Threats, promises and good intentions don't amount to action. -- Alice: Madness Returns

It was just as well, Kilan thought, that he had finally managed to get the guards to stop following him around. There would certainly have been questions raised if the Emperor left his room only minutes after entering it, fetched a blanket from a supply cupboard, and gone to an empty room further down the hallway.

The room he had chosen was kept for his younger brother's use, and so was well-aired and regularly dusted.

He had just settled down on the bed and pulled his blanket around him when a voice spoke in his ear.

"Emperor Tinuviel sleeping in a spare room? The High Council would have a fit!"

Kilan's startled yelp was embarrassingly loud in the silence of the room.

"What do you want?" he snapped, glaring at Death. "What are you doing here, anyway?"

"I looked for you in your bedroom," Death said, lying down beside him and folding her arms behind her head, "but all I found was an astonishing number of suitcases. So I came here."

"How did you know I was here?" Kilan asked, curious now the shock had worn off.

"If I concentrate on any living soul, I can tell where it is."

That was quite unnerving. But then, what about Death wasn't?

"So you decided to come and scare years off my life."

She shrugged. This was harder than it should have been, because her head was resting on her arms, and so it became more of a lurch than a shrug. "I thought you might like to talk to someone before your holiday."

"It's no holiday. Do they really eat stewed sheep's eyes in Malish?"

Death raised her head to give him a bewildered look. "Sheep's eyes?"

"The Council have been telling me what to do if I'm served some." The very thought made Kilan feel ill.

"I have never paid much attention to the culinary eccentricities of mortals," Death said after a pause. "I imagine that if the Council thought it important enough to warn you about it, then you must be likely to encounter it."

Kilan closed his eyes with a muffled groan. "Should I write my will tomorrow?"

"Don't worry." There was a hint of laughter in Death's voice. "You won't die for any day soon."

Left unsaid was the inevitable fact that he would die eventually. It would simply be some time in the future.

"That is not comforting," Kilan pointed out.

"I'm Death." There was now much more than merely a hint of laughter in her voice. "If you want to hear something comforting, you shouldn't be speaking to me at all. Now, are you sure you remember everything the Council told you?"

Kilan shuddered and buried his face in the pillow. "I don't remember a quarter of it! One of them would be telling me about how to speak to the Iqui while at the same time another one was listing the names of all the Iqui's sons -- he has about thirty of them, believe it or not -- and the proper way to speak to each of them."

"Then list all the names you can remember, and I'll tell you if you've got them right."

His eyes flew open and he sat bolt upright. "What? Go through all that again? In the middle of the night? Over my dead body!"

Too late, he realised the implications that saying could have when said to the embodiment of Death. Fortunately for him, she didn't take him up on the unintentional offer.

"What is the title for the Iqui's oldest living son?" she asked in a business-like tone.

Kilan tried to search out the answer from among the confused mass of Malish-related information the Council had bombarded him with. "The... Gudea?"

"No. Gudea is a title for any son of the Iqui, not just the oldest. The correct answer is Gudea-Natum. Who is the current holder of that title?"

Kilan had expected he would have a good night's sleep tonight. He had never expected Death to interrogate him on the Malish royal family. The situation was so strange it would have been funny, if he were less tired. "I don't know and frankly I don't care. Please, can I go to sleep now?"

Death folded her arms and gave him a Look. It was the sort of Look that would strike terror into anyone's heart. Kilan decided it would be wiser to play along.

"Er...Is it Prince Bekọe?"

"Not any more; his younger brother Rǎwanep assassinated him last week."

Kilan gaped at her. "Assassinated?"

"Yes. That's how members of the Malish royal family get to positions of greater power: by killing or otherwise removing those who stand in their way. You see, the crown does not automatically go to the oldest son of the Iqui. Any son has a claim to it if he can connive, cheat or kill his way to it. And since any given Iqui has at least sixty wives, most of whom have at least one son, there are many possible contenders. Many of them aren't even the Iqui's sons; all the wives live in a separate palace, and although they are guarded there are so many of them that some of them can sneak away for a night or two without being noticed."

