A Dictionary of Fools (The HouseOf Light And Shadow Book 2) Read online

  Growing up, Kisten had never tried to consider life from a woman’s perspective. Women had to get married; some women, inexplicably, complained about this fact. He’d always attributed it to their not understanding the realities of the world: that everyone had a place in it, and a duty to perform. Men had their part, also, and it wasn’t always sunshine and roses.

  Except he saw now that no one had forced him to enlist; he could have chosen a diplomatic career, like his father. Or lounged around smoking opium like his brother Arjun. A woman, however, had no alternative but to spend her life serving a man—and she might not even have a voice in who that man might be.

  There must, Kisten realized, be women who felt about their husbands as he’d felt about the man who’d used him. He mentally reviewed the various men he’d served with, and concluded that he certainly wouldn’t have wanted to live with most of them. And yet they were, many of them, married. Many of their marriages had been arranged.

  If a woman chose her own husband, it was from the selected group to whom her father introduced her. Men who were, in his mind if not in hers, suitable mates. More often, though, her husband chose her. In a culture where forcible abduction was still seen as a legitimate method of marriage, the question of consent was moot.

  None of the women in his immediate circle had seemed unhappily married. He’d had numerous affairs with various court ladies, and none of them had mentioned anything about disliking their husbands. They must have, of course; otherwise, why would they have made advances, or accepted his when they were offered?

  His favorite sister, Zoharin, was still a child. Thirteen this year. When Kisten was her age, he’d known he could do anything. The best she could hope for, as brilliant as she’d already shown herself to be, was to marry a man who appreciated her capabilities and allowed her to pursue her interests.

  Allowed. What a wretched word. He went to sleep.

  FOURTEEN

  The sun dragged Kisten into wakefulness. He felt like it was searing his eyeballs through his eyelids. Charon II’s strong light was unkind to a native Bronte. Blinking, he struggled back into the straw and away from the patch of light. It was coming in through the roof, a wide patch nearly a foot across. He didn’t look forward to the first time it rained.

  He still couldn’t figure out how long he’d been in this dump. Part of his life was just missing. He didn’t remember eating, but he must have; he couldn’t have gone this long without food or water. When he’d roused himself earlier, he’d been too sick to his stomach to even think of food. But now he felt the first faint pangs of hunger. And thirst.

  His pen-mates looked just as listless as they had the day before. The dead man was still there. He was thinking about this, and thinking about finding some water, when a voice spoke in his ear.

  “Good morning.”

  He didn’t turn. “Fuck off.”

  “I’m Aros,” continued the voice, undeterred.

  “I don’t give a fuck who you are,” Kisten replied, honestly pleased to find out that he could still talk. “And I don’t care what you want, or what you’re offering. Leave me alone.”

  “You,” said the wretch that had identified itself as Aros, “are Prince Kisten.”

  Kisten’s head whipped around. He wondered if he was still strong enough to kill this person. Aros blanched, taken aback. “Your picture was in the Star Gazette when you were caught playing ecarté in the nude with those feather dancers.” He glanced back and forth. “I don’t think the guards here read the Star Gazette,” he added hurriedly, in an attempt at—what? Reassurance?

  Kisten glared. “You think I care if people see me naked?”

  “I would,” retorted Aros promptly. “My mother would have heart failure.”

  Kisten threw back his head and laughed. That, he’d be known to remark, years later, was how one knew one’s mirth was real: it swept in when it pleased, caring little for circumstances. In fact, the more inappropriate the circumstances the better. And like the pied piper, it made those who fell before it dance to its tune. Kisten hadn’t forgotten that he was in a cattle pen, and might be tortured again or killed, but he couldn’t help himself. Aros laughed, too.

  “Where are we?” he asked finally.

  “In a cattle pen.”

  If this Aros character turned out to be stupid as well as banal, it would be a long morning. “I know that,” Kisten said irritably. “But where are we?”

