8.1

While Zyrdicia slept, Portia lay in bed next to her thinking about Azriok's return. Before Zyrdicia had fallen asleep, they had talked about it for a few hours. Portia had known Zyrdicia a little more than ten years. In that time, the dark angel had been an almost mythical figure in conversations. Zyrdicia fought with him occasionally, but that was the extent of her direct involvement with him as far as Portia knew. It was inconceivable that in a single night, he was suddenly back in Zyrdicia's life in a very serious way.

Portia knew Zyrdicia's laughter was a numbing device to keep depression at bay right now. It was a survival mechanism to cope with a time when she would otherwise be languishing in hopelessness. The frenetic energy would keep her too busy to give in to the loneliness. The illusion would last a while, and then the world would come crashing down again. She worried that when that happened, Zyrdicia might very well decide to go away with Azriok. That possibility of losing her to him terrified Portia.

The guards' voices outside the tent interrupted the silence of the late-afternoon. A quick knock on the fabric of the tent flap jarred Portia out of her worry. She arose from the bed as delicately as she could in order not to wake Zyrdicia. Portia opened the flap slightly and peeked out. It was Prince Blackpool.

"Hi. I wish to speak with your lady."

"Shh!" Portia implored. She whispered, "Zyrdicia's asleep. Please keep your voice down! It took me all afternoon to get her to sleep."

His eyes widened at her lack of deference. "It's four o'clock in the afternoon!" he snapped. Zyrdicia's peculiar sleeping habits suddenly annoyed him. He wanted to discuss the castle's destruction in greater detail.

"She usually awakens by sunset," Portia whispered quickly. "I promise to let her know you stopped by." His irritation was obvious to her. She added gently, "I'm certain you'll be her first priority when she wakes up."

Portia watched him as he considered the meaning of the last sentence. She was very adept at reading men. Although his facial expression did not change, she noticed a slight movement in his eyes and a tensing of his jaw. There was something there. "I'll send her out to play when she wakes up," she smiled.

Later that night, Dirk went looking for Zyrdicia a second time. She had never come to see him after she awakened. He was annoyed.

He had just finished torturing Baron Erowyn Dagonet. The nobleman's head now stared out from a pike outside the command tent. The baron had provided all the information the prince required about the rebellion. He now had an exhaustive list of the movement's organizers. He was about to send Cai orders to begin systematically rounding up and executing those involved.

Getting the information had proven remarkably easy, once the baron had learned that his wife and children were in Castle Blackpool's dungeon and faced execution as co-conspirators. It had, of course, been a lie, but effective nonetheless. The Dagonet family would be stripped of its lands and title. Anyone complicit in the treason would be put to death; the rest would be exiled.

Portia was just about to depart for a rendezvous with his seneschal when the prince stopped by the tent. She was in a hurry. "You missed Zyrdicia by about an hour. She is already inside Castle Tronin."

"She's WHAT?"

"She turned herself into a purple butterfly and flew over the wall. She wanted to see it for herself." Portia smiled thinly, "Now, if you don't mind, I have to go. I'm late. Cai's waiting..."

Revealing her destination, she soon learned, had been a mistake. Portia was forced to wait another twenty minutes while the prince retrieved documents from a messenger so that she could deliver them to the seneschal instead. Making her wait twenty minutes would save a messenger at least three days travel time.

Portia was normally a relatively patient person. She was accustomed to petulant demands and errands from her mistress. She tolerated the prince's imposition, but only marginally. At least Cai would not be able to complain about her being tardiness.

In fact, Cai eventually found the reason for her delay quite humorous. He had no difficulty whatsoever imagining the situation. When Portia finally reached Castle Blackpool, the pair spent the next hour laughing over their respective bosses' bothersome, egotistical idiosyncrasies.

"He's virtually impossible to please. Once that fact is acknowledged, the inevitable violent outbursts are easier to shrug off," Cai smiled. "He once had me hang the laundry staff from hooks on a clothesline for leaving wrinkles in his bedsheets when they washed them."

"Zyrdicia is easy to keep pleased. As long as she's entertained, and gets what she wants, life is easy."

"She doesn't torture servants?"

"She has no conception of common servants. They don't even register in her mind as existing. The idea of even having a laundry staff would be a revelation to her. As far as she's concerned, things just get done. If not by people, then by magic. If she sees household servants, they might as well be furniture. Out of her realm of consciousness." Portia thought a moment, then added, "Food preparation she sort of understands."

"That's something at least."

"It is only because a few of Lyr's chef's coddle her and compete for her favor. She knows there is a person associated with making food, but she's never wondered how. For all she knows, it's a form of sorcery."

"No woman can be that senseless, Portia."