The blunt description of such horrors made Kilan feel ill. "And I'm going to spend two weeks in such an awful place?"

"Don't worry," Death said in what was probably meant to be a reassuring tone. "I'll be watching over you, and if anyone gets too close I'll kill them for you."

"Don't even joke about such things!"

She smiled, showing all her teeth. "Who said I was joking?"

~~~~

The next day found Kilan, his retinue and his luggage (of which there was far less than there had been last night) in an airship on their way to Malish. Each minute brought them closer to it. And Kilan was seriously considering jumping off the observation deck.

"Your Majesty, if you--"

"Your Majesty, what about--"

"Your Majesty, if the Iqui--"

At least five different Counsellors were trying to speak to him at the same time. Kilan couldn't hear anything they said, and couldn't make himself heard.

"SILENCE!" he bellowed at last, startling himself with how loud his shout was. Thank the gods, the Counsellors shut up. Some of them looked utterly gobsmacked. "I cannot concentrate on anything you say if you all talk at once. One at a time, please!"

As the first Counsellor began to repeat whatever she had been saying, uninterrupted this time by any of her friends, Kilan found his mind wandering to what Death had said last night.

"Is it true that the Princes of Malish murder each other for power?" he asked suddenly, cutting off the Counsellor's lecture on the proper way to shake hands with someone in Malish.

The silence that fell at that question was one of the most awkward silences he had ever heard. Chief Counsellor Dilves (who else? Kilan thought dryly) took it upon herself to answer.

"While it is certainly true that their culture allows for many things we would consider barbarous, we must remember that it is their culture and respect that." Kilan thought of a girl's skull being split open by stones, and the words connive, cheat or kill his way to it. Respect that? She might as well ask him to respect Marin's adultery. "And you must remember, your Majesty, that your own ancestors have committed similar crimes."

Yes, Kilan thought grimly, and their actions horrify me as much as the Malishese's. But I have no choice about being associated with them. I have a choice about visiting Malish. And is a country like that really the sort of country we want as our most important trading partner?

Ranoryin's suspicions came back to him and gave him pause. Where were these thoughts coming from? Had Death planted them in his mind to suit her own ends? How could he tell if she had or not? She would hardly admit it if he asked her.

Damn it! he thought furiously, trying to chase those doubts away. If this kept up, before the week was out he would be as paranoid as his father's distant cousin Zoulve, who by the end of his life had believed that the pictures on the walls were plotting against him.

There were quite enough madmen in his family without adding his name to their list. Besides, he had promised Varan he wouldn't go mad.

~~~~

Kilan didn't know what he'd expected Malish to look like. A desert, he supposed. That was an idea which probably came from the fact that memory he'd seen had taken place in a village beside the sea, and thus there had been sand everywhere in the village.

Ihalāiksonen, the capital of Malish, was the complete opposite of his vague ideas. It was built on a hill, surrounded on all sides by green meadows and orchards. A fragrance of fruits and flowers hung over the wide, perfectly straight roads leading to the city. As they got closer, that smell faded to be replaced with the far less pleasant smells of a large and dirty city.

The city itself was a maze of narrow, cramped alleyways with piles of rubbish in the corners, and large, well-kept streets with crowds of people constantly milling around. In the city's outskirts, the houses were rickety, run-down buildings stacked on top of each other with laundry lines strung from a house on one side to the house on the other. Further into the city, the houses were grand mansions with grounds so extensive the house itself was scarcely visible from the street. There were no shops of the sort Kilan was used to. Instead, the streets were lined with stalls selling food, clothes, kitchenware, furniture and everything else imaginable.

It wasn't until the street led through an open square with a wooden stage set up in it that Kilan realised "everything else imaginable" included people. Lined up on the stage were a dozen people of both genders and all ages, and over their heads hung a banner that read, in what looked like several different languages, "Slaves For Sale".