  They were, it seemed, in the middle of nowhere. Aros’ introductory experiences, unlike Kisten’s, had included a march of twenty-eight miles from Dharavi to a rebel camp in the foothills and from there into this pen where he’d been for a week. He’d been captured in Dharavi doing reconnaissance, and swore that if he ever got out of this mess he’d put in a transfer to the regular service. “I’m bloody sick of intelligence,” was how he’d put it.

  “I can’t see why,” remarked Kisten, “as you’ve displayed none so far.”

  “This pen,” said Aros, ignoring him, “is, I gather, frequently used for the rounding up of cattle.”

  Please stop stating the obvious, Kisten willed him, or I may be forced to kill you after all.

  “And prisoners, too, but—”

  “If you’re the best and brightest that naval intelligence has to offer,” said Kisten, “no wonder I’m locked in a cattle pen.”

  “They’re going to take our clothes.”

  Kisten sat up straight, and regretted it. “What?” He winced.

  “They relieve us of superfluous clothing. Which I suppose means anything one of them takes a fancy to. Jackets, boots, belts.” He shrugged.

  Kisten digested this.

  “I’ve encountered a man from my home province—same village, in fact—and his friends. We’ve made a pact to help each other out.”

  “How wonderful for you.” Kisten’s tone was dry.

  “And you’re going to join us.”

  Kisten turned his head. The man, God damn him, was serious.

  Aros held out a canteen. “You’re going to keep us alive.”

  Kisten met the other men that he had, perforce, joined. They didn’t impress him. Two bore the indelible stamp of the south: short of stature, with skin like bitter chocolate and hooked noses to boot. Aros and the fourth man, with their tanned skin and light eyes, were just as clearly from the north. Palamau, Kisten discovered, one of a thousand identical farming communities that no one cared about. Least of all Kisten, who had better things to do than stare at peasants.

  What things? He dismissed the thought. It came from a part of his mind that he’d gotten quite good at ignoring. Just the same, he resisted the urge to retreat back into his corner. No winning, he reminded himself. Hope lay in making use of whatever tools lay at hand. He couldn’t do that if he refused to accept the limits of his situation. So he sat and watched as Aros shared out what food they had—where it had come from, no one seemed inclined to reveal—and introduced Kisten’s new friends.

  Aros was Aros Askara-Brahma, the son of some kind of farmer and the middle of seven children. His fellow northerner was Walid Shah, a pinch-faced man with gray eyes that missed nothing. He looked like a rodent. Kareem Burhan was from Benares, a sink of a place famous for its illicit drugs and diseased women, and Ali Khan was from Sindh. The largest city on the subcontinent of Chennai after Chau Cera itself, it was an industrial center. Where Kareem was quiet, Ali seemed almost offensively cheerful. He laughed at the drop of a hat. Kisten detested him immediately.

  These men could not, he knew, help him. What did the sons of farmers and rug merchants know of espionage? Apparently nothing, if Aros was a representative sample. All Kisten had to do was survive; Keshav would rescue him. In the meantime, he had to figure out how to survive these simple-minded and no doubt ignorant peasants. Under other circumstances, he would have simply made himself scarce; but Aros knew who he was, which—Kisten could scarcely believe it—his captors did not. And that meant Aros had power over him.

  Kisten thou
ght about suffocating Aros in his sleep, and decided against it. He was hardly travelling disguised; there would be others. He had been in the papers more than he strictly should. There had been incidents…. Perhaps a team of peasants would be good camouflage; no one would think to look for him amongst men too ill-educated and unattractive to be his servants. He perked up a little with the thought.

  Kisten was neither sullen nor spiteful and he did not, at heart, believe his life to be worth more than that of other men’s. But he was limited. His grandfather was brother to the Emperor; from his earliest years, he’d lived a life of privilege. Even the enforced servitude of boarding school was accomplished with the idea that experiencing life below-stairs, as it were, would help him understand how the other half lived. So that he could lead them. Not mingle with them. Not that he had any particular objection to mingling; from the time he was small, he’d taken a great interest in the running of his estates and had pestered the various overseers, gardeners and grooms with thousands of questions. They’d answered, indulgently, as they had their own children and understood something of the breed. But they hadn’t been equals. They couldn’t be rude to him—it honestly hadn’t occurred to Kisten until years later that they might have wanted to—because he was the prince.

