The Assassins of Tamurin

by S. D. Tower

  The Short Canal ended in Feather Lagoon, beneath the ramparts of one of the fortifications I’d seen from afar. The slipper captains paid off the tow masters, the crew unshipped their sweeps, and we sculled along the quays until we found a mooring place near the customs house, a yellow brick building jutting from the fortification walls. There were small craft everywhere, not only slippers but waterspoons, long-necked periangs, the many-oared dispatch boats called gallopers, and other types I didn’t recognize. At the seaward end of the lagoon ran an esplanade with stone and brick buildings. Rising on the far side of their roofs were the mastheads of many big ships, moored in the deep-sea harbor of Salt Lagoon. The tide was out, but at Kuijain it varied merely by two feet, so the only sign of low water was a band of soggy weed and barnacles along the faces of the piers.

  Feather Lagoon was the second largest of the four main lagoons of Kuijain, and was easily big enough to accommodate hundreds of slippers at once. The ramparts above us belonged to the Jacintii Fortress, which protected the river approach to the city. It was built of large amber-colored bricks, finely mortared, with a parapet of red stone. The gate was in good repair, reinforced by iron, and the sentries looked alert.

  A port officer came out of the customs house to inspect the slippers and their cargo, which consisted solely of our wagons and gear. The officer knew of both Master Luasin’s reputation and his patrons, so he was very respectful, and the inspection was cursory. In short order the slippers sculled out of the lagoon, swung