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“Tell me what you see, worm” growled the king.

The serpent slid nervously to the side of the throne, and thought carefully before he opened his mouth. The king had grown unsettled, paranoid even, these last few seasons. It behoved the soothsayer to choose his words with caution.

“Sire,” he began, “the paths before you branch in many directions. It is getting more difficult with every passing day to speak the future-“

“Curse it, Vriss, just work your trickery and let’s be done with this!” Goragh roared, his deep, booming voice echoing in the chamber. He glared at the snake, and two pairs of golden eyes locked gazes. Vriss turned his face from the monarch’s fierce stare.

“It is as I have said before,” the soothsayer continued, “and so I say it again. A wall of thunder, grey as the heaviest rains, will roll from the south. We will be engulfed, but your line will triumph and endure. It is a test, not an invasion. It may happen soon, or it may be a lifetime away.”

Disgruntled, Goragh leaned back in his throne, one paw on the medallion of office at his throat. In the room’s dim light, its dull gold gleamed against the deep red of his mane. It was burnished from wear against the skin of his fingers as he rubbed it in thought. “And what of your predecessor’s visions?” he asked. “They run counter to yours. He sought not to please me with simple platitudes, but to tangle us all in twisted words.”

“Indeed, highness” said the snake, “but we all now know why he sought to confuse his masters, for even though he served the royal line for many years, indeed for your own father’s lifetime, his was all make-believe. He never took the stone that would have enabled him to truly see the future. He had an unnatural affection for that race who carried such treasures within them.”

“Yes,” Goragh agreed slowly, tapping a claw on the arm of his seat. “Hmph! Such a soft-hearted creature he was. Or maybe it burned his lying tongue, eh?”

“Maybe,” Vriss replied uncertainly. It was well known among the soothsayers of all species that the stone-bearers’ gift, whether given freely or taken by force, would not work for many – the power of future-sight only blossomed in a few. Yet it was a fool’s tale that it would burn and shrivel the tongues of the unworthy. However, the king needed his little fantasies, and Vriss remained silent.

The great doors at the far end of the throne room creaking open distracted the pair. Shafts of golden sunlight outlined the form of Goragh’s chief general, Murghan. The older lion strode up the centre of the vast chamber to stand before his ruler. Arrayed behind him were a selection of his troops, dragging a travois heaped with stinking, raw skins.

“Your majesty,” the veteran began, after performing a perfunctory bow, “here are the last of the stone-bearers in our kingdom. They have been eliminated.” He spoke flatly, with distaste for the task he had been forced to perform. “No more remain.”

Goragh leaned forward, sniffing the rank stench that arose from the hides. “And their stones?” he growled.

Murghan beckoned one of his subordinates to his side, and took a large leather pouch from him. Glaring at Vriss, he tossed the bag to the snake, where it landed on the polished floor with a thud. “All there,” he snarled at the serpent. “And may they bring you much foresight!”

Ignoring his anger, Vriss coiled around the pouch and tugged its drawstring open with his mouth. He nosed inside it for a second, surveying its gruesome contents, and glanced up at the king. Disdaining to speak to the general, he said “A good haul, sire. These will be most productive.”

“Then take them and go,” replied Goragh, waving a paw dismissively. Vriss gripped the bag in his jaws and slithered away, knowing when he was not wanted. The king’s moods were prone to change swiftly these days, and his sanity was waning. The cracks in his stately façade were growing wider every day.

When the snake had disappeared from view, Goragh rose from his throne and came to seat himself on his haunches before Murghan. The old soldier looked down at his king, sighed heavily, and lowered his own aching legs until he too was seated. With a nod of his head, he dismissed his troops. Both lions were quiet until the soldiers had closed the tall doors behind them, leaving the two cats in a room that was large, empty and reeking of dead things.

“We are both getting old,” said the king without preamble.

“You’ve only just noticed?” replied the general in a voice laden with irony.

Goragh looked at his old friend. Really looked, for the first time in what seemed so long, at the scarred face, the large stripes where fur had been replaced by puckered black skin. Looked, and saw the greying of his muzzle, the silver streaks in the long mane – the mane no other male was allowed to grow. Murghan had been spared the shearing many years ago out of respect for his long service and dedication to the monarchy.

“This,” growled Murghan, indicating the flayed skins, “this is wrong, and we both know it. They were occasionally trouble, I’ll grant you that, but they didn’t deserve this. Not for any ‘gift’, either – how can a gift be taken by force? It loses its power that way, it has to be given freely, and when the gift lies within your own body, how could you possibly want to give it away?”

“The stone-bearers never give them away anyway, until they are dead.”

“Of course not!” Murghan exclaimed in exasperation. “Would you give up an eye? Would you willingly rip out a piece of your own flesh, for no use to yourself but to attain power for somebody else, power that may never benefit you?”

