The Wings of Ashtaroth

Chapter 10: Monsters: Section III: Kirin

Kirin: Marianus's Private Office: Lorar

Marianus's snug little private office smelled of fruit, wine, incense, and the stale farts the incense was intended to disguise. Kirin sucked back a gulp of oily air. The perfume was a talon carving the inside of his throat. He coughed into his fist, struggling not to break the rigidity of his protective stance beside Marianus.

Farnus Alba, the White Faction senator who'd arrived to see Marianus, shot Kirin an uneasy glance from his side of the desk. The spymaster's pinched little eyes gleamed like a falcon's black-beaded stare, trying to intimidate despite his modest height and saggy arms.

Kirin wrapped his fingers around the hilt of the gladius at his belt, shifting so that the metal chape of his scabbard clacked against the wall.

Farnus took a subtle step back from the desk. Kirin suppressed a grin.

Since Oran's attack, Marianus had made a show of parading in his atrium and waving at his clients, but once he'd made an appearance, he'd quickly abandon his visitors to the attentions of his wife and son and stalk off to his private office. After days trapped in the office's confines, Kirin's skin felt like it was melting into the wall, sticky with sweat and itching from stasis. Ydelka had been relegated to standing outside the office, but at least Marianus's foul mood toward her was mellowing (and besides, as Ydelka herself had remarked, it didn't stink so badly outside the office, without Kirin and Marianus around).

Even more lucky for her, she didn't have to put up with the sniveling Whites and grasping Greys that had been filing inside the office. It made sense for Marianus to discuss political matters across the factions, but with every creak of the door and set of approaching footfalls, Kirin hoped it would be a Red face that next passed the threshold.

With each disappointment, Kirin felt the tickle of grass against his fingertips and heard the laughter in Ydelka's voice as she joked about making him her husband. It had been a joke, but she'd been completely serious when she'd talked about leaving the city and finding a home out west in the countryside. She'd been serious about taking Kirin with her.

All it would mean was leaving Marianus and his world behind.

Kirin eyed the senators, seeing not Marianus the great Red general, but Marianus as he'd been that day in the peristyle—the Marianus who'd fumed at his household for a crime Oran had committed, and who'd vented his anger on the bodies of Kirin's fellow slaves. He saw Marianus as he was right now: sitting across from a snake in senatorial clothing while bargaining away the spoils due his own soldiers.

For the hundredth time over the course of the past few days, Kirin counted in his head the coin he'd need to buy his freedom and join Ydelka on her dreamed-of farmstead. She may not have been serious about making Kirin her husband, but there were surely worse people she could choose. Oran, for one. Oran, who was still alive and skulking Lorar's streets.

Whoever had hired him—and it wasn't Yakovius Lutelian, despite what Marianus believed—the senator didn't deserve Oran's sword in his back. Kirin had to stay at least as long as it took to make sure the Anouti rat was dead.

Farnus Alba's White face fixed once more on Marianus, ignoring Kirin again, like Kirin was another mural on the wall. "Zioban demands we instate him as sovereign once Aesmun falls."

"You worry too much, friend. Let him demand away." Marianus strolled toward a cabinet behind his desk, retrieving a decanter of wine and two cups. He held the beaker up questioningly to Farnus, but the senator declined with a wave of his hands. Marianus shrugged and poured himself a cup.

Back in the arena training grounds, Thanus had said you could tell a lot about a man by what he drank. What would the Thumper have said about a man who drank nothing at all?