“Are you busy?” Without being invited, the sorcerer dropped onto a tuffet just out of arm’s reach. Whatever the answer was, she rocked it back onto two legs and was deploying the pieces of her game.
“I’m packing,” Sayeh said.
Ravani’s dubious gesture took in her hands, folded in her lap, and her raised leg propped on its little stool. It extended to Ümmühan and Nazia bustling about.
“Someone has to supervise,” Sayeh replied primly.
“Oh, certainly,” Ravani answered. Her sideways glance seemed to imply that supervision was especially necessary when one was confronted with such impossible servants as Ümmühan and Nazia. “Black or white?”
Sayeh imagined Nazia’s eyeroll with stunning detail, even though the girl wisely had her back to them and was pretending not to be able to overhear.
“Black.” Sayeh sipped her cooling tea, and set the cup back on the little tray beside her. “Are you here to insult me again, or just my ladies this time?”
Ravani tossed her head to move her heavy braid behind her. “You know that was just for display, Sayeh. My profoundest apologies. That was just the instructions of the raja. He wanted to see you humiliated and off-balance. He thought he might get a straighter answer out of you.”
“Sure,” Sayeh said. “That seems likely.”
It did, though. At least a little.
“Are you sure you want to move that?”
“I touched it.”
They played in silence for a while while Sayeh’s ladies moved around the pavilion. Sayeh thought she was holding her own for a change until Ravani took the black rajni with a quick diagonal move.
Sayeh began to lose.
She had not been accustomed to losing, before she began to play Ravani. But now her raja was pinned between an elephant and an infantryman, and she could not move without moving it into check.
She tipped the piece over with ill grace.
“I brought you something as a sort of apology.” Ravani leaned far forward to set a small casket on the tea tray beside the game. It clicked as if it were heavier than it looked. Her braid fell forward over her shoulder again. “Surely you know what it is like to serve a master you despise.”
Sayeh eyed it. Ravani had been wise not to try to place it into her hand.
“Are you going to pour yourself tea next?”
Ravani smiled. “Thank you for the offer.”
Sayeh was certain they were both well aware that it had not been. Was Ravani seeing how far Sayeh would risk going to stand up to her?
Ravani’s hands fell back into her lap, and did not move. A little later, they did move, as she broke the stillness between them to wave dismissively. “Besides, you need me to get you into the city.”
“Didn’t I hear from the guards that the Tian Wizard did some sort of sorcery on the city, to seal us out?”
“The Tian Wizard.” That seemed to amuse Ravani, for some reason. “Yes, you have developed quite the spy network here. Well done, Rajni.”
“So how are you going to get me in?”
Ravani shrugged. “Magic, of course. Your luggage might be a bigger problem.”
“I will, at the very least, need some clothes.”
“With a figure like that?… Oh, all right.”
Sayeh had to restrain herself from shaking her head. “And my ladies.”
“Of course,” Ravani said, with a second glance over at them. They had finished the packing—only one trunk: truly there was not much. Even if “not much” turned out to be a surprising amount. “I am trying to make myself useful to you, you know. You are going to need me. Especially once you’re inside.”
“Oh, yes. Anuraja’s agents within.”
Ravani tipped her head.
Sayeh snorted, and decided to try a little vulnerability. She wished she understood better what Ravani was driving after in their conversations. They seemed so … meandering. Surely the woman couldn’t just be looking for a friend?
Ravani did not seem like the sort of person who had friends.
Sayeh said, “I do better with people when I don’t let myself need anything from them. Once I need something, my emotions—my desire for attention or validation—become distracting, and it makes me sad.”
Perhaps it wasn’t wise, sharing her vulnerabilities so. But the best way she knew to lie convincingly was and had always been to put as much truth in it as possible. And misdirection was a kind of lying. She did not want to seem too eager to go on this mission. Anuraja might be willing to believe her resistance had caved before his force of will.
Sayeh thought Ravani was cannier. And less enamored of her own supposed irresistibility. She might figure out that Sayeh had more of a plan—okay, a ridiculous, desperate gamble that could backfire to destroy everything she loved—than just getting away from Anuraja.
