“I did find this in the pouch,” Asmodeus said. He produced, like a conjurer out of a hat, a single pinkish petal.
Thuan stared at it. “It’s a flower,” he said, finally. “In the gardens?”
“Don’t look at me,” Asmodeus said. “I was rather hoping you’d be able to identify it. I’m not a gardening person.”
“Neither am I!”
In the silence, it was Van who spoke. “It’s a celestial pearl lily. My lord. It only grows in the imperial gardens.”
“Oh, drop the ‘my lord’. I’m not ruling anything that’s relevant to you, and neither is he,” Thuan said, and glared at Asmodeus, daring him to speak up.
A smile. “I disagree, since I currently hold her life.”
Thuan opened his mouth, closed it. It was either that or having someone else hold it, wasn’t it? “Fine,” he said. “If she stays with us, it’s not on those terms.”
Thuan fished in his sleeves, and located a Hawthorn tracker disk, which he held out to Van.
Asmodeus raised an eyebrow. “Really?”
Thuan didn’t care. “That’s the membership and protection of House Hawthorn. It’s not my husband’s caprice or good will. It’s a promise that if you stand by the House, we’ll stand by you, even after this is over. By you and by your family.” He paused, then, realising that made him little better than Asmodeus. “And if that includes your ultimately leaving the House and going back into the dragon kingdom or elsewhere, we can do that, too.”
Van swallowed. She looked at Asmodeus—who shrugged, nonchalant and pleasant, but he was angry. He’d had plans for her, and they’d probably included toying with her more, enjoying her fear and uncertainty, something her being a House dependent would prevent—because both he and Thuan would then have obligations to her.
Well, tough luck. Thuan wasn’t going to roll over and let decency fly out the window that easily. And he knew Asmodeus hated losing face.
At length, Asmodeus nodded. “Take it,” he said. “If you want.”
“My lord…”
“Thuan is right.” A shrug. “I always stand by my dependents.”
Van reached out, lightning-fast, her hand lengthening into pincers—she’d slipped the tracker disk around her neck almost before Thuan could even move. The disk fused to her skin: it held a magical spell that would let both Thuan and Asmodeus know where she was. She looked at them both, uncertainly.
Thuan said, “We’re also going to need the name of your birth town, and of your mother and wife, to see if we can track her down.”
“Tam Phong, in Anh Sang province. Her name is Old Vi. Tran Thi Hanh Vi. My wife is Le Thi Hai Yen.”
Thuan nodded. “I can’t make promises on this,” he said. “But I’ll ask after this is over.”
“Thank you, my lord,” Van said. “Sorry.”
Asmodeus laughed. “Actually, you’ll find that becoming a dependent of the House does make us your lords, so this is entirely correct this time.” He still sounded angry, but at least it wasn’t at her. Not that he’d take back the disk from her: Asmodeus’s backstabbing was entirely reserved for outsiders to the House, and occasionally Thuan when he was particularly angry. Another bridge they’d cross when they got around to it.
Thuan spared a brief prayer to his ancestors to let Second Aunt find about this after they’d thwarted the secret society—or after the dynasty went down, even. Anything but the excoriating talking down she’d give him for taking one of her subjects without her permission: not only disloyalty to a ruler but more importantly disloyalty to an elder. “Let’s go find the gardens,” he said.
* * *
There were two locations in the gardens where the celestial pearl lily grew, as it turned out: one of them in the Empress Dowager’s gardens, and they emphatically didn’t want outsiders coming in.
“You must request permission from the Ministry of Rites,” a rather stuck-up dragon of the first rank said, drawing herself to her full height. Behind her were four other guards in lacquered uniforms. The gardens themselves were at the back of the citadel, behind a wall of stone behind a coral reef: a double line of defense with a single wide, circular door in the shape of a longevity symbol, in front of which Thuan, Asmodeus and Van were currently stuck.
