“Yes, Nik, true blacks are degenerating, there are less and less of us. We lose ourselves and dissolve in the general mass of mudbloods and commoners.”

“And you also contributed to this mixture.”

“Yes.”

“You blamed me for doing a lot of stupid things, but isn’t your connection with Iness the same madness?”

Kors lowered his head.

“Now I understand this and admit my mistake, but in fact I am not as noble as you think due to your inexperience. I am not as pure-blooded as Prince Arel, Prince Ariel or Salafael. There is no royal blood in my veins. Yes, I am from the race of masters, from a good decent family, but my ancestors did not observe purity so much: sometimes there was a misalliance. Of course, I am not a peasant or a commoner. But in many ways, I built my career myself. Thanks to my intelligence and hard work, I reached the top and approached the true blacks, became one of them and entered their Supreme Order.”

Nik listened intently.

“And more, more, Nick, I was young and madly in love!”

Kors fell silent, lost in thought and lost in memories.

“What would you do when you saw that your son had blond hair?” Asked Nik, tearing him out of the past. “When you saw that he was such an obvious half-blood? You would get rid of him, right? You planned to let live only dark-haired children? People like Karina? Yes?”

“Yes,” Kors replied barely audibly. “Maybe I would leave a blonde girl…”

“And the boy?”

“No. No, I’m sorry. I’m telling you honestly.”

“So this is how you were going to solve this problem. And how would you explain this to your beloved Iness?”

“Small children often die…”

“It turns out that your son was lucky that the Reds stole Iness: they themselves, unwillingly, saved his life.”

“Nik…”

“You were looking for your child, you suffered, and if you found and saw that he was light-haired, you yourself would get rid of him! Great!”

“Please don’t…”

“Or would you sell him into slavery? Why kill him if a white child is worth good money?”

“Well, why are saying this!”

Nik, slightly raising his head, quickly looked up: the day ceased to be cloudless, and the sky was increasingly covered with gray clouds:

“It looks like it’s going to rain,” and he put his black glasses into his belt bag, not putting it on as usual.

Kors looked at him, still a little sleepy and rumpled, looked at his face, realizing that no matter how hard Nik tried to pretend to be indifferent, inside behind this inept mask he was upset and depressed.

Guided only by his passions, Kors, without hesitation, transgressed the laws and regulations, having entered into a relationship with a woman of another race, thereby dooming his descendants to life-long torment to be half-breeds, second-class people. And no matter what Nik did, he remained a mud for the blacks from birth to death. Yes, the soul of Kors belonged to the Demon, and he was completely devoted to him, but the human body of the Demon was the body of his son and belonged to Kors: the Demon had nowhere to escape from him, and he couldn’t do anything about it.”

And Kors involuntarily smiled: he understood that it was ugly in relation to Nik and unpleasant for him, but now Kors no longer regretted what he had done, he was satisfied with this alignment.

“Put on your glasses!” He ordered, just to demonstrate his power over his son. And, since it seemed to him that Nik was hesitating, he added sharply:

“Do you hear badly what I said?”

Nik silently took out his glasses and put them on. Kors was pleased, his mood improved a little:

“Tell me, Mara, this witch – did she pay them a lot for you?”

“Enough,” Nik said barely.

Kors felt sorry for him: “What am I doing? Why am I humiliating him?!”

“Forgive me,” he said hastily, “forgive me…”

“Why are you asking for forgiveness from me, it makes no difference to me,” and Nik, covering his face with a mask, turned away and walked away.

Kors saw Nik walk up to his Unclean Power and, inserting his healthy leg into the stirrup, confidently jumped into the saddle. Kors turned away in frustration. With annoyance, he looked at Adrian – he also looked at him, looked with his narrow, deep-set eyes, surrounded by black stripes of indelible arrows, looking at his master, as it seemed to Kors, even somehow too impudent. And now Kors didn’t feel, as usual, his inner suffering. He didn’t like it at all.

“I could kill you with one blow,” said Kors. He stroked his iron stick hanging from his belt, and Adrian noticed the gesture, the way he gently stroked it.

And now Kors listened with pleasure to his emotions:

“Coward,” he chuckled. “I’m not going to kill you, because then you’ll go to a feast for your gods. No, no, you will suffer here much more, Adri…”

Adrian dropped his eyes.

“Useless stupid creature,” Kors hissed with anger and disappointment, and spat in his face.