Ravani said, “And you need something from Anuraja.”
The sorcerer did not, Sayeh noticed, often use her employer’s honorifics, except when in his presence.
“I need his forbearance,” Sayeh agreed. “Eventually, I need my son.”
“Himadra has your son.”
“Himadra is Anuraja’s ally. And Himadra’s kingdom is not much bigger or richer than was Ansh-Sahal. I don’t see him ever becoming the dominant partner.”
“You’re probably right,” Ravani agreed, too easily. “Himadra is quite the personality, though.”
Sayeh almost asked about the other sorcerer. Almost. Caution stilled her tongue. She might have risked more, if she had not been leaving.
“I believe you,” she said. “But personality rarely wins wars.”
Ravani laughed. “You might be surprised.” She stood, leaving Sayeh with a sense of envy at her strength and freedom of movement. It will come back. Already she was stronger. “I’ll see you in a little while. Enjoy your gift.”
Sayeh waited until Ravani was gone to lean forward, wrapping her arms around her uninjured knee and pulling her forehead down to her thighs. She rested her face against her own flesh, feeling the stretch of muscles. She did not weep.
“Rajni?” Nazia murmured, from beside her.
“God, I hate that woman. Hand me that box she left, wouldn’t you?”
Nazia obeyed. Sayeh opened the little casket, which was ivory and intricately carved. Inside, tucked into the slit in a white velvet pillow, was a dainty ring. Gold, thick and yellow as butter. Tiny diamonds and emeralds, sparkling and trembling in the light. And at the center, one gorgeous coral sapphire, shimmering.
Sayeh stared at it, her breath caught despite herself.
She reached to touch it.
“Accepting a gift is a form of consent,” Ümmühan reminded from the other side.
Sayeh startled. Dammit, who had taught these women to walk so softly? She looked at Ümmühan, and drew her reaching finger back. “You are very wise.”
“I am a fool,” the old woman answered. “That is why God made me a poet.”
21
“I’d give a lot for a good desert hound right now,” the Dead Man muttered to Ata Akhimah and Yavashuri. The latter had interpreted Mrithuri’s order to get her leg seen to by bullying Ata Akhimah into winding a length of cloth around the swelling knee, and was limping about with the kind of taut non-expression that soldiers adopted to hide their painful grimaces.
The three of them stood over the tossed disarray of Chaeri’s trunk and its contents. Either Mi Ren was not a subtle searcher, or Chaeri had detected the intrusion, packed hastily, and fled. Possibly both.
“How well do they track in the rain?” Yavashuri reached out with a long-handled crochet hook to select a fluttering chiffon veil from the pile without touching it with her hand. Of course the old spymistress had the means to crochet on her person somewhere.
You’re not that much younger than she, the Dead Man mocked himself.
“Never had the occasion to learn,” he admitted. “You have something similar in the kennels here?”
“Alas
,” Ata Akhimah said, “the best sense of smell in the palace belongs to the rajni’s vultures, and I’m not sure even she could get them to track something living with it.” She extended a hand. “But I might be able to do something with that. Wizardry is often of little use in the moment … but perhaps this time.”
Using the hook, Yavashuri laid the cloth across Akhimah’s hand. The dye was exceptional; the color a rich and strong mauve, shading between steel blue and dusty purple depending on how the light fell on it. “I’ve never seen her wear that.”
“It was a bequest from the late rajni, if I remember,” the Wizard said. “Pity about that.”
With her fingernails, she unpicked a thread. It seemed to come loose more easily than the Dead Man would have expected, and once it slithered free of the woven length, it rapidly spooled itself around Ata Akhimah’s hand as the scarf unraveled. There was a lot of thread in a silk scarf, as it happened.
Ata Akhimah whispered something to the thread. It shimmered faintly blue-violet, though whether that was the Wizard’s magic or the rainy light on the silk was anyone’s guess. Then one end of the stuff lifted like a snake’s head, and flicked forward. It kept going, unreeling itself as fast as it had reeled itself in. At a glance from Ata Akhimah, the Dead Man followed, Yavashuri limping in their wake.
