The Assassins of Tamurin

by S. D. Tower

  But most of all I watched the actress who played, no, was Maylane. Her name was Perin, and in her imperial regalia and actress’s paint she was unutterably beautiful. I fell completely in love with her. I wanted to be like her, to be glorious and passionate and stand before a multitude and make them mine, just as she’d made us hers. And when she died at Maylane’s moment of victory, I wept.

  In fact I think everybody wept, though I’m not sure about the Tradition Tutoress. Dilara certainly did; as the last notes of the last melody died away, she buried her face in her hands and sobbed. As for me, I stared with tear-blurred eyes at the stage, wishing in my deepest self that it had been me there, being Maylane. For I knew at last what I was going to do with my life. I was certain of it, in a way I’d never been certain of anything.

  I was going to be an actress.

  Over the next few days. Master Luasin presented the plays of the Loyalty cycle. I liked them, even if they didn’t overwhelm me as had the story of Maylane, and I watched Perin every instant she was onstage, with my resolve to emulate her growing by the hour. But because Master Luasin kept his people at work almost all the time, I never got a chance to speak to her until the morning after the Loyalty cycle finished. That was when we presented our selection from The House of the Magistrate to Master Luasin’s company and the whole school.

  By this time, the prospect of Master Luasin being in our audience had reduced both the Literature and Arts Tutoresses almost to nervous collapse. Fortunately, they’d had the sense to use a scene with mostly declamation and mime, with just two songs and no instrumental part, so the performance went tolerably well. At least, nobody giggled during it, and everybody applauded at the end. We all mingled afterward, and I finally got to talk to Perin.

  She wasn’t quite as beautiful out of paint and costume as she was in them, but she was still very lovely. And quite young, not much past twenty. Flushed with my new experience, I marched up to her and told her I wanted to be an actress, and asked how I should go about becoming one.

  To her credit, she didn’t even blink. Instead she said, “You played Unsal, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, Mistress Perin.”

  She pursed her mouth a little. Then she called past my shoulder, “Guyal, come here.” To me she said, “You are ...”

  I’d forgotten my manners. I was behaving just as I had years ago in Riversong, pushing in wherever I liked and chattering until somebody aimed a swat at me.

  “I’m Lale, Mistress Perin. I apologize for being so forward, I—”

  She gestured impatiently. “Better than being backward. No girl gets anywhere if she makes herself part of the scenery gossamin. Guyal, this is Lale. She played Unsal.”

  This was to the sivara player, a thin man whose eyes were on a level with mine. He had some foreign blood, for they were gray eyes, and his hair was closer to copper than auburn.

  After contemplating me he said, “Ah, yes, Unsal. Did you know your voice is very good?”

  I hadn’t. The Arts Tutoress had said it wasn’t the worst she’d heard, which might have signified anything.

  “Does that mean I could be an actress?” I blurted.

  They exchanged glances, then looked me up and down. Perin said to Guyal, “Well, she maintained the presence of her character, didn’t she? Loose at the edges, but the center was strong.”

  Guyal nodded. “Possible, possible.” To me he said, “How hard are you willing to work?”

  “Very hard,” I told him hopefully. “All the time.”

  “Then you might manage it someday,” Perin said. “I started in Master Luasin’s theater school in Istana when I was eighteen. That was a bit late to begin, but I managed.” My ears pricked up. “I didn’t know he had a school,” I said.

  “Oh, yes. He’s even expanding it, because he’s trying to start a second company to go along with this one. But it’s going slowly. It takes so much money.”

  If I had been older and more experienced. I’d have realized from this that Master Luasin had come to Repose with more in mind than his performance fee—he was looking to Mother for money to finance his dream. He got what he wanted, too, although he should have considered more carefully what she might make him do to earn it.

  “Well, then,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant and confident. “Someday, perhaps.”