Chapter 4

The unclean ones drove slowly behind the main army of blacks: they were clearly in no hurry and often stayed at a halt all night and all the next day, lagging behind the people more and more. The warriors of Zagpeace and Tol have gone far ahead. Kors was not upset. He wanted to be with Nik and didn’t want to return to the Black City, he was afraid of this and was also playing for time. It was better that way – to stay with Nik as long as possible, until business in the capital didn’t twist them into a deadly whirlpool. Therefore, Kors was ready to go on this road endlessly.

This time they stood near a small picturesque lake for two days, and although Kors really didn’t want this, he still had to let Nik go play cards with his unclean ones. Kors and Arel remained in their tent, Valentine brought them dinner, and then removed the dishes and folded up a small camp table and chairs so that there was more space inside and the sirs could lie on the skins.

“Valentine, burn some more of this resin against insects,” said Kors. “I am annoyed by its smell, but the mosquitoes infuriate me even more!”

“Yes, sir,” Valentine immediately responded and put a tightly pressed piece of coal on a small censer in the corner.

With the help of a thin candle, he set it on fire: the coal began to smoke, covering a small area of the tent with thick gray smoke. Valentine, lifting the bottom of his helmet as far as possible, began to gently blow on the flat piece until it stopped smoking, red-hot. Then Valentine put small balls of tree resin on top of it. Softening on a hot coal, the resin spread a rather specific aroma over the tent, to which one had to get used to; but this pungent smell was good at repelling insects.

“I all like the southern lands,” said Kors, “except for the abundance of all kinds of flying and crawling evil spirits. I hate insects, as well as spiders and snakes!

“Yes,” Arel agreed with him and slapped himself on the leg, trying to kill an impressive, but already sluggish from the smoke and smell of tar, mosquito.

Kors looked skeptically at Valentine, who easily straightened and wiped the jar with a stone flower hanging from the ceiling with a rag.

“Arel, why did your slave become so tall? Is he almost as tall as you? I don’t understand something?” Kors asked, watching the lanky Valentine closely.

Arel didn’t answer.

“Or am I not aware of something?” Kors looked at him with his professional gaze, which had always instilled fear in those poor fellows, who, unfortunately, found themselves in his office. “And he continues to grow. Arel, he will soon catch up with you and overtake you. Look at his legs! How long his shins are! He will be very high, I understand this. Where did you get him from?”

“This is a slave from my Estate,” Arel answered clearly reluctantly, but nevertheless he answered.

“Take off his helmet. I want to look at his face. You hide his face carefully all the time. Take off his mask.”

Valentine was very frightened and involuntarily froze, squeezing into the wall away from them. He didn’t want the sirs to look at him at all, since he was not at all stupid, despite the difficult living conditions and the mental disorders associated with them. Valentine nevertheless perfectly remembered Arel’s questions about sir Chester: he was smart enough to understand at that moment that he was sir Chester’s illegitimate child from a little slave; a bastard who wasn’t killed just because sir Chester had died earlier. And his owner Arel was his half-brother.

Valentine also realized that their father was very cruel, not only with the slaves, but also with his legitimate son. Therefore, Arel with all his soul hated his father and never pronounced his name, always calling him only “damned”. And Valentine, as luck would have it, grew up and matured in the Limit, and if now his helmet is removed… What if during this time, he became even more like the damned? And seeing the traits he hates… Arel would simply kill him!

Valentine began to shake with a small shiver: he was terrified of Arel, and this uncontrollable reaction always started when the prince paid a little closer attention to the boy. Yes, Valentine suffered from the heat in a slave helmet, but at least he was composed.

“Why have I grown and changed so much?! What for?!”

“No, I won’t take off his helmet,” Arel said.

“Valentine is Chester’s bastard? Yes?” Kors asked. “Arel, do you want to deceive me? Have you forgotten who I am? I don’t even need his face, I see his physique, and this is not the body of a peasant and a commoner. Was your father having fun with the pretty slave girls from the Estate?”

“Yes,” Arel replied reluctantly, realizing that it would hardly be possible to hide this fact from the former head of the security service, “and this girl was a little over ten.”

“Sorry,” Kors nodded knowingly. “Your father was very unrestrained. I will say more: Chester was just a pompous turkey, confident that only he was always right and only his opinion and point of view were the only true ones. He managed to quarrel with everyone! Even with Leonardo, who was initially very loyal and sympathetic to him. Yes, your father was a rare kind of shit…”

“I killed him,” Arel said calmly.

