047

Malina waved her hands absently and the feathers on Itzi's headdress stood straight up in the air, the water having been removed from them.

"And that?" Malina asked, "Where does that come from? Have we not been favoured by the Gods? These natives you pits, what have the Gods given them?" Malina stood up from her chair and placed her hands on the desk as the floor beneath her rocked in the water. Her black hear fell forward and eclipsed part of her face as she looked down at Itzi. "They build on our ruins. They scramble out of the swamps on the roads we built, and they don't even know it. Without our forefathers where would they be?"

Izti looked up at the awakened fire in his empresses eyes. "I did not mean to offend you Masu, I only spoke what was in my heart. With so much at stake and so much of the empire... involved I am concerned. Sometimes I worry that we see what we want to see. That, when there is power...superiority...that things make become confused."

"Of course." Malin sat down. Itzi was a slave, his people had been conquered long ago. The plain just south of the Himath mountains had been overrun by the empire in the years of her grandfather. Itzi's people had been slaves since then. Of course he would be sensitive to conquest at this scale. The prophecies had given the plains to the empire just as they would return the forgotten continent.