Page 29 of Dark Destiny: The Fates' Bargain

The clan was making plans to build a permanent laboratory for them, which meant that they weren't planning to get rid of them.

When everyone was done eating, Turner rose and led them out of the kitchen. "I'll show you to your temporary quarters." He walked up to the elevator that had brought them down to the kitchen level. "It's three levels below this one. We call it the dungeon level, but you are not prisoners, and what used to be cells were converted a while ago into comfortable guest rooms. It's just a secure place that we use for those who need it. You can move through the keep freely once you're settled in."

"Are there any guests on that level other than us?" Yaaf asked, his instincts prickling at the way Turner had chosen his words.

The strategist pressed his palm to the reader by the elevator. "Just one. Your former lord is down there."

"Navuh?" Yaaf asked even though there was only one person Turner could have referred to as their former lord.

We should feel him,Number Three thought, and the others agreed. On the island, his presence had been a constant pressure at the edge of their awareness, the low, ambient hum of his compulsion cloud blanketing everything, so pervasive that most immortals stopped noticing it. When it had lifted, though, the night he vanished, they'd felt the absence like a held breath finally released.

He was here, in this building, and the collective felt nothing.

We've transcended, Yaaf thought.He can no longer touch us.

"We cannot sense him," Yaaf said aloud. "On the island, his compulsion blanketed everyone. It was like a constant pressure. Is he drugged?"

Turner shook his head. "Not as far as I've been informed, so I wouldn't be able to tell you why that is, not with any authority.I've never felt what you're describing in the first place, so I can't say what its absence means. My best guess is that it has something to do with the state he's in."

"What state?"

Had they tortured him? Starved him?

Not that the collective cared about what had been done to their former tormenter, but it didn't fit the image they had of the clan. Then again, the clan and the Brotherhood were ancient enemies, and getting information out of Navuh would have been the smart thing to do.

Navuh wouldn't have caved, out of pride more than to protect the organization he had created.

Turner held his gaze with those pale blue eyes of his, then nodded. "He was badly injured the night you felt him disappear."

The elevator arrived, the doors opened, and Turner motioned for them to go in. The two Guardians entered behind them.

"I'm not sure I'm the best one to tell this story," he said as it started to move.

The collective waited while the elevator descended, and when the doors opened again, they filed out and followed Turner.

He told the story, or rather a brief version of it, while walking them the rest of the way down the corridor. A harem lady named Tula, pregnant and unwilling to surrender her child the way the harem required. Areana, the queen of the harem and Navuh's truelove mate, conspiring to get her off the island rather than watch it happen. A cliff. A fall. Areana going over the edge and a Guardian catching her and preventing her fall to the rocks below, and Navuh, seeing only the fall and not the rescue,throwing himself after her with no plan beyond the desperate, unthinking certainty that he would not survive her death.

"He hit the rocks," Turner said. "Nearly every bone in his body shattered, and his internal organs were badly injured, but by some miracle he survived, probably because he is a demigod and his healing ability is superior, and because Areana begged the Guardians to save him. We had to oblige her because she's Annani's sister."

All eight stopped walking, the shock of that statement rippling through the collective, and the Guardians trailing behind them stopped as well.

"Navuh had Annani's sister locked in the harem?" Number One asked.

Turner smiled, and it transformed his face from austere to almost pleasant. "That's another long story, but I'm not going to tell it tonight. What I can tell you, though, is that once Tula realized that with Navuh gone from the island, the rest of the harem ladies would be in danger, she insisted on going back and getting the rest of them out. That was how all the harem ladies disappeared. We got them, and they now live happily and freely in our village."

Turner stopped in front of a row of open doors, cells with their fronts open to the corridor, and gestured. "Point is, Navuh is not what he used to be. I hear that he is still as cantankerous and manipulative as ever, but he has no teeth. He lost the use of his legs, and it will still take a while longer for him to regain use of them. Lady Areana is taking care of him."

"Which cell is he in?" Number One asked.

"That one." Turner pointed. "The one without the window at the bottom. It's an apartment, and much too nice for him, but we couldn't throw him in a regular cell because of Lady Areana."

"Because she is Annani's sister," Number One reasoned.

"Exactly."

"We assume she's a half-sister, born to a human concubine."

Turner smiled for the second time. "They are half-sisters, but they were both born to goddesses. Areana is older and was born to a goddess who was not married to Annani's father. After Ahn married Nai, Annani's mother, he was exclusively hers, his truelove mate."