At these words, Valentine froze and shrank even tighter.

“Yes, now the owner will kill me too. Exactly.”

“You killed him?” Kors was surprised. “After all, it was an accident, a fatal coincidence: Chester burned down in a fire in your ancestral chapel, when he offered prayers to the Gods.”

“It was already afterwards,” said Arel, “first I killed him, and then he burned down in the chapel, because I set it on fire.”

“But! Arel! How did you deal with him? After all, you were at that time… mmm… no more than sixteen years old, and he was such a healthy and tall, experienced warrior.”

“He was on his knees and prayed, kept whining and complaining to the Gods about injustice and his unhappy fate, as usual. I just quietly approached from behind and cut his throat, then stuck a knife in his back, up to the handle, and then again and again… He didn’t expect this: he wheezed, grabbed his neck with his hands, tried to stop the blood. He considered me a weakling and didn’t take me into account,” Arel smiled bitterly. “He didn’t have time to do anything. And I hit him from the back. It wasn’t fair.”

“I don’t blame you,” Kors stretched out his hand and gently stroked Arel’s head, slightly burying his fingers in thick, parted strands, admiring how the gold rings on his hand glittered beautifully in the prince’s dark hair. “Your father really was the true shit and deserved to die like that. I am sorry for you, sorry that you were forced to do this, to take on this burden, to do this wrong act in order to save your life. He is to blame, he forced you to get dirty in this filth, dragged you along with him into hatred.”

Arel smiled sadly and unconsciously tilted his head a little tighter, pressing it to Kors’ stroking hand. He looked at him with sincere love and fatherly tenderness.

“I felt such relief then,” continued Arel, “it was one of the best moments of my life: happiness, and a little fear that I was the owner of a huge Castle and would not be able to cope with all matters. But everything turned out to be not as difficult as I feared. I could live without flinching at his voice, without jumping into a corner at the sound of his footsteps along the corridor; I could talk loudly and say whatever came into my head, laugh, sleep as much as I wanted, order the servants to set the table at the time I wanted, and eat and drink what I wanted. Actually, I was finally able to have my time! And invite my friends to visit. I didn’t need to hide everything from that freak all the time…”

Kors, in a fit of feelings, pressed Arel’s head to his chest, pressing on the back of his head in the same way as he often did with Nik, and said with the same passion:

“My poor boy, you didn’t tell me anything during the interrogation, you didn’t confess.”

“You weren’t particularly interested in him.”

“Yes. Everyone believed that he burned down in this chapel. Nobody thought of you. But what about Valentine, Arel?” Kors returned to the beginning of their conversation. “Let me see, maybe he doesn’t look so much like Chester?”

Arel, and Kors noticed this with pleasure, with some regret pulled away from his hand and, taking out the key from his pocket, looked at his frozen slave.

“On your knees! Crawl over here!” He ordered, and Valentine immediately collapsed to the floor.

The helmet completely covered his head and wrapped around his neck, it was tightly laced up and additionally closed at the back with a lock so that Valentine could under no circumstances take it off on his own. However, Valentine would never have dared to do this even without these tricks. Moreover, on his throat an iron slave collar was put, very similar to the one that Nik once wore. Wide and heavy, tied tightly, it covered his neck, resting the upper edge against the chin, not allowing Valentine to fully turn his head.

To remove the helmet from Valentine’s head, Arel first had to loosen the lacing a little. After unbuttoning the lock, he finally pulled the edges of the helmet out from under the collar with some effort.

“Lift your face and look at sir Kors,” he ordered, opening his slave.

Valentine’s face was dirty, because on the campaign Verniy had no time to take care of the boy properly. And Arel rarely gave him the key. But despite the dirt, deep streaks of scars on his cheeks and the absence of one eye, poor Valentine’s clear resemblance to Chester was evident, and no injury could hide it.

Kors shook his head in disappointment.

“Yeah… Arel, it looks like you were right. Damn it! He is practically his copy!”

Arel was silent.

“Maybe we should dye his face with black paint?” Kors suggested thoughtfully, meticulously examining Valentine, who was grimy and pale with fear. “Rub in the dye the way Nurhg does with her slaves? You can ask the unclean ones for paint, for sure they have not only blue, but also black one. Rub it with black paint and hmmm… cut off his nose,” Kors smiled cheerfully at his idea, imagining disfigured Valentine. “With a black face and no nose, he will cease to be like Chester. No, nevertheless an artist died in me, I have this talent, and I passed it on to my son, not Iness,” he laughed smugly.

