The Assassins of Tamurin

by S. D. Tower

  “How long?” she asked.

  “Soon.” I prayed to Our Lady of Mercy that it would be. “Will you stay with me until I . . . until it’s over?” She sounded both fearful and diffident, as if she were too frightened to let me go, but at the same time didn’t want me to think her a nuisance.

  “Yes,” I answered. “I’ll stay.”

  She closed her eyes. “I’ll see Lahad soon, won’t I? I’m sure he’s waiting for me.”

  “Of course he is,” I agreed with an aching throat.

  Adrine fell silent. The poison took longer to act than I’d expected, and I was starting to worry when she suddenly gasped and clutched at her breast. Stupidly I said, “Is it—” “It hurts,” she gasped. “Oh, Lale, it, oh sweet Lady of Mercy oh it hurts it hurts—”

  Her back arched and she screamed. Then she slumped back onto the pallet and rolled her head from side to side. Sick with horror and pity, I seized her hands in a futile, stupid gesture of comfort. But in her agony she didn’t notice. She drew a sobbing breath, held it, let it out, drew another. Her eyes stared into mine. I couldn’t meet them. I wanted to scream, too. Die, I thought, please die and get it over with. Please.

  She shuddered, then went limp as her last breath flowed from her. I thought I sensed her idu-spirit rush past me on its way to the Quiet World to find Lahad, and I hoped fervently that that was where she’d gone. She would make a very unquiet ghost if she lingered.

  After a while I closed her eyes and slowly got to my feet. Then I called out, “It’s done.”

  Tossi entered and joined me in looking down at the poor, ruined body. Eventually she said, “You didn’t have to stay, you know. I said to leave her alone.”

  “She wasn’t always a traitor,” I mumbled. “I stayed because of that.”

  “She didn’t deserve it,” Tossi said.

  The next day we buried Adrine beneath a camellia tree outside the walls. Then we bumed a lock of her hair, but because of her crime the ash couldn’t go back to Repose to be placed in our ancestor shrine. Instead we scattered it on the mountain wind, which we hoped would blow her away and prevent her ghost from troubling us.

  After she had gone under the earth, Tossi instmcted me to dispose of her belongings. There weren’t many: a leather bag, a scarf, a copper necklace, a comb, and some hairpins. Nothing about them was memorable, just as there had been nothing memorable about Adrine herself, except her wretched death.

  I knew nobody would want any of her things—^they had a sad, doomed air about them—so I decided to bury them near her, as a sort of offering. I gathered them up and was slipping them into the leather bag, when I felt something at the bag’s bottom. It was two sheets of paper, folded small. I opened them, glanced at the first neady written line, and discovered I was reading Adrine’s love poetry.

  I almost put the papers back then and there. I knew how flat my own poetry was, and I imagined that hers would be no better. But then I read the next line, and the next.

  There were four poems, in the very difficult three-nine-three lyric mode. I was no poetess and never would be, but I’d been trained to know the bad from the good, the merely good from the splendid. These were splendid.

  For ten days I have not seen you.

  Now you retum from the river,

  You kiss my mouth,

  And make me drunk as wine,

  I read them all several times, realizing sadly that in executing Adrine we had killed a poetess of the first order. What might she have achieved if she’d lived? I couldn’t imagine why she’d kept her talent from everyone, including the Literature Tutoress. It would have saved her, if she’d let it. Mother would never have sent her to Three Springs, if she’d known the greatness of Adrine’s gift.

  But there was nothing anybody could for her now. I told no one what I’d found but instead took her belongings to the grave by the wall and dug a hole for them beside her.

  At the last moment I couldn’t bear to let her words go into the dark. I took the papers out of the bag and slipped them into my jacket, begging her forgiveness if this was displeasing to her. Then I covered up everything else and went away.

  The next day Tossi summoned me and said, “I heard Adrine say to you that the wraiths came, but only after she told the boy about us and about Mother.”

  I nodded. I’d puzzled over this. I’d supposed, from the ambiguity of Nilang’s words about the v^aiths, that merely fleeing Mother’s service would bring them after you. This seemed not to be the case.