  Perin smiled, dazzling me, and then the Literature Tutoress came up and wedged me out of the conversation. But I didn’t care, for now I had the beacon of Master Luasin’s school before me, and it seemed the perfect answer to my ambitions. I’d never been quite sure how to achieve them, but now the means was clear: I’d become a High Theater actress. I’d certainly become famous and probably rich, and everyone would talk about me. It was, I told myself, only a matter of time.

  Eight

  By the time Master Luasin departed, not only I but half the other girls in the school wanted to be actresses. But the passion was fleeting, and by summer’s end everybody’s interest had waned.

  Except mine. My fascination with the craft endured, and over the next three years I relentlessly pestered our tutoresses to let us put on plays from the High Theater. Often they yielded, successes that I smugly credited to my persuasive tongue. In this I was wrong, for it was Mother who was behind their compliance. She was engaged in a very deep game. Mother was, and my awakening talent—for I did have talent, and it was considerable—had played into her hands in a way she could scarcely have expected. I had been part of her game from the day she caught up with me on the Riversong road, and now she had a much better idea of the kind of game piece she might make of me.

  But all I knew was that Mother took a flattering interest in my increasing skills and praised me for them; I basked in her attention and glowed with pride when she told me, for example, that my singing had moved her. I loved her so deeply that I worked as much for her approval as for my own pleasure in the craft.

  But one day, when I was sixteen, I overreached myself. I had got it into my head that we should stage The Orphan's Daughter, a slightly risqué comedy from the popular drama, and I tried to persuade the Literature Tutoress to allow it.

  She recoiled in horror, as I should have foreseen she would, and refused. Angry over this, I sought an audience with Mother and complained not only about the decision but also about the tutoress.

  This was a serious mistake. I thought of myself as Mother’s favorite student, and thus expected her to see the matter my way, but this was not at all what happened. In a brief, painful, and humiliating audience, she told me that my teacher’s authority flowed from hers, and that in rebelling against the authority of the Literature Tutoress, I was rebelling against Mother herself. I must ask her forgiveness immediately and never do such a thing again.

  It was a very frightening rebuke. My greatest terror was losing Mother’s love, and disloyalty was the shortest path to that abyss. I was well aware of how far I’d strayed from the path of proper conduct, and I apologized abjectiy both to her and to my tutoress. But in spite of my contrition I still felt deeply thwarted, and for some time afterward a tiny coal of anger burned far down inside me.

  As for my future. I’d made no secret of wanting to go to Master Luasin’s school after I’d finished my basic education. Mother knew my goal, although she refused to comment on it, just as she refused to comment on any girl’s prospects until she judged it time to do so. Dilara, however, had no interest in the stage and still wanted us to be weavers. We had angry arguments over our future together, although we always made up again afterward. Finally we agreed to stop fighting over it. We’d wait until our schooling was complete and then see if Mother could help us decide what to do.

  There was more to our lives than schooling. We celebrated the Solstice Festival that led up to the New Year, when Chiran blazed with torchlight processions. Then there were the holidays like the Lantem Festival and the Fragrance of Nature Festival, as well as the feast days of the gods and goddesses.

  For such occasions we learned dance
s like the five-string dance with its sedate steps, and the lazy thrush, which despite its name left you out of breath. And Kidrin surreptitiously taught Dilara and me the tassel dance, during one of the Plough festivals. It was fun but very unseemly, and I don’t know where Kidrin learned it—she wouldn’t tell us, but it certainly wasn’t at the school. I think it belonged to her life before she arrived.

  There were also bad times. One hot, dry summer the spotted fever broke out in Chiran; several hundred people died before the cooler weather of autumn brought relief, and the deaths didn’t abate until the new year. The crowded old necropolis outside Chiran’s east gate filled up, and Mother had to get a new piece of land purified for the spate of burials. The masons ran out of tomb markers, and at one point people were dying so quickly that they had to go into common graves, to the great distress of their families.