“They used to give them up willingly,” Goragh said softly. “Only a generation ago. My father received one from the clan of the salt flats. I remember that their queen travelled for weeks to reach the palace, and gave up her very own stone for my father’s soothsayer.”

“The one supplanted by your snake,” grumbled the general.

“Enough, Murghan!” snapped the king, rising to all fours. He stalked a few paces from his friend, then turned back. “That serpent’s predecessor was a trouble-stirrer! He would have dethroned me in favour of another species, let alone another lion! We have always ruled, as is our right, and he would have replaced our noble lineage with common muck!”

“You see trouble where there is none!” snapped the general. He too arose and stepped, shoulder to shoulder, with his king, following his pacing. “Soothsayers have always said that they see many futures, many different paths, using the stones. He simply stopped using them when he saw how obtaining the stones was damaging our relations with the bearers.”

“They stopped offering them to us!” roared the king. “We had to take them by force, or the royal household would have lost its most precious ability. How could we govern effectively without foreknowledge?”

Murghan abruptly stopped pacing. Wearily, he sank back to the floor. How could he tell the king that the stone-bearers simply ran out of candidates to offer? True, they sometimes survived having the stones removed, but the surgery was brutal and their numbers were becoming depleted as demand from the soothsayers of all species rose. More and more leaders wished to emulate the king and retain the services of a mystic advisor, where traditionally only the ruling monarch had ever had such a privilege. And so demand for the seeing-stones rose, along with the death toll of the bearers.

Goragh’s father, instead of curbing the demand for soothsayers, had instead decreed that the stone-bearers should be forced to offer a proportion of their number to be given as tribute every season to the royal household, whereupon the seeing-stones would be removed and divided between those of his subjects he thought worthy. The bearers, always a volatile species with delusions of independence, began to vanish from the kingdom. No tribute was ever forthcoming.

The situation had spiralled wildly out of control. Hunters had been dispatched to track down and take any bearers they could find, of any age, and the creatures fought back viciously. Murghan remembered those days with deep regret. As he gained promotion within the ranks of the old king’s army, he had been forced to order patrols out into bearer territory. Sometimes they were successful, but often they returned deeply scarred, missing limbs even, and as the young Goragh had taken the throne upon his father’s death, Murghan had hoped that this madness would end.

For a time, it did. The new king was more interested in governing what remained of his kingdom than chasing mystical trinkets and slaughtering their holders. His advisor at the time had even urged against it, to allow the species time to recover. Gradually, bearers had returned to the fringes of the land.

Yet somewhere along the line, the royal madness had returned. Goragh’s trusted advisor had been replaced, through what machinations the general did not understand, with the odious Vriss, and the troubles had started up again. Vriss had demanded seeing-stones in large numbers, and had planted in the king’s head the idea that the bearers were an unworthy race and plotting open rebellion. Murghan had no idea for what purpose the snake wanted so many stones, but his greed for them had fuelled the same problems – stone-bearers were hunted mercilessly now, and their gifts ripped from them along with their skins.

“Why do I do this?” he muttered to himself. Most of the skins on the stinking pile had been gathered by bounty hunters for the price Goragh had placed on them, at Vriss’s suggestion. Murghan had flatly refused to allow his soldiers to participate in such butchery, but the task still fell to them to collect the skins and stones and pay the bounties. Even though his own troops were not involved, lions had still done most of the killing. Baboons, painted dogs, even leopards, weren’t so foolish as to try to kill an enraged stone-bearer, so his own species had taken most of the reward.

Goragh had ceased prowling the throne room and come to stand opposite his old friend. He looked weary and haunted as he said, “We must stop open rebellion, general. My family has ruled for generations, and without us the land would not prosper. The other species are not fit for governing themselves.”

“They appear to manage perfectly well to me,” Murghan replied. From any other creature, such an impudent reply would have bought its speaker a deep set of scars from the king’s own claws. Murghan, however, was safe from such retribution, being second only to Goragh himself in seniority among the males in the ruling pride. He even stood above the king’s own nephew, and feared nothing for his safety in the monarch’s presence. Old friends, he had always spoken his thoughts openly when alone with Goragh.

The other lion growled and flexed his claws. “Useless, mewling imbeciles!” he snarled. “They wouldn’t last a full year without being told what to do!”

“So what do you decree now?” sighed the old general, deciding not to argue. The smell of the raw hides was getting on his nerves.

“Are these the last?” Goragh asked, walking over to the pile. “Do they stink this bad all the time, or only when they’re dead?”

“They’re more than a bit ripe,” Murghan grumbled. “I can assure you, the carcases smell worse. And yes, they’re the last within our borders.” The rest had the sense to move as far from our lands as they could, he thought. Troublesome though they could be, they were not stupid.