  “You will keep this to yourself, Lale, but running away will not alone awaken them. Nor will thinking incorrect thoughts, such as imagining that one might run away. But if you speak our secrets to someone who has not shared our initiation, that act will summon them.”

  “But then,” I asked, worried about this vulnerability, “what’s to prevent somebody from running off, if all she has to do is keep her mouth shut?”

  “The fact that we’ll hunt her down and kill her,” Tossi said grimly. “Adrine was doomed, even if she hadn’t been so stupid as to betray us.”

  With this cold comfort, I promised Fd keep the knowledge to myself, and Tossi let me go. That aftemoon she had the storeroom door walled up as if to obliterate the memory of what had happened there.

  A couple of months went by, and we left off talking about the execution. Later, we stopped thinking much about Adrine and how she died, and eventually our lives went on as if she had never set foot in Three Springs. By the time a year had passed, she might as well never have existed at all.

  But I kept her poems, never showing them to anybody, not even to Dilara. And I almost never allowed myself to remember how I had wondered whether Mother might be, if only sometimes and just a little, mad.

  Eleven

  Three important events occurred in the year 1314, in the month of Early Blossom. First, I completed my training at the Midnight School. Second, Mother gave me leave to study with Master Luasin in Istana. And third, Ardavan, the young Exile King of Seyhan, overran and annexed Jouhar, the realm of his uncle to his west.

  Dilara and I were now the senior students at Three Springs, the girls preceding us having departed on Mother’s business. I was soon to go as well; in fact, we received the news of Ardavan’s conquest just before I was to leave for Istana.

  It came up with the supply train, in the form of a letter from Mother. She sent such dispatches regularly, and we were expected to pay close attention to them. We could not do our best work, she believed, unless we understood the dynastic and military affairs of the world beyond Tamurin’s borders. To this end, Tossi led a discussion of each dispatch, during which we considered the motives and intentions of kings, ambassadors, generals, despots, and, of course, the Sun Lord and his Chancellor.

  The day after the letter arrived, Tossi summoned us to the banquet hall, where we gathered under the mosaic wall map of the old empire. I listened with growing excitement as she read the dispatch to us, for it was by far the most dramatic we’d ever received.

  Mother had mentioned Ardavan in earlier dispatches, and we’d studied the Exile kingdoms, so we knew this young

  King’s background. Ardavan was in the direct bloodline of Pakur One-Eyed, the ferocious leader who crushed the power of the Durdana a hundred years ago and founded the first Exile realm. Following his victory, and to add bitter insult to the catastrophe he’d akeady inflicted on us, Pakur took our beautiful and ancient capital of Seyhan for his own chief city.

  Then, after he died and his conquests broke up into the Six Kingdoms, the region that contained Seyhan became the Kingdom of Seyhan. Because the city had been Pakur’s capital, its Kings claimed precedence over the other five Exile rulers, who, naturaUy, paid not the least attention to the claim. From time to time a King of Seyhan would try to bring the other kingdoms under his sway so as to reunite Pakur’s conquests, but nothing ever came of it.

  Pakur had been preparing to finish us off when he died, and only the ferocious struggles among his six sons and th
eir heirs saved us. But we Durdana had been so weakened by the wars that we could not take advantage of their struggles to recover what we had lost. Thereafter, although occasional border squabbles broke out, we and the Exiles had avoided a major war for a century, not because we didn’t hate and despise each other, but because neither side was united or strong enough to risk an attempt at conquest.

  As the years passed and we and the Exiles became accustomed to the stalemate, we began to exchange embassies and envoys. Trade grew between us and the Kingdoms, although their monarchs would not allow our merchants on their territory; all buying and selling had to be done at designated border points or at tightly controlled port towns along the Pearl.

  Among their nobility, it eventually became fashionable to ape our ways. They read our literature and adopted our method of writing, and their Kings used what remained of our imperial bureaucracy to administer their realms. But they never relaxed their savage grip on the Durdana who had fallen under their sway. There were so few Exiles, compared to the population they had conquered, that they didn’t dare to. They governed by terror and the threat of terror, and they did so very effectively; massacre was the ordinary punishment for rebellion, or even the threat of it.

