I was still smiling when I saw Laela ahead of me. I knew her first by her robe. It had been a gift from our master and was dyed a deep blue that was expensive and unusual. I made out her face only as she drew nearer. Normally as warm toned as myself, she was sickly pale. She raised a hand to her lips as she approached, and silently she turned me around to pull me through a curtained entrance into the nearby serviceway. We stood in that narrower connecting passage, the slatted roof just above our heads admitting sunlight that striped Laela’s face and clothes. When she’d checked to be sure we were alone, she leaned close. I could smell the cosmetics on her skin, and when she spoke, I was reminded of the Attolian’s warm breath on my ear.

“Nahuseresh is dead,” she whispered.

For the second time that day a statement was too nonsensical to understand.

“Poison,” Laela said, looking at my face for some comprehension.

Dead. She meant, murdered.

“His meeting was cut short. He came back to the apartments and called for the doctor but when the doctor came, he was already gone.” She turned my unresisting body away from her. “Go,” she said, putting her hands to my shoulders and pushing me down the serviceway. “Go.”

I turned back, reaching for her hand, but she pulled it free. Her face was in shadow and she put both hands to her cheeks, as if to hide her tears. “Save yourself, Kamet,” she whispered.

I nodded as tears pricked my own eyes and started moving, one stumbling foot in front of the other.

“When?” I asked, over my shoulder.

“Just after the noon bell,” she said as she, too, turned away, pulling the scarf at her shoulder to hood her face as she passed back through the curtain.

I needed to make a plan, but my thoughts ran in all directions at once, like rats in a grain store when the door is thrown open. I considered the Attolians—I’d already guessed they meant to kill me, not set me free. Had they meant to use my disappearance to implicate me in the murder of my master? It made no sense. They’d wanted me to leave that night and while they might have wanted to murder Nahuseresh, they couldn’t have carried it out. I had been free to run errands in the city only because my master had meant to spend the entire morning with his brother. When his powerful friends had failed him, he had staked everything on the support of Naheelid, and he had been absolutely certain his brother would help him. If what Laela had said was true—if my master had returned directly from that meeting—then he had been fatally mistaken.

My master’s brother was served by the emperor’s own servants, his food provided from the emperor’s own kitchens. The slaves who oversaw this process had served the emperor for years, and as most, if not all, would die with him—sacrificed at his funeral and buried in his tomb—they were fanatically loyal. There were only two men who could have poisoned my master—his brother, or the emperor himself.

The reversal of my master’s plans in Attolia—that had not just been a personal humiliation. My master had showered the Attolian queen in gold, the emperor’s gold, and then had nothing to show for it. The emperor had committed troops on my master’s recommendation, troops that had been overwhelmed by the combined forces of Eddis and Attolia. Afterward there had been painfully expensive goodwill gestures to placate the Greater Powers of the Continent, alarmed as they were to find the emperor encroaching on what they thought of as their territory. It had been in every way a disaster, and every bit of it laid at my master’s door. He had since schemed tirelessly to restore his position and he’d failed. Failed utterly.

I cast about for any possible alternative. My master could have been poisoned earlier, but he would have died more slowly. I had eaten dinner with him the night before, and I was fine. Neither of us had eaten in the morning—my master had ignored his breakfast tray, as he often did, and I couldn’t touch his leftovers if he hadn’t eaten first. He would hardly have taken anything on his way to meet with his brother. I retraced what I knew, reordering my knowledge, trying to deny my conclusions, but they were too clear. It was not as if the emperor hadn’t poisoned people before. There had been a number of imperial dinners that were the stuff of nightmares.

Trying to move more quickly, but not so quickly as to attract attention, I was still turning at random, distancing myself from my master’s apartments.

And from Laela.

When a man is murdered, his slaves are tortured. If any confess, then all are executed whether they share in the guilt or not. No one will buy them and they can hardly be freed—what a temptation that would put before the enslaved population. In the case of a poisoning, where the administration of the poison is unclear, the slaves are put to death on principle. The Medes fear little in quite the way they fear their own slaves.

The torture begins with the most intimate servants, the valet, the secretary. If a slave implicates another in his confession, the rest of the slaves will be fiercely interrogated as well, but if not, there may be no torture for the others, just death. After the recent beating, I would be doubly suspect, and if anyone had seen Laela warning me, she would be in greater danger as well. That it was the emperor who was guilty, that everyone would know it, changed nothing. We would be arrested and tortured not just into confessing, but also into implicating our fellow slaves—all of us judged an infection in the body of the empire, to be cut out at any cost. The houseboys, eight and twelve years old. Hormud, my master’s cook, and Mirad, his valet. The men in the stables, the dancing girls. None of them could leave the emperor’s palace. Of all my master’s slaves, only I had that privilege.

The only thing I could do for them was go. If I escaped, blame might fall on me alone. I might be a loose end that the emperor would tolerate—my successful flight bolstering an official story that I was involved in a conspiracy to murder my master, that the emperor had nothing to do with his death. A chance to die quickly instead of slowly was all I could give them.

So I walked on.

I hadn’t known my master was in such danger. I blamed myself for that. A man like my master is not eliminated without hints and foretellings running through the palace first, like a fracture through glass before it breaks, but I had been cooped up in my little alcove hiding my bruises. Had my master’s brother ordered his death, or had the emperor? Eternal gods, I thought, what if the emperor had turned against his heir and both he and my master had been killed? I shuddered at the chaos that could be coming to the entire empire and stumbled over my own feet.

Laela had said that my master had died not long after noon. I’d heard the great bell ring just after I spoke to the Attolian—while I was laughing at him from the alcove. Who was laughing now? I thought, before I wrenched my attention back to the matter at hand. The wheels of the palace turn slowly, but they would be turning. I had some time, but not much, before the doctor would call Nahuseresh’s death poisoning and officially inform the emperor, and then the guard would be sent to arrest all of my master’s slaves. I needed to leave the palace before all the gates were closed to keep me in.

I touched the pocket on my belt. I’d visited the tailor in the city that morning to order a robe for my master, one he would now never wear, and I had the money left over from that. My own savings, in the little bag inside my master’s cashbox, were out of reach. My scrolls, my own small damaged statue of Shesmegah, goddess of mercy . . . I dared not return to the apartments to collect any of my things, and I knew it, but my thoughts kept circling back to my little office alcove. I wanted so much to be seated at my slanted desktop, with my cot behind me and my account books in front of me, my only problem in life my master’s temporary dissatisfaction. My treacherous feet kept slowing down and I understood the impulse of small animals that hold themselves motionless until they are eaten. I felt a kinship for the rabbit sitting perfectly still, hoping that the lion would somehow pass him by.