Mistress of the Empire Read Online Free PDF Page A

Scholars claimed the game of shah sharpened a man’s instinct for battle and politics, but Jiro, Lord of the Anasati, enjoyed puzzles of the mind over physical contests. He found its intricacies hypnotic for their own sake.
    His skills had surpassed those of his father and other teachers at a precociously early age. When he was a boy, his older brother, Halesko, and younger brother, Buntokapi, had often as not pummeled him for the contemptuous ease he displayed in defeating them. Jiro had sought older opponents, and had even contended against the Midkemian traders who visited the Empire more and more often, seeking markets for their otherworld goods. They called the game chess, but the rules were the same. Jiro found few in their ranks to challenge him.
    The one man he had never defeated sat opposite him, absently scanning through an array of documents piled meticulously around his knees. Chumaka, First Adviserto the Anasati since Jiro’s father’s time, was a whip-thin, narrow-faced man with a pointed chin and black, impenetrable eyes. He checked the game board in passing, now and again pausing to answer his master’s moves. Rather than being irritated by the absent-minded fashion in which his First Adviser routinely defeated him, Jiro felt pride that such a facile mind served the Anasati.
    Chumaka’s gift for anticipating complex politics at times seemed to border on the uncanny. Most of Jiro’s father’s ascendancy in the Game of the Council could be credited to this adviser’s shrewd advice. While Mara of the Acoma had humiliated the Anasati early in her rise to greatness, Chumaka had offered sage counsel that had sheltered family interests from setbacks in the conflict that had followed between the Acoma and the Minwanabi.
    Jiro chewed his lip, torn between two moves that offered small gains and another that held promise of long-term strategy. As he debated, his thoughts circled back to the Great Game: the obliteration of House Minwanabi might have proven a cause for celebration, since they had been rivals of the Anasati – save that the victory had been won by the woman Jiro hated foremost among the living. His hostility remained from the moment Lady Mara named her choice of husband, and picked his younger brother, Buntokapi, as her consort over Jiro.
    It did not matter that, had his ego not suffered a bruising, Jiro would have been the one to die of the Lady’s machinations, instead of Bunto. Enamored though he was of scholarly thought, the last surviving son of the Anasati line stayed blind to logic on this point. He fed his spite by brooding. That the bitch had cold-heartedly plotted the death of his brother was cause for blood vengeance; never mind that Bunto had been despised by his family, and that he had renounced all ties to Anasati to accept the Lordship of the Acoma. So deep, so icy was Jiro’s hatredthat he preferred obstinate blindness to recognition that he had inherited his own Ruling Lordship precisely because Mara had spurned him. Over the years his youthful thirst for retribution had darkened into the abiding obsession of a dangerous, cunning rival.
    Jiro glared at the shah board but raised no hand to advance a player. Chumaka noticed this as he riffled through his correspondence. His high brows arched upward. ‘You’re thinking of Mara again.’
    Jiro looked nettled.
    ‘I have warned you,’ Chumaka resumed in his grainy, emotionless voice. ‘Dwelling on your enmity will upset your inner balance and ultimately cost you the game.’
    The Lord of the Anasati indicated his contempt by selecting the bolder of the two short-range moves.
    ‘Ah.’ Chumaka had the ill grace to look delighted as he removed his captured minor player. With his left hand still occupied with papers, he immediately advanced his priest.
    The Anasati Lord chewed his lip, vexed; why had his First Adviser done that? Enmeshed in an attempt to fathom the logic behind the move, Jiro barely noticed the messenger who hurried