In the Palace of the Khans Read Online Free PDF Page A

spot on. Still, this was different. He was about to meet the monster. His heart started to hammer.
    Mr. Dikhtar tapped on one of the half-dozen doors.
    â€œA pleasure to have met you, Mr. Rizhouell,” he said, handing Nigel his pass. “I will see you later and give you back your knife”
    â€œThank you,” said Nigel, and turned to the opening door.
    Just inside the room, waiting to close it behind him, smelling of some kind of strong, musky scent, stood …
    What?
    Man or woman? The bald, mottled head emerged from a loose long-sleeved ivory surcoat. The skin of the face was almost the same colour, creased with tiny wrinkles and shrunken to the shape of the bone beneath. Out of that deadness one living eye gazed at Nigel. The other was filmed with grey goo.
    With a shaking hand Nigel held out his pass. The right sleeve rose like the wavering fin of a tropical fish, thin fingers reached out from its folds, took the pass and held it up for the eye to peer at and gave it back, then beckoned Nigel to follow him across the room to where a man and a girl were sitting on a sofa. He was reading some documents and she was watching The Simpsons .
    The man pressed the mute button but the girl snatched the remote from him and pressed it again. He slapped her hand and took it back, turned the volume way down and handed it back to her, then rose. He was the President.
    He was wearing a black open-necked shirt, slacks and sandals. He was shorter than he’d seemed on the video. He looked at Nigel, unsmiling. Nigel met his gaze for a moment, and looked down.
    Apart from the force of that gaze there didn’t seem to be anything special about him. Pass him in the street, and you mightn’t have noticed him. But standing there facing him for only a couple of seconds Nigel became strongly aware of something else. Nothing tangible, but there all the same. Like the hum of a PC on stand-by, so faint that you notice it only if the room is utterly silent. The purr of the monster in its lair.
    The monster held out his hand to be shaken.
    â€œG-good morning, sir,” said Nigel as he took it and let go. “Er … It’s good of you to ask me to meet your daughter.”
    â€œYou know who I am?”
    â€œYes, sir. You’re the President-Khan of Dirzhan.”
    Now the man smiled.
    â€œMerely the President, internationally,” he said. “The Khan is for local consumption.”
    â€œIt sounds good, sir.”
    â€œAh, a diplomat’s son, evidently. So you are Nigel Ridgwell—a tongue-twister for us Dirzhaki.”
    He was obviously proud of his English, and had made a much better shot at the name than Mr. Dikhtar, but he still spoke with a definite accent.
    â€œI bet there’s a lot of Dirzhaki names I’d make a mess of, sir.”
    â€œDirzhani names. Dirzhak is the noun, Dirzhaki its plural. Yes, of course. But you have been here only one day. How did you spend it?”
    â€œI watched the video of your ibex hunt in the morning, sir. That was a cool trick you played.”
    â€œIt was more than a trick, Nigel. It was a necessity.”
    (Nigel knew that already. His father had spent most of supper last night filling him in on stuff he might need to know when he met the President. Like the Greens making a lot of fuss about the dam internationally because there was some kind of fish-owl that lived in the gorge and the new dam would drown out its habitat. The President had made the video to help get them on his side.)
    â€œâ€˜Cool’? That is still current?”
    â€œYes, sir. People say ‘wicked’ too.”
    â€œDo you?”
    â€œSometimes, sir.”
    â€œNot to my daughter, please. And then, after the video?”
    He couldn’t possibly want to know—just wants to get me talking, Nigel thought. Some kind of test, heaven knows what.
    â€œMy mother took me to the East market,” he said. “Then in the afternoon we went and