  When Mother’s dispatch reached Three Springs, Ardavan was twenty-three. Already he had acquired a reputation for severity and for his pitiless methods of assuring his power. On ascending the throne at his father’s death, he executed his two younger brothers on treason charges; he next arrested his sister and her husband and put them to death, along with their young son. His mother also died suddenly. Publicly it was said that she fell to an illness, but the rumors were that she had committed suicide from grief.

  The Golden Discourses strongly condemn kin murder, for we Durdana know that the well-being of any realm, as well as our own day-to-day happiness, depends on the nurturing of family bonds. But the Exiles felt no such compunction, and the rulers of the Six Kingdoms murdered their relatives frequently, indiscriminately, and without remorse—although no Exile King would kill his mother, the one exception to such ruthlessness.

  In this way, Ardavan was no different from his fellow monarchs. But on the evidence of the dispatch, he was much more inclined to war than they were, and a lot better at it. A month and a half ago, he suddenly moved his army from Seyhan to the north bank of the Pearl, and there he collected Durdana slave-labor gangs and began to construct barges.

  This was startling behavior for an Exile ruler. The Pearl had long been neutral territory, because the Exiles had never understood ships; their crude attempts at river piracy after the Partition had brought them only disaster. We Durdana might be no match for them on land, but they couldn’t beat us on the water, and after a time they prudently left the Pearl to us. Later they even forbade the building of boats along the Pearl, except for fishing skaffies. The north shore towns and cities they ruled consequently feU into poverty, and smugglers flourished, though they risked dismemberment if caught.

  Ardavan’s sudden willingness to venture onto the water horrified the neighboring Despot, whose domain of Panarik lay directly across the Pearl from Ardavan’s busy barge builders. The King clearly intended to extend his power across the great river, a thing not attempted even by his ancestor Pakur.

  Or so everybody thought, including Ardavan’s maternal uncle, the King of Jouhar. So when Ardavan suddenly tumed and marched into that realm, he caught the uncle’s forces unprepared. In less than a month he had routed them, and his army stood at the gates of Jouhar’s capital, whereupon the uncle fooUshly led his remaining forces out of the city to do battle. But his officers and men, foreseeing certain defeat, murdered him the instant they were outside the gates and offered Ardavan the throne. He graciously accepted. The conquest of Jouhar was complete.

  “So,” Tossi said, gazing at the mosaic wall map. “Ardavan now mles two of the Six Kingdoms. What will everybody else do about it?”

  Like Tossi, I examined the map. There was our peninsula of Tamurin, and to its east the Gulf of the Pearl; on the far shore of the Gulf lay Bethiya. Beyond Bethiya was the Exile kingdom of Lindu and beyond that, Ardavan’s newly annexed dominion of Jouhar.

  “If Ardavan overmns Lindu next,” I said, “he and the Sun Lord will stand eye to eye. There will be nothing between them but the Savath River, and that’s easy enough to cross. Will the Sun Lord let Ardavan come so close without attacking him?”

  “But will he need to attack him?” Jisrin asked. “The other Kingdoms might combine against Ardavan, to keep him from gobbling them up one at a time. They might do the Sun Lord’s work for him.”

  “Or,” Tossi observed, “they might see Ardavan as a new Pakur, and then all would combine against us.”

  “Yes, but we Durdana might win this time,” Tulay said, with a tinge of excitement. “Bethiya’s armies might drive the Exiles all the way through the Juren Gap, and get our old lands back!”

  “And then what would happen?” Tossi snapped. “Can you imagine what the Sun Lord would do after he drove out the Exiles? Do you think that would be enough for him? No, it wouldn’t. He’d go after the Despotates next, and pick us off one by one. And there goes our freedom—we’d have the emperors back, and the empire with them, and then what do you think would happen to Mother and to us?”