“I could ask the Empress Dowager,” Thuan said, smiling through gritted teeth, the antlers and scales of his dragon form shimmering into existence on his face—along with the sharp canines and pointed teeth in the huge maw. He’d seen his maternal grandmother briefly on arriving. She had taken to Asmodeus, whom she found decisive and rather sweet: the first was understandable, the second one was just deuced odd—though Asmodeus, who had looked up her bloodthirsty empress days, thoroughly approved of her.
“Certainly not,” the dragon official said. “The Dowager is resting, to get all the strength she needs for New Year’s Eve.”
Asmodeus looked as though he was going to stab the dragon and walk over her corpse, which would definitely not improve anything. Thuan opened his mouth, but Van got in first, “It’s Tet,” she said, bowing low. She was now wearing loose purple robes that covered both the brands on her arms. They were lightly embroidered along the hem and the sleeves: to all intents and Van looked indistinguishable from a minor official of the ninth rank. The dragon looked at her as if she’d been dragged in with the trash, but visibly softened when she bowed all the way to the ground with practiced ease. “This is a time for honouring family and the ancestors. His Highness would merely like to make a filial gesture for his grandmother. He knows that she loves langsats, and there is a grove of three langsat trees in this corner of the gardens which fruit out of season.”
The dragon official looked at the guards. They shrugged. At length one of them said, “The back of the garden is a bit temporally disjointed, and there are langsat trees there. It may not be safe, though. Your Highness,” she said, bowing to Thuan.
“Mmm.” The dragon official looked at Van, and then at Thuan.
Van bowed even lower. “You wouldn’t want to stand in the way of filial piety, would you? It would be so distressing to His Highness to have to face his grandmother empty-handed, when he owes her so much.”
Thuan kept his face straight, and sent a tendril of magic on Asmodeus’s lips to be sure that he wouldn’t say anything.
At length, the dragon official shook her head. “You and your retainer can go in,” she said to Thuan. She pointed to Asmodeus. “He stays here. No foreigners.”
“Charmed,” Asmodeus said, mockingly bowing to her. “I’ll find profitable ways to spend the time, no doubt.”
“Behave,” Thuan said.
“Oh, I’ll be sure to do so, being bereft of gifts,” Asmodeus said, sharply. Thuan didn’t rise to the jibe. He walked between the spears of the guards, into the Dowager Queen’s gardens, with Van following behind him.
The gardens were a long expanse of algae and sea grass, leading up to a pavilion on a rocky spur overlooking a basin full of opalescent pebbles—the pavillion’s sloped roof had cracked longevity tiles and lacquered pillars invaded by greyish mould. In the distance were the citadel’s walls, separating them from the capital’s busier streets. The noises from the city were faint, the din of marketplaces and street sellers almost inaudible. Overhead, the sky was grey, and the sunlight the dappled and shivering one of a star seen through water. Shoals of fish wheeled above them, light glistening on their scales. The grass was dry, breaking under Thuan’s feet. He couldn’t see amphibians or crabs.
“Thank you for the intervention,” Thuan said. “You weren’t a farmer, were you? In your town.”
“A farmer.” Van looked puzzled. “Oh, you thought that because I knew about the celestial pearl lily. Goodness, no. I was a clerk in the county tribunal. That’s why I ended up in the capital for my execution.”
As a convicted official. “The magistrate you worked for—”
“—denounced me.” Van looked sick, as pale and withdrawn as she’d been when he’d first met
her. “It was… unpleasant.”
Something twisted in Thuan’s chest. “You don’t have to explain further. I’m sorry. I have a lot of baggage from my time in the citadel, and it turns out a lot of it isn’t pleasant or decent.”
Van shrugged, her patches of broken carapace glistening in the light. “You’re of imperial blood.”
That didn’t make it better, not one bit. “Yes. And it’s not an excuse and no one should use it as such.” But he had, hadn’t he? His blood was the reason he’d made it out of the court at all—unlike Kim Diep or Van.
All the coral formations and algae-covered rocks looked suspiciously like each other, and the profusion of colourful sea anemones and aquatic flowers just blurred into insignificance. Thuan withdrew the petal from his sleeve again, stared at it. “Celestial pearl lily. Any idea what the actual plant would look like?”
