Interestingly, one of the principal members of the underground was one of Kazi’s daughters, Nephthys. Nephthys was also the prized and privileged jewel in the harem of Draco, one of the two ruling consuls after Kazi’s death.
From A HISTORY OF THE ORCS, by Reinholdt Malaluan. A.C. 876, Deep Harbor, New Home
VIII
Orc officers were skilled in subterfuge and concealment of purpose. They practiced them unceasingly in the vicious politics of command. But in those politics, character concealment was neither troubled with nor possible; they were too much alike, and too many were telepaths.
Now, when it might have been possible to conceal their character from their visitors, they didn’t know how. Both assigned hosts wore togas instead of uniforms, but their arrogance, hardness, and utter lack of compassion were increasingly apparent with continued contact.
In contrast, Chandra and Anne Marie were conspicuously innocent, earnest, and benign.
The driver, standing against the dashboard of the polished and topless bronze chariot, was like none of his passengers. He was a non-personality whom his masters would notice only in failure or error, unless one of them was looking for someone to abuse. To Chandra and Anne Marie, he was silently informative, a source of inner discomfort.
Their first afternoon had been spent with their two hosts beneath an awning on one of the roof gardens of the varied-level palace. What had been anticipated as a session of questions and answers had proved to be a round of frustration. It became clear that their hosts would not be frank, and they in turn dared not be. But the orc telepaths had learned abundantly from their unspoken thoughts and reactions.
At Chandra’s request, much of the subsequent two days had been spent seeing the city, and their cameras had been busy. Yesterday they had visited the squat cylindrical granaries and seen how barges would be unloaded in harvest time. Blindfolded oxen trod in circles, turning a heavy capstan that powered a conveyor screw. The cats that policed the granaries seemed as arrogant and efficient as the orcs.
Today’s visit had been to a slaughterhouse where women cut up carcasses of beef, their strong bare arms smeared with blood. The floors were mortared stone, sloping to drains and scrubbed daily with lye. From the slaughterhouse the ambassadors had been taken upstream to the water intake plant, where the long vanes of windmills pumped canal water into tanks resembling the granaries. The stout bald man in charge had bowed and smiled and rubbed his hands. A man of responsibility, he nonetheless wore numerals tattooed on his forehead, like their driver and the women in the slaughterhouse and every other unarmed inhabitant they’d noticed.
Afterward Anne Marie had ridden in preoccupied silence. Now she looked around again. From the air I thought this place was handsome, she told herself, but it’s not. It’s ugly. Nothing green, nothing growing except on and around the palace. Just stone buildings and hectares on hectares of pavement. At least they’d had the foresight to install lots of storm drains. But why no soil, no grass, no trees? Two-storied row buildings of precisely fitted stone blocks crowded the wide streets. Their windows were small in the thick walls, giving built-in tunnel vision.
From the air they had seen substantial grounds separating the buildings from those behind them. She thought she knew now what they were: drill grounds. She couldn’t remember whether they had looked paved or not, and tried to glimpse them through the alleyways between buildings. But the alleyways were long and narrow; from the moving chariot her eyes were rewarded by nothing more than momentary slots of light.
The hard-faced officers sat facing them; she and Chandra thought of them as “the Centurions.” What were they thinking, sitting so expressionlessly?
Chandra broke the silence. “Why have most of the workers we’ve seen been women?”
“The men have been taken into the army,” one of the officers recited. “Barbarians threaten the country, and we must defend it.”
“From the sky we saw a fight between barbarians and some of your cavalry. Then we flew over their encampment. There aren’t enough of them to endanger the Empire of Kazi or this city.”