"I'm serious! She commissioned a sprawling, magical palace and designed it without a kitchen. It never occurred to her that such a thing could exist, much less be useful."

Cai laughed, imagining it. "So how do you eat?"

"Food is always catered from Lyr. She understands food as a commodity to restrict and profit off of. The day-to-day link is totally outside her concern. Food is there. That's all that matters. Same with the rest of the household - it's there and it functions. That it could be otherwise would just confuse her."

"What did she do before you?" Cai, asked, running his fingers through his lover's striking red hair. Portia had come to see him for a few hours every night that she had been in Lyr. Despite his previous protestations to Prince Blackpool, the fact of the matter was that Cai had grown rather attached to her.

Portia sighed, "She's always had people taking care of her. The entity who raised her entrusted her to dark elves who treated her like a goddess as a child. Then she had various groups of human devotees over the years. If I were to disappear, there are others who would die for the chance to fill my shoes. She has an entire temple priesthood dedicated to her amusement. But she's totally dependent on me to keep her connected to the real world."

Cai nodded. "I know that feeling. I constantly have to balance out Vector's advice to the prince with a modicum of pragmatism. It's like playing nanny to someone powerful enough to kill everyone I know, but too self-indulgent to be bothered with common sense."

"Exactly!" Portia laughed, "She sends me all over the damned universe looking for whatever random item strikes her fancy. A single piece of fruit from an extinct species of tree was the best one. She read about it and wondered what it would taste like. If her demands were limited to well-ironed bedsheets, there would be no challenge to it. She doesn't care how impossible a demand is, or how much something costs, or even how it gets accomplished."

"I have the opposite problem, actually. The prince insists on overseeing every detail of every decision. He is a control freak. He is naturally a distrusting person, so he has to scrutinize everything. It's frustrating and exhausting. I think it would be far less stressful to work for someone who will let you do your job without constantly interfering."

"Mm, I think there's no question that between the two of them, she's more fun to work for. I adore Zyrdicia. She drives me nuts sometimes, but there's nothing I wouldn't do for her. I never really lived until I knew her. You?"

"I enjoy being an organizing force behind the throne. I have tremendous respect for Prince Blackpool, and his vision of conquest. He's a brilliant strategist. His temper is just one of the hazards of the job."

"But is he fun to work for?"

"Fun?" Cai smiled. "He hardly knows the meaning of the word."

"Bullshit. Zyrdicia had him laughing this morning while she was playing with some prisoners this morning."

"You mean the short, dark little laugh?"

"No, I mean really laughing. He was clearly having fun."

"In front of the troops?" Cai's stared in disbelief.

"Yeah, the whole army watched her catapult bodies into the castle."

"Hm. I'm sure he would find watching something like that amusing."

"He wasn't just watching. She had him firing his crossbow at them as the bodies flew through the air. He was very much a participant in the game."

"If he weren't so frigid and she weren't so childish, they would be perfect for each other," Cai commented dryly. "Not that there would be anyone left alive to notice."

Portia kept her commentary about the likelihood of that to herself. Her mistress had never been interested in mortal men-- that would be especially true in light of the unexpected rekindling of the nefarious relationship with Azriok. Flirtatious games had nothing to do with reality.

Cai and Portia proceeded to work out the details of the gold transfer to Castle Blackpool from the slave sale. Portia routinely handled the practical aspects of Zyrdicia's convoluted financial affairs. Moving huge amounts of money from one plane of existence to another was a trivial event for her. To him, however, a delivery of such wealth into the castle was a major undertaking. Portia intuitively sensed his relief at the gold's impending arrival and suspected the problematic state of affairs, though she said nothing. She had seen the glimmer of financial desperation in men's eyes often enough to recognize it now.

Cai could not hide his amazement at the woman's ability to plow through the complex details of the transaction and move on to other issues. Other than overseeing minor household expenses, it was unheard of for females in Karteia to handle financial transactions. Portia, however, oversaw more money in a month than many nations produced in a year. From Zyrdicia's vast payroll to her labyrinthine smuggling operations, Portia relentlessly kept an eye on all of it. Zyrdicia had built the rudiments of the financial empire in her youth, and then it seemed to grow of its own accord over many decades. It was now a self-nurturing, endlessly expanding monster spanning the entire cosmos. Zyrdicia loved creating exploitative schemes to generate wealth, but once in place, the day-to-day task of overseeing business operations bored her. She preferred to pay people to do it for her.

The seneschal found Portia's effortless administrative expertise impressive. She was the only woman he had ever known who understood the world in the same terms that he did. They had more in common than their service to powerful, lethal characters. They also shared a steadfast conviction that humans are naturally polyamorous creatures. Portia was ideally suited to him in that way.