  Because of the pestilence Mother kept us at home, but two of us fell sick anyway. The first, sadly, was the earnest and scholarly Sulen, and despite all Mother’s personal physician could do with infusions and poultices, and despite the efforts of the best spirit summoner in Chiran, she died. We other girls hoped that Nilang might help her, but Nilang was not at Repose (her absences were sometimes long and never explained) and she did not retum until after Sulen’s burial.

  Mother put our classmate into a tomb in a special comer of the old necropolis that she had set aside for such purposes. Some years before, she had also consecrated an ancestor shrine for us, and we burned a lock of Sulen’s hair for the ritual ashes and put them into the shrine’s spirit box. Of course, it wasn’t an ancestor shrine in the true sense, because we weren’t sisters by blood, yet it meant a great deal to us all.

  But as we left the shrine after the ceremony that morning, I began to feel unwell, and before the day was out, I, too, had fallen ill with the fever. Mother moved me into a room in the palace, and for the next seven days she never left my side, although she risked the sickness demons herself by remaining with me. She laid cool cloths on my burning skin and dribbled water through my cracked lips; she sang to me and murmured words of comfort. When I shook uncontrollably with the fever chills, she lay on the bed beside me and held my trembling body tenderly in her arms. No mother could have done more, and many would not have done as much.

  Finally, on the night that the palace physician and the spirit summoner despaired of my life. Mother sent them away and called Nilang to join her in my room. I was very weak and must have appeared to be asleep, but I was more aware of my surroundings than they realized. Also, perhaps because of the fever, my hearing seemed pretematurally sharp.

  “You must do something,” Mother said. “Drive the illness out of her.”

  Nilang’s voice answered, “I can compel some of the creatures of the Quiet World. But the fever is not of that world, it is of our own, and its nature is not subject to my art.”

  “You will try, nonetheless.”

  “Trying will do her no good. It may do her ill.”

  “I cannot lose her,” Mother said. “Already she has been years in the making. Try.”

  “I protest.”

  “Protest as you like. But remember that you are bound to me and how you will suffer if you prove disloyal.”

  A silence. Then Nilang said, “I will attempt it. Stand aside.”

  Another silence, and I smelled a fragrance like that of burning incense but not quite. Then I sensed motion by my bed, and a fingertip touched my brow. I was so aflame with the fever that it felt like ice.

  The only thing that happened then, for what seemed a long time, was that Nilang whispered to me. I could not understand the words, for they were in a tongue I did not know. But gradually, as she whispered, the sounds began to take shape, as if I could see them through my closed eyelids, and I realized that her whispers had opened a passage to some other place, and that this place was the Quiet World. I glimpsed improbable skies, some of them night black but spanned by vast whorls of starry radiance, others blue with day yet bearing many pale moons like diadems of pearls. Under these heavens lay eerie landscapes. Some were bright and wondrous, as if cut from jade and sapphire and crystal by some magical jeweler, but others were as evil and ghost haunted as an ancient field of massacre, and these sickened my very spirit.

  And then, in one such foul place, a creature lifted its ghastly head, and I saw that it knew of my presence.

  Terror seized me, but I could neither move nor cry out, for Nilang’s whispers had bound me tighter than manacles of iron. Yet the beast, if it was a beast, felt no such constraint. It slouched nearer; it stalked me. Spiritlike, it had no clear form, but within it swirled all the shapes of my darkest nightmares. And somehow, as if I perceived its awareness, I knew that it hungered after me. That hunger flooded me with horror, for I knew what it foretold: I was to be eaten alive, but I would find no release of death while I was devoured, and afterward I would live on within the beast, shrieking at what had happened to me.

  Nilang’s words now struggled to keep my stalker at bay. It feared her, but not enough, and her power could not halt its relentless advance along the passage she had opened. I wailed a silent prayer to the Lord of the Dead who ruled this realm, and to all the Beneficent Ones, and to all my unknown and nameless ancestors. But still the creature came.

  And then a woman’s soft voice, not Nilang’s or Mother’s, said from a place I could not see: Go back. It is not her time.

