Do we take the head of every guard on duty at the hour of her disappearance? Or, do we take the heads of their wives and children?”
    “You deal in unbalanced scales, Your Grace,” Basaal snapped.
    “Do I?” Shaamil challenged.
    “Yes!” Basaal cried. “As you did in Aramesh, you transfer the sins of one onto the heads of many, and that is not justice.”
    Shaamil lifted an eyebrow and pressed his fingers together as if thinking. “You do not condone my scales?”
    “No!”
    “One for one, is it?” Shaamil asked.
    Basaal bent his head, pursing his lips, waiting for his father to call for his life in payment.
    “One for one,” Shaamil repeated. “But if that is the scale with which you wish to play, then this loss of great value demands another of equal value to you. Who should it be? One of your brothers?” Shaamil suggested. “Annan? The woman who serves your house?