Van’s face was a study in neutrality. “I’ve only seen diagrams, but I think it’s quite similar to some of the other water lilies. Here.” She pointed to a patch of leaves and algae by the pond’s edge that looked like nothing so much as the other patches—except that, getting closer, Thuan saw small pinkish flowers scattered in the midst of them.
“All right.” He looked up: there were a handful of gardeners and officials around, but due to its limited access it was otherwise a very quiet place. “They’re way smaller than I thought.”
“And that’s a problem?”
“Well, they’re sickly and not very impressive.” Shriveling a beautiful and symbolic patch of plants or anemones in the Empress Dowager’s gardens—the progenitor of the current empress and the symbol of the continuity of bloodlines—would have been a statement. Not as clear-cut of one as he’d hoped, but… “You could take them all out and barely anyone would notice.”
Van said, “Can I ask a question?”
“Of course,” Thuan said, startled. “You don’t need to ask permission.”
“Can you tell me exactly what the investigation is?” A grimace. “I got some of it from your conversations, but…”
Thuan hesitated. Hong Chi would never forgive for sharing her confidences. But Van looked entirely sincere, and for all his faults Asmodeus was an excellent judge of character. “Trying to prevent… an incident.” He summarised, quickly, what Hong Chi had told him.
“Saving the dynasty.” Van’s voice was careful neutral.
“Yes,” Thuan said. He paused, then. “I realise these are the same people who condemned you to death.”
Van stared at him for a while. “No. They’re not.” It was final, something he wasn’t meant to probe into. And then, in a smaller voice, “I want to live, my lord. I want my family to be safe.” She sounded ashamed.
Thuan wished, paradoxically, that Asmodeus were there. “We protect our own,” he said. “Asmodeus is right: he doesn’t much care about what you stole.”
“But you do.” Van’s voice was sharp.
“I did.” Thuan sighed. “Not my best moment, admittedly.”
Van looked shocked. “My lord—”
“You’ll find I don’t much care about whether I’m losing face.”
“But you care about this,” Van said, slowly.
“It’s a family affair,” Thuan said—something she could surely see the appeal of.
Van closed her eyes, for a brief moment. “What you said about finding my mother and my wife—”
“We’ll make it happen,” Thuan said. Hong Chi was going to owe him by the time they were done, and it was an easy thing to leverage. “We’re not abandoning you or your family. That’s how the House works: we always stand by our own.”
Van relaxed a fraction. “When this is over.”
“Yes,” Thuan said, as firmly and decisively as he could. “Things are going to be very different for us as well when we’re done. The Court will owe us, and it’ll be much easier to get our way. All we have to do is navigate until then.”
“Navigate.” Van put a particular accent on the word, one that Thuan didn’t quite know how to interpret.
“It’ll be ok,” he said. “I realise you’re in a very vulnerable position right now.”
“I should be dead.” Van’s voice was flat.
Thuan sighed. “I can’t change that. But Asmodeus and I can make sure that you’re always in our sight. Does that help?”
Van said nothing for a while. “In a way.” She didn’t sound wholly convinced, but then why would she trust them?
Thuan said, “You don’t know us yet. Give us a chance. Please.” Which was a tall order given Asmodeus’s earlier statements.
Bitter laughter. “It’s not as though I have much of a choice.” And then, before Thuan could say anything else. “I’ll help you, my lord.”
Thuan felt acutely embarrassed, and cast about for another thing to say. “Let’s just get this done, shall we?”
Van nodded.
“I could freeze all of these flowers to death, and no one would even notice anything was missing from the gardens. Are they used for something specific, maybe?”
Van’s face screwed in thought. “I can’t remember what the diagram said—”
The wind had changed: it blew into Thuan’s face the smell of brine undercut with mildew. And something else, too, a sharp and animal smell he’d have known anywhere. “Wait.”
A little bit further on, there was a patch of coral reefs overlooking a smaller pavilion decorated with images of Immortals and peach flowers, where someone had left a sheet of paper bearing calligraphy in a beautiful hand, as well as the vermillion imprint of a seal: it wasn’t one of the official ones of the dynasty, the ones under lock and key in a stronghold of the citadel, but rather the personal one of the Empress Dowager.