  This was too obvious to need comment, but Dilara said, “Still, maybe Tulay’s not so far off the mark. The Sun Lord might give the ExOes a bloody nose—in the past two years he’s practically doubled the size of Bethiya’s army. And Bethiya has cavalry horses these days, good ones and lots of them.”

  This last was very significant. The Exiles’ great strength was in their horse lancers and mounted archers, while we Durdana preferred the remorseless battering ram of an infantry army. But the Sun Lords of Bethiya, whatever their other failings, had realized years ago that they needed a powerful cavalry of their own. Ever since, they had been improving their herds both with native stock and with animals bought—or stolen—^from the Exiles, and by adapting the Exiles’ cavalry tactics to Durdana purposes. This present Sun Lord had continued the work more vigorously than ever.

  And the Sun Lords of Bethiya had never made any secret of their ambition to reunite the Durdana people, nor of their conviction that they were the legitimate heirs of the imperial power. And suddenly I knew, as surely as if Father Heaven had whispered it in my ear, that we Durdana and the Exiles were going to war. I could not suppress a shiver.

  “What’s the matter?” Dilara asked me in a low voice. “Have you got a chill?”

  “No, it was something else. Remember back when we had our last dinner with Mother at Repose and she said there’d be a big war within a few years? I think this is the beginning of the road to it.”

  “I bet it is,” Dilara said. Her face suddenly lit up. “Lale, everything’s going to change! Everything! And we’ll be in the thick of it! It’s going to be so excitingV"

  Her blazing enthusiasm kindled mine, for she was right. We were going to be in the thick of it. My sisters and I would trouble the sleep of Kings and Despots, and of the great Sun Lord himself; because of us, armies would march and thrones would tremble. I practically bounced up and down on my stool at the prospect.

  And if I worked everything just right, I reminded myself, I could probably become rich and famous into the bargain. My dreams were nothing if not expansive.

  Dilara and I were much gloomier two days later, when I had to leave for Istana. We had been together for eight years and had grown into adulthood side by side. She was the first friend I’d ever had, and although I’d been sociable with other girls in both schools, those friendships had come and gone. But my intimacy with Dilara had never wavered or diminished. She and I were as near as branch and bark.

  “You won’t forget me?” she asked, trying to smile. We were in the little courtyard with its mist trees and stone benches; the wine finches were there, too, chirping and squabbling among the leaves. Tossi and the others were down in the Lower Court, waiting
to see me off. Knowing how close Dilara and I were, they’d left us alone to say our private farewells.

  “Don’t be silly,” I said. “How could I forget you? Anyway, we’ll see each other again. It may not even be that long. Maybe Mother will give you an assignment in Istana.”

  “I wish I knew where she’s going to send me,” Dilara said grumpily. “There was nothing in the dispatches that came last night.”

  “I’m sure you’ll know soon,” I told her. But we both knew also, though we didn’t say it, that if Dilara did go to Istana for some secret purpose. I’d never know she was there. It was against the rules.

  “I hope so. Oh, Lale, Fm going to miss you so—”

  She didn’t cry because she never did. But I got the sniffles and Dilara put her arm around me.

  “We’re soldiers,” I said eventually, wiping my eyes with the back of my hand. “I shouldn’t make so much of it. It’s not forever.”

  “No, not forever. We’ll have fun together again. Maybe, when the wars are over, we can go somewhere and just be ourselves.” She gave me her old sideways grin. “You can be an actress in some despicable low-class theater and I'll weave gossamin robes for rich ladies, and we’ll have a house and live in it and let the rest of the world go by. And Mother can come and stay with us whenever she likes.”

  It was such a wonderful, ludicrous vision that I burst out laughing. “You’re mad,” I told her.

  “No,” she said. “The world is mad, but we’re not.” She squinted at the rising sun, a hand’s breadth now above the eastern horizon. “You’d better go. But I won’t come down. I'll watch from here and wave before you get into the trees. Remember to look.”

  “I will,” I said huskily, and embraced her before hurrying away. Down the stairs I went. So many times my feet had trod their cool stones; not a step was without its memories.