Goragh circled the pile, stopping to lift the edge of the topmost skin. It was stiff with dried flesh and blood. “What do you do with these?” he asked.

Murghan sensed a change in the king’s voice. It had an unpleasant edge to it. He shifted uncomfortably before responding, “They are buried. With what little ceremony we think the stone-bearers give their dead. We cannot know for sure, none have ever seen what they do with their bodies themselves.”

“Maybe they are not so rotten after all,” mused Goragh, lowering his head to further examine the hide. He flipped it over to inspect the dappled fur on the other side. “Hm, coarse,” he muttered to himself, “but probably not without its uses.”

“Sire!” cried the general. “You cannot be thinking of using them? That would be monstrous!”

“Why would it? We use the hides of other species all the time.” He pointed to the furs that draped the throne. “Zebra, gnu, oryx –“

“All legitimate prey!” Murghan shouted angrily. “They know that, and accept it, but the stone-bearers are different. They are predators, it was in the Agreement!”

“That ancient document? Maybe it’s time it was changed,” said the king calmly. “I feel we need to extend our search for the seeing-stones.”

“Then I will have no part of it!” roared Murghan, standing up. His tail lashed as he continued, “You cannot hunt outside our borders, the law forbids it!”

Goragh smiled slyly as he turned to face his friend. “It only forbids the hunting of food animals outside our borders. Nothing else is specified. Besides, I can re-make the law if I have to.”

“You’re mad,” growled the general. He strode up to Goragh and faced him, nose-to-nose. His amber eyes bored into the king’s. “Where is the friend of my youth? Where is the compassion, the adherence to what we hold sacred?”

Suddenly Goragh’s face crumpled, and he collapsed to the floor, paws clutching at his head. “I don’t know!” he wailed as he writhed.

Horrified, Murghan crouched over the king. He had known that Goragh’s mind was under immense stress, but the infamous royal madness that had gripped his father and grandfather had, until now, seemed to have passed over this generation. Murghan’s heart sank as he thought that it might not have done so after all. They needed no more mad kings.

Goragh’s wails eventually quietened to soft mewlings as his friend comforted him. “Come, sire,” he said softly, leading Goragh to his throne. “You should rest. I’ll call for your queen.”

“Yes,” muttered Goragh, “yes, yes. Sheraghn. I need Sheraghn. Please fetch her.”

“And those things, sire? Shall I bury them?” Murghan asked, pointing to the skins. He weighted his voice as more statement than question.

Goragh looked up blearily, his eyes misted, and peered at the pile. “Yes,” he said faintly, “get rid of them. Bury them, burn them, throw them in the river. Whatever you feel necessary.”

The king’s mind was wandering again, Murghan knew. His voice quavered slightly, and he seemed to have almost forgotten what the skins were. He was starting to slip out of lucidity again. The general was worried that it was happening more frequently these days and resolved to have words with the royal physician, if he could find a way to speak with him.

Murghan returned to the huge doors at the other end of the throne room and called in his guards. As they began removing the foul hides, he felt a prickling on the nape of his neck. He was being watched.

The room was full of shadows. Even in the fullness of the day’s heat and light, the throne room retained darkness in its recesses; deep, black places where a spy could crouch and watch. And spies could come in all species, and all sizes.

The general shook his head, trying to ignore the crawling of his skin. The throne room was searched daily and guarded at all hours by his own troops. Doubtless, the palace was a maze of corridors, rooms and staircases, but he knew all the secret routes, all the trapdoors and cubbyholes, and he had trusted, veteran guards stationed at every one.

Still, Murghan couldn’t help but feel uneasy as he exited the chamber behind the laden travois. He would have to conduct a thorough search himself soon. Maybe the king’s paranoia was rubbing off on him.

In the shadows behind the throne, two pairs of eyes watched him leave.

*

Murk ran. He fell to all fours and galloped as if his very life depended on it. His spear was a league behind him, left in the dust where he’d dropped it, and his leather pack bounced wildly on his back as he raced through the grassland.

The messenger bird had reached him hours after he had begun his hunt, but not before he had realised the futility of his self-appointed task. He was not built for lone hunting. Even when in the pack, he had been last to throw himself upon the prey, last to strike with spear, and usually last to eat. His mother could show no favouritism in the hunt and so Murk was the last of the adults to take his share. He didn’t usually mind. As the clan numbers had dwindled, there had been more to go around and he usually managed to claim a good piece of the kill, even after the others had divvied the rest of it up.

Recently, however, he had felt uncomfortable in being last. His mother was growing older, and the younger females were talking about who would step up to be leader after her reign was over. She had no daughter, only Murk, and males never led the clan. He had caught her looking more often at him with a thoughtful expression on her face, her brow wrinkled and her eyes distant.