  The prince was an object of worship, or scorn, or pity, depending on one’s point of view. But the prince was not an equal. He wasn’t supposed to be. No man, regardless of what he claimed to the contrary, wanted to be led by the fool who stood next to him on the train platform every morning and who was just as prone to error as he.

  Growing up with Keshav, and in the relative freedom and security of his parents’ estate, Kisten hadn’t had a chance to be lonely. He didn’t truly experience the sensation until he left for school. The driving compulsion on his classmates’ part to prove that he was not better was his first introduction to the idea that he might be different after all. He had been sheltered, he realized later, by a mother who’d wanted to give him the things that she hadn’t had in her childhood. And so, at school, he’d begun to hold himself apart.

  It worked. That, and his natural gift for athletics gave him something of a godlike status among the younger forms. He’d still be described as difficult to know, but forgiven for the failing as well.

  If it was, indeed, a failing. He wouldn’t realize until much later in life that, for all his polish and sophistication, he wasn’t, in some ways, terribly worldly. The only point of view he’d ever had was that of a prince. He’d never had to rely—really rely—on one of his fellow men as merely a fellow citizen.

  When he put on the uniform, he was Lieutenant Commander Mara Sant; when he took if off again, he was Prince Kisten. No one forgot, least of all him. But what was he now? Just a lone man, staring at other men, and with nothing to recommend him except his wits. He realized, with a growing sense of fear, that he had no idea what to do. Again and again since he’d been captured, he’d found himself utterly powerless against forces he’d never encountered and couldn’t even begin to understand.

  He hated it.

  “What do your friends call you?”

  Kisten recognized the opening that Aros was giving him. “Kit,” he said quietly.

  “Is that short for Kirti?” asked Ali.

  “No.” Kisten was shorter with the man than he’d intended to be.

  “You’re what—Charonite by birth, am I right?” This from Kareem.

  Of course. Regular people didn’t think it was the least bit strange when colonists and natives intermarried. Or when natives enlisted in the hopes of finding a better life, as these men had undoubtedly done. Poverty, boredom, and lack of opportunity existed on every planet.

  “Yes,” said Kisten.

  Ali laughed. “Then it’s probably short for something I can’t pronounce.”

  “Probably.”

  Walid grumbled. “He’s probably a spy.”

  Aros had to pull Kisten off the other man. His best friend had died on this waste dump of a planet and he dared suggest that—

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” The ever affable Ali seemed to regard this as some sort of joke.

  Kisten just glared.

  “Look at his eyes, he’s at least part Bronte.” Ali snorted. “And besides, if the rebels were going to plant a spy you’d think they’d plant someone a little more personable. Not someone with no social skills.”

  Hearing himself described like that was a shock. He was famous at court for his social skills. I have social skills, he thought mulishly. Just not with you.

  He continued to glare daggers at Walid, who seemed remarkably unrepentant. Kisten might be half-starved and quite possibly suffering from internal injuries, but he’d see Walid dead before he’d hear another word out of him about spies. Aros tried to smooth the situation over and as there was nothing to do in the humid, foul-smelling enclosure but talk, eventually he succeeded.

  Kisten ignored the banter. He wondered, instead, where Keshav was. He’d know what had happened, because of their bond and because of the fact that Keshav was a field agent with the Imperial Intelligence Service. His cover was, well…being himself. His twin brother was exactly the sort of dissipate playboy whom no one accused of having even a passing flirtation with hard work. Or any work at all. Keshav cultivated the image quite adeptly, putting it around that he’d gotten his job out of sheer nepotism. And anyone who’d met Arjun knew that, within House Mara Sant, nepotism had no limits. He never even went into the office, he bragged.