As they hurried through the outer chamber of the rajni’s apartment, the temporarily piebald Guang Bao lifted his head to croak at them grumpily. The Dead Man could not disagree.
The good news was that Chaeri could hardly have gotten out of the city. The bad news was that a city was a large dune in which to seek one grain of sand. And it was still pouring outside—harder now, in fact, than ever. As the thread darted toward the gardens, though, the Dead Man hoped they might be lucky. Perhaps she had not dared to try the palace gates and their guardians. Perhaps she had gone to ground somewhere within the walls.
They did not go alone to arrest the rajni’s handmaiden. Between them, along the way, they commandeered Vidhya, half a dozen palace guardsmen, and Yavashuri’s agent Druja, whom the Dead Man had first encountered in his role as a caravan master. That latter, they sent on to the gates to warn the guards against letting Chaeri escape—a thing they should all have thought to do first, but things were happening quickly. The other seven plus their three made ten, which was probably overkill.
It seemed worth going prepared.
* * *
It was a good thing the thread was so long, because it unspooled faster than they could run, even with two guardsmen lifting Yavashuri by the elbows. They charged through the rainy gardens, scattering gravel. The Dead Man and Ata Akhimah were in the lead as they ran up a flight of wet stairs that wound through the terraces, slipping precariously. A figure stood on the heights, alone, wind-whipped, wound in a faint, thready blue-violet glow.
“Got her,” Ata Akhimah said, leaning forward and digging in, hauling herself hand over hand up the thread as if it were a rope. The Dead Man drew his one still-primed pistol, having been too wet and too busy both to have reloaded the other. Something small, black, and heavily flapping swarmed just within the swirl of ashy clouds hanging so low overhead that he ran through some of their trailing streamers.
On the height overlooking the city, Chaeri turned to face them. She had climbed up atop the wall, and was balancing herself precariously among the shards of dragonglass. Her black-brown ringlets blew across her face; she could not restrain them. Ata Akhimah’s thread had bound her arms tight to her sides. They were crossed over the filigree box that held Mrithuri’s Eremite serpents, flesh pressed white against the corners. The Dead Man could hear the heavy bodies hissing and striking inside. Chaeri shook her head to get the rain and her hair out of her eyes.
“Surrender!” the Dead Man shouted.
“Oh, fuck you,” the handmaiden said.
She hurled herself backward, suddenly and hard, over the precipice with a scream that started late and choked off abruptly. The thread linking her to Ata Akhimah snapped taut. The Wizard staggered forward, toward the wall studded with poisonous glass and toward the killing drop beyond it. Vidhya lunged and caught her by the waist, throwing them both to the flagstones with a doubled grunt as the air thumped out of them. They slid and stopped, so the Dead Man whirled back and raced to the parapet.
Chaeri dangled perhaps twice the length of his body below, pale-faced and gasping with the shock, blood washed down her arms from where the corners of the box had broken the skin open. She swung, directing a glare at the Dead Man that suggested she would have spat at him if she thought it would have reached. The thread lay across the dragonglass blades, unparted. Ata Akhimah’s Wizardry was perhaps a little stronger than she claimed.
He leaned back and gestured the guardsmen up with the hand that did not hold his gun. “You have gloves? Good, haul her up. Careful of the glass.”
Ata Akhimah and Vidhya had gotten themselves into a sort of crouch, and he was taking the strain of the thread off her hand, which was already swelling and purpling around the blue-violet spool. Her face was clenched like a fist, her breath a concentrated pattern of in and out and in again. When the guardsmen came and took the rest of the weight, she straightened and sighed slightly, stretching out her neck. She examined the hand, still wound in magical thread, and rolled her eyes and shook her head. “Well, that’s a couple of broken bones.”
“You held her,” the Dead Man said.
Then the carrion birds fell out of the darkening sky.
Cawing, shitting, beating their wings like shaken metal and glaring about them with angry coral eyes, the birds descended. The louring clouds left them not far to dive, and they stooped in a column so thickly packed that the rain beneath them was less than the rain elsewhere. They trailed bright scraps of something from their beaks as they flew.