  The beast quailed at the sound, and Nilang instantly hissed a sharp word. The passage contracted and snapped shut, taking the creature with it. I suddenly lay in my bed again, as sick and fevered as ever, hearing Nilang’s breath rasp in her throat. I opened my eyes; she was staring down at me, her lips tightly compressed, brows knit. When she saw me wake, a flicker of relief passed over her face.

  “What?” Mother asked. She was not in my line of vision, and I was too weak to look around. I shut my eyes again.

  “She will not die,” Nilang answered. Her voice was without emotion.

  “So you do have the power,” Mother said harshly. “Why did you tell me you couldn’t cure her? Are you playing some game of your own?”

  “I did not say I have cured her, because I have not done so. What I said is that she will not die. But we are lucky that she is still with us. While I searched for a healing instrument, a khnum attempted to subsume her.”

  A long pause. Finally Mother said, “I see. And if it had?”

  “She would appear as if sleeping, but she would no longer be within her body. Eventually the body would die.”

  Mother’s voice became worried. “She appears to be sleeping now.”

  “The creature failed,” Nilang said. “There was an intervention that enabled me to close the nexus. It is from that intervention that I know the girl will live. It was an ancestor, I think, and no doubt one of hers.”

  Sick as I was, I felt a tenuous comfort at this. An ancestor in the Quiet World knew me and had helped protect me from something very nasty.

  “And you say she won’t die.”

  “It is not her time,” Nilang answered.

  A faint sigh of relief. “You may leave us.”

  When Nilang had gone, Mother lay down by my side. I drowsed for a while, then found myself half awake. Summoning all my strength, I whispered, “Mother?”

  “Yes, Lale?”

  “I won’t die. I promise.”

  “No, child. You’re safe here.”

  “I love you. Mother,” I breathed.

  “I love you, Lale. Now go to sleep and get well.”

  I obeyed her, and by midnight my fever had broken and I was sleeping normally. But several days passed before I was strong enough to leave my bed, and during that time I thought about what Nilang had done. Mother said nothing of the incident, and I began to wonder if it was only a fever dream, so finally I plucked up the courage to ask her about it.

  “Yes,” Mother answered, “I summoned her, and she did what she could. What do you remember?”

  I tol
d her about the creature and the rescuing voice. She nodded and said, “All men and women have ancestors in the Quiet World, even if we know nothing of them in this one, and so cannot summon them here. But you already knew this, Lale—the matter is examined in the Discourse on the Eight Divinities and the Ineffable.'

  “Yes, ma’am. But it’s still a surprise to find that it’s real, instead of just something in a book.”

  “You are not the first to make this observation,” Mother answered in a dry voice. “But sorcerers dislike any gossip about their doings, so I strongly suggest you do not speak of this to anyone, not even Dilara. Now, what else do you remember?”

  I hesitated. I wanted to ask why and how Nilang had bound herself to Mother, but that would resemble the gossip Mother had warned me against. And Nilang was very clearly no one to be trifled with. So I merely said, “You told Nilang I had been years in the making. What did you mean?”

  “Ah,” she replied smoothly, “All my girls are years in the making, Lale, from the time I find them until they are ready to go out into the world. You are no exception. That is all I meant.”

  I believed the lie, of course; she’d already given me so much, why would I not expect the truth as well? And as it happened, on the day I left the palace to return to the school, she gave me something more: the news that the murderers of Master Lim were dead. She didn’t tell me why she’d avenged him, or what he’d been to her, and I sensed it would do no good to ask. But she’d kept the promise she’d made to me after he died, and I was grateful to her on Master Lim’s behalf.

  It did not then occur to me to wonder at how long an arm she had, to pluck two such distant birds from their perch. But in my heart, I believed that Mother could do anything, so I suppose I expected nothing less.

  My teachers deemed me fully educated soon after I turned seventeen. Being no scholar, Dilara finished at the same time I did, although she was a few months older.