“My lord?” Van asked, but Thuan was already foraging at the bottom of the reef.
“Here,” he said, unfolding what had been stuffed between two corals: the long robes of an official, soaked in blood. The smell was now unbearably strong: he fought the urge to throw the robes away from him. They were much larger than the ones Ai Linh had been wearing, and in any case Ai Linh wouldn’t have been allowed to access the Dowager’s gardens.
“There’s no body anywhere,” Van said. She frowned. “Wait.”
There was no body, but there was a rather suspicious looking charred zone, and blackened ivory fragments Van lifted to the light. “Bones.” She sounded matter of fact: Thuan felt rather less chirpy about it. Not about the body itself: he’d seen his share of them, but the fact that someone had just committed murder a few meters away from his grandmother.
“So they killed someone and they burnt the body. It’s deuced odd no one realised there was a missing person.” The burning of the body could have been magical, which would have generated no smoke, and he supposed the wind was blowing the wrong way, which explained why no one had smelled the blood: Thuan and Asmodeus were both unusually sensitive to the smell.
“They might have reported it but been unable to find them,” Van said. “It’s not like they would notify you in particular, would they?” She grimaced. “Not many bones left.” She lifted up a fragment of antlers. “Dragon, quite probably, but I’m not even sure what sex.”
“Mmm.” Thuan shook the tunic loose, stared at it. “Uh. They slit the throat.” All the blood was coming from the neck. The patch on the chest bore the attributes of the fourth rank and the mark of the Ministry of Rites, but there was no other indication of affiliation. Under the patch was the hard smooth surface of something, and a jolt of khi-water up his fingers. “Ah. A sort of tracker spell. That’s why they didn’t hit the chest. Or burn the clothes.”
“That’s reserved for just a few departments,” Van said. “The critical ones.”
Of course. Thuan sighed. He looked, again, at the pavilion. A quiet, personal spot. “I’m going to need to check a few things. How much khi-magic do you know?”
In the end, Van was the more expert magic-wielder: Thuan was mostly a theoretician with a good eye for detail, and h
e let her check every single patch around the pavilion from the lacquered pillars to the coral reefs and the scattering of algae. She shrugged, finally. “Nothing wrong I can see, apart from the usual spells of protection on the pavilion. I’m not Ministry of Rites, though.”
“No.” Thuan stared at the pavilion again. He’d bunched the tunic under the folds of his, and he was acutely aware of the way that the blood was seeping into his own clothes. “Neither am I.” He bit his lips. “It mostly sounds like this was a convenient spot for a murder. It’s not too difficult to access, comparatively speaking, and it’s secluded. I’m sure the Empress’s private palace has emptier gardens, but it’s all but impossible to get into that.”
“All right,” Van said. “But who?”
“If only I knew.” Recouping the offices which had tracker spells and access to the Dowager Empress’s gardens would thin the ranks of victims, but it was a fallacy Thuan wouldn’t fall prey to. The murderer could very easily have been the one with access. “Maybe Asmodeus will have better ideas when he sees the tunic. He’s usually the one with the murder skills.”
* * *
Asmodeus, of course, wasn’t anywhere near the entrance to the gardens when Thuan and Van came out. “He’s with the Dowager Empress,” the dragon official said, looking bored.
“He—what?”
“One of her servants came inquiring for something and saw him there, and extended an invitation to him.”
In other words, grabbed him and not let go. Thuan winced. Grandmother had liked Asmodeus, but that was on the basis of a short meal and small talk through an interpreter. They’d been in the garden for way longer than that. “Let’s go get him before he manages to outstay his welcome.”
They were halfway to the Empress Dowager’s quarters, walking along a pillared corridor, when a voice called out. “Your Highness!”
It was someone Thuan didn’t know, a dragon official of the fifth rank who carried himself with the arrogance of someone newly raised to the office. “We haven’t been introduced,” he said, coldly.
Of Dragons, Feasts and Murders Page 4