The Dead Man tossed his pistol into his off hand and, with a continuation of the same movement, drew his sword. He fell back, whirling, to protect Yavashuri.
The birds swept past him, close enough to touch with a bare hand. They swept past Ata Akhimah and all the other people on the parapet. They swarmed over the edge like a black cloth whipped from a table, and dropped beyond it as if they had all, at once, folded their wings. One did not make it that far but fell, sliding across the stones, a crochet hook protruding from its eye socket.
A moment later, the guardsmen who had been bearing up Chaeri’s weight staggered backward. The birds flocked up, wings straining in eerie unison. The thumps as they struck the air sounded like bootheels, like soldiers drilled to march in step. A woman laughed, triumphant and a little hysterical. “Took you long enough!” Chaeri shouted, as the birds lifted her bound body on a sling of ribbons. They strained away from the parapet, but the violet thread still connected them to the men and the Wizard below. More birds dropped from the clouds, joining the team in strange harness.
More guards ran to help Vidhya and Ata Akhimah, who was struggling to get the ensorceled thread unwound from her injured hand. They slid on the wet flags, a step closer to the precipice and the dragonglass-studded wall. Ata Akhimah yanked at the thread and groaned.
The Dead Man raised his off hand, squinted through the rain running under his veil, and leveled his gun. The birds surged forward, gaining another arm-length.
He had one shot.
The guardsmen were at the wall. One turned his back, planted his boots against the bottom of the parapet, and braced his companions as they held onto the thread. Ata Akhimah seemed to have it loose now; it was unspooling bloodily from her hand, but it was dug in and she was having to pry it from the flesh. The rain beat at all their heads, pounded the cold flesh of the Dead Man’s outstretched hand.
He looked past the muzzle of the gun—the gun Ata Akhimah had made for him. He looked past the rain and the black wings. He found his target, and he did not allow himself to feel her humanity, or her fragility, or the quirks and kindnesses and cruelties he had seen in her.
He looked past the sight. His finger flexed in
side the trigger guard. The pistol slammed into the web of his palm.
The thread came loose from Ata Akhimah’s hand, whipped through the gloves of the guardsmen, and vanished over the edge of the parapet as the birds bore Chaeri away into the rain. Staring after them, panting through the wet fabric plastered across his mouth and nose, the Dead Man lowered his smoking gun.
“Mother—” said Vidhya, in the tones of a curse. “Did you get her?”
“Fucked if I know,” the Dead Man answered. “Akhimah, how bad is it?”
“I’ll probably keep it,” she said in strained tones. “If it doesn’t get gangrene. And if it does I’ll make Tsering-la handle the amputation. I won’t be doing any scribing for a while, however.”
The Dead Man stepped toward her. It didn’t look good, but he’d seen worse. Hell, he’d suffered worse. “Hnarisha is probably still tending to the rajni—”
“Hello,” a woman’s voice called from the garden terrace below them. “I seem to have arrived at a bad time.”
The Dead Man turned. Below him, two women stood and a third sat in the rain. One was the poetess Ümmühan, whose facsimile he had encountered before. Another was a girl with short hair and high cheekbones, accentuated by the hollows beneath. The third—
Sitting on what looked like a piece of luggage, her shoulder leaned louchely against one of the planters that had held marigolds before the rain failed, was a woman of middle years. She was clad richly in sodden drape and blouse. Her skin was a clear pale olive, her large eyes lighter than he would have expected. Her dark hair had been dressed and jeweled before the rain got to it. Her eyebrows were plucked into an elegant, expressive, mildly startled arch. Her face was bare of cosmetics, which—given the state of everything else on this parapet—was probably a wise choice.
There was something subtly unusual about her proportions, and there was a terrible scar low on the curve of her belly, just above where the pleats of her drape began. The Dead Man had just realized who this must be—the third-sexed queen, the famous beauty from the north—when Vidhya rushed past him, flew down the steps, and prostrated himself at her feet, whatever he tried to say strangled in a sob.
The Red-Stained Wings--The Lotus Kingdoms, Book Two Page 35