Kilan shuddered and looked away.

~~~~

The Iqui's palace was vast, but not as sprawling as Zasordoth Palace. It appeared to be built entirely from white marble, which struck Kilan as an extravagant waste of money.

He and his retinue were escorted through a maze of pillar-lined hallways decorated with mosaics, plant pots, and thin, gauzy curtains. They saw no one but guards stationed at corners. The guards' eyes followed them as they passed.

At last they reached a set of double doors that seemed to be made of solid gold. Common sense told Kilan that they couldn't possibly be; gold was too soft a metal to hold the shape of a door, and so the doors were likely made of steel with a layer of gold coating. The knowledge of the probable reality, however, did not make the illusion any less imposing.

Everything in this palace, Kilan was beginning to realise, was meant to flaunt the wealth of the Iqui and make any visitors feel small and unimportant. It might even have worked on him, if he hadn't reflected that the Iqui, despite all his riches, couldn't claim to be Death's friend and sort-of husband.

It was hard to feel unimportant when he thought of that.

The gold doors slid slowly open. Kilan thought at first that they opened onto a supernova, or an exploding star. When his eyes had adjusted to the blazing light and coloured spots had stopped dancing across his vision, he realised the doors opened onto nothing more exotic than the Iqui's throne room. The walls were covered with a layer of what appeared to be an extremely reflective form of gold, and the roof was a glass dome, allowing the sun's rays to stream into the room. The result was a room that appeared to be glowing. The throne, positioned beneath the a portion of the glass roof that seemed to be made of mirrors, was the focal point of several rays of sunlight.

Kilan wondered how many unlucky visitors had gone blind upon walking through the doors.

"His Majesty, Emperor Tinuviel of Carann, to visit his most Blessed and Serene Majesty the Iqui of all Malish, may he live forever," a man with a high-pitched, irritatingly-squeaky voice was saying.

Kilan looked at the man seated on the throne. His first thought was that there must be some mistake. This couldn't be the Iqui! This short, astonishingly overweight man bundled up in as many robes, frills and jewels as could by any contrivance be put on one person? This man with a pointed beard dyed a brilliant purple and a curious spiked crown on his head, who bore a striking resemblance to a clown? This was the Iqui? There must be some mistake!

Luckily for continued peace between the two Empires, Kilan was not required to speak yet. His interpreter, bowing until his forehead touched the ground, was speaking to the Iqui in Malishese. This gave Kilan a chance to collect himself and remember the speech his Counsellors had prepared for him.

The interpreter stopped talking. Out of the corner of his eye Kilan saw Chief Counsellor Dilves briefly clasp her hands together; their agreed-upon signal for letting him know when to begin.

"Emperor Tinuviel salutes the Iqui of Malish," Kilan began. He wasn't sure he could keep his astonishment off his face if he had to look at the Iqui, so instead he focused his gaze on the rays of sunlight shining through the ceiling.

How he got through that speech Kilan never knew, but he managed it somehow, pausing only to give the interpreter a chance to translate. When it was finished, he bowed. The Council had gone to a great deal of trouble to make him understand how he should bow to the Iqui: low enough to show respect, but not low enough to imply subservience. He prayed he got it right. The consequences for getting it wrong might be worse than a "we're so disappointed in you" lecture from the Council.

The Iqui was silent for so long that Kilan began to worry he had said or done something wrong. He tried to glance over at Chief Counsellor Dilves -- whatever else he could say of her, she was at least more likely to understand the situation than he was -- without it being obvious what he was doing.

Finally, the Iqui spoke. His voice was remarkably deep for such a small, fat man. And most startling of all, he spoke Carannish.

Why did the Council insist on an interpreter if the Iqui could understand me all along? Kilan wondered. It was a question he would have to ask later.

"We are pleased to welcome our esteemed friends," the Iqui proclaimed. "During your stay you will see all the glory and might of Malish."

Kilan wondered if that sentence sounded as ominous to the Iqui's ears as it did to his.