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“Or what?” she asked, pointedly sitting on the narrow bunk “Will you flog me? Bend me to your ith cruel tor to a small map table set into the ork below the porthole “There are a dozen men on this ship ill happilyintothe first scroll to hand

“I’ve no doubt,” she agreed “Will you watch? My dear husband liked to watch when the slave girls hipped He’d often pleasure hihed, biting down a response and unfurling the scroll An Illustrated Catalogue of Volarian Ceramics, Brother Harlick’s precise but overly florid letters provoking runt Even the h I couldn’t pretend any liking for the brother, I had to concede Harlick’s draughtsmanship was excellent, the illustrations possessed of a flawless exactitude, the first depicting a hunting scene fro back so through pine forest

“Cera over ins lurk in pots,an age often bereft of writing, decorative illustration can be highly inforhten rateful?” she asked, leaning close, breath soft on my ear

I hed and moved away “You really have no interest in wo to the wo ods, and creatures of bizarre design

“I can help,” she said “Iwould like to”

I turned, finding her expression cautious but earnest “Why?”

“We have a long voyage ahead And whatever you may suspect of my ain at the ireat ape-like creature, e Pre-Iive up their gods?”

• • •

“It was all long beforebefore my mother’s birth in fact But she was ever a studious wolorious e near the prow as she spoke and I scribbledat our appearance but nore us, bar a few hostile glances at Fornella

“The eue now,” she went on, “and follow the Council’s edicts be they denizens of the greatest city or the foulest swaed in war,” I said “Many wars in fact, lasting soe left us with an empire, true unity eluded us for centuries to come There were too many different coins with too es spoken by too ods My ht and kill for ods For the empire to endure we required that kind of loyalty, untainted by any divine distraction And so there were more wars, called the Wars of Persecution by some, but Imperial historians refer to the entire period as the Great Cleansing, a sixty-year trial of blood and torture Whole provinces were laid waste and entire peoples took flight, some to the northern hills, others across the sea to found new nations free of Volarian persecution But, for all we lost, it was this that truly birthed the empire, for this is e became a nation of slavers

“There had always been slaves, of course, mostly in the Volarian heartland, but now there were ods, beaten, cowed and bred so successive generations forgot thes: great organisation and vast cruelty I often think it was these particular traits the Ally found so alluring After all, we must have been chosen for a reason”

“Do you knohen he made himself known?”

“I know not whether the Ally is male, or even truly huo, when the e in its unity War with the Alpirans was nothing new but it took on a new intensity, the battles grew in size, the cah victory still eluded us Eventually the Alpirans became tired of our endless attacks and launched one of their own, overrunning the southern provinces in a matter of months Crisis has a tendency to reveal noteworthy talent and thus it was that a young general froeneral with a revolutionary notion, and the means to make it happen If our slaves could build our cities and work our fields, why not also fight our wars? And so, via his new-found knowledge, we created the Varitai and Kuritai Through tactical genius and prodigious use of his slave soldiers, our new general won eternal fath and breadth of the empire, statues were raised in his honour, epics composed by our finest scholars to docu a wry sh her eyes betrayed a sadness I hadn’t seen before “But it was not a nor, whilst his fellow officers grew old and withered around hi”