  Which, of course, he didn’t; it was a brilliant cover.

  Keshav would never be hailed as a war hero, even though he’d done more good for the empire than the rest of them put together.

  And that was the rub, wasn’t it?

  FIFTEEN

  “Wake up, there! Wake up!”

  The speaker’s uniform marked him as a rebel sergeant. He sounded like a carnival barker.

  “Fall into two ranks, you worthless sons of whores!”

  Kisten struggled upright. Moving still hurt, but at least he could force himself to do it now. He didn’t know the full extent of what, exactly, had been done to him but as he wasn’t dead yet, he had to conclude that he’d live. Or rather was now free to die from something else. Aros tried to help him and he pulled back. He couldn’t tolerate the idea of needing help; it made him furious. He wasn’t some wretch, he was a prince. A leader. A man.

  “Why are they moving us?” asked Kareem, glancing about worriedly. He’d heard the stories; they’d all heard the stories.

  But before Aros could answer—Kisten held himself above such conversation—the sergeant explained in the same loud, bawling tone that the occasion of their moving was the arrival of a trainload of actual cattle. Whatever poor son of a bitch was in charge of supplying the rebel troops had seen an opportunity. The cattle would be unloaded into the pens and the prisoners, neat as a pin, would be loaded into the freight cars. But sent where?

  “Some place in the north.” Ali spoke in a whisper. “I heard it from the guards.”

  “What?” Kareem turned. “They told you?”

  “I hoped,” said Walid, “that you’d heard it from the men dispensing rations.”

  Kisten didn’t hold out much hope for rations. He looked around at the clumps of gaunt men. Most looked like they hadn’t eaten a decent meal in a long time.

  “The north?” echoed Aros, bringing Kisten back to the present moment.

  “Yes.” Ali failed to notice the change that had come over Aros’ face. “I think the train ride is a few hundred miles, but it’ll be better than marching.” Naively, he smiled. He actually believed that.

  “Oh, God.” Aros had turned completely ashen. “They’re sending us to Palawan.”

  Kisten had never heard the name. What he wasn’t to know until much later was that the Palawan Detainment Camp, also known as Palawan Prison or, more succinctly, Hell, was a new facility. It had only, at that time, been open a few months and was never intended to be more than a tempo
rary processing facility for at most ten thousand men. But fractured leadership and a lack of supplies conspired against them, turning Palawan into something else entirely.

  He could tell from the look on Aros’ face that this was bad news. Still, he didn’t press for details. He’d find out for himself soon enough.

  The sergeant was shouting again, about cows. He sounded like a cow, and Kisten was astonished to find himself—almost—smiling. Aros noticed, but said nothing.

  The sergeant, meanwhile, directed them into a line of dark and foul-smelling freight cars. Each freight car was fifty feet long by just over nine feet wide, according to the dimensions printed on the side in fading block letters, and the prisoners were packed in sixty to a car. Which meant, Kisten worked out in his head, that each man would have a spot about three feet square. If everyone was polite, and shared equally.

  Kisten and his newfound companions were near the back of the line, so they saw when it happened. Kisten, in fact, was standing at the doors and facing out. On the off chance it came in useful later, he wanted a good visual record of where he’d been. Aros and the others had melted into the gloom behind him and he stood shoulder to shoulder with a few other curious souls. No one paid them any mind; their guards had carbines, old-style projectile weapons, trained on them. They’d seen better days, but they’d do the job.

  Rebel soldiers had been shepherding men into the cars. Now, at the car directly left of Kisten’s, the lead man in the team stopped. Turning, he gestured to the sergeant with a universally understood slicing motion. No more, we’re full. It was, Kisten saw, the last car in the line. The remaining men exchanged glances, wondering what this latest development might portend.

  “Well,” said the sergeant, “looks like the rest of you maggots are riding up top.”

  “What?” asked one of the men.

  “You heard me.” He gestured lazily toward the ladder that climbed the side of the freight car.