Arel said nothing, just rolling his eyes slightly. He had heard these endless self-praises of Kors so many times in his life that he had long been accustomed to letting them pass by.

“I’m just kidding, just kidding,” Kors continued as if nothing had happened. “What’s the point in cutting off his nose? You can’t hide his height, but he will be taller than you, and maybe then me. Arel, he has absorbed the best features of true blacks! You look like a mother, you are all like her. And he… This is unacceptable! Wouldn’t it have been easier to get rid of him immediately and quickly and painlessly, since Chester didn’t have time to do this?”

“Yes, he didn’t have time, and I… I just didn’t know about it. When I arrived at the Estate, Valentine was small, sweet and smart. I became fond to him, and then in the Limit, Verniy began to feed him, heal him, and now…”

“In the Limit, he became what he always was,” said Kors thoughtfully. “That which slept in him, in the Demon’s Limit woke up, came to life and actively developed.”

“Yes,” Arel agreed, “this cursed blood immediately manifested in him.

“Do it now. Get rid of him.”

“No, I can’t, I love him.”

“What?! You knocked out his eyes!” Kors didn’t seem to believe his ears.

“So what? I still love him very much,” Arel pulled Valentine to him. “Do you hear, you moron? I cannot kill you.”

“M-master, I’m n… not worthy of your love, I upset y-you and look like the d-damned, kill me!” As always, from being worried, Valentine began to stutter badly.

“No!”

Kors was stunned.

“Arel, this is so unlike you. I thought it was easy for you to kill slaves.” There was overt surprise in his voice. “How many of them did you kill in your Castle, Arel? My slave, the white half-blood that I gave you, did you kill her?”

“No,” Arel shook his head. “I really loved your gift – Mina – and took care of her. I didn’t give it to anyone. She saved Nik’s life.”

“How?”

“Nik needed Black Water, he lost consciousness and fell into a coma. The doctor transfused him with the blood of the white half-breed Mina, and Nik didn’t die. And Mina also survived, I took care of her. I didn’t let anyone touch her, neither Lis nor Enriki.”

“Arel!” Kors was touched. “I love you, Arel, I love you very much!”

He hugged him again.

“You are like a son to me too. Do you know why I stopped loving you then?”

“Because I became dirty.”

“No, I thought so. But with Nik, I realized that I love dirt. Yes, unfortunately, I love dirt. I stopped loving you because you did not obey me!”

“No, I always listened to you!”

“You didn’t listen well. You don't understand what it means to obey properly. Nik more or less understands… not completely, of course, he also needs to be educated much more, but at least he is trying to obey me as needed. Maybe you will try too?” Kors gently ran his fingers over the tightly closed lips of his prince, slightly pressing his not-cropped nails on his lower lip.

“No!” Arel said, dodging.

“Arel! That’s why, that’s why I stopped loving you! I love obedience. And you infuriate me with your obstinacy! You just piss me off!”

Arel turned away in frustration, but Kors, moving closer, tried to turn him around and kissed him on the temple.

“You will try, Arel, try, and you will succeed.”

But Prince Arel was stubbornly silent, and Kors, knowing his character, decided to change the subject for a while.

“Do you want me to help you? I will make it as painless as possible for Valentine.”

Arel shuddered and turned sharply to Kors:

“No! Don’t dare! It will be over between us forever if you dare to touch him without my permission. Don’t you dare harm Valentine!”

“Okay, okay,” Kors shrugged his shoulders, offended, “I wanted to help you, but since you don’t want… but no problem, Arel! Let your slave be taller than you, this is very… hmm… original! But you have always been not like everyone else, it is not for nothing that you were nicknamed “stupid handsome prince.”

Valentine, all this time kneeling in front of them, sobbed, unable to restrain himself any longer, and tears flowed from his eyes; and from a thorn covered, and from an implanted unclean eye. Arel, oddly enough, didn’t get angry.

“Valentine, I will bring you to the Black City and give you to my half-brother Vil. There are three of us.”

“Father had three sons,” Kors whispered softly and grinned.

“Vil will take care of you, he is very kind, and I will go with Nik and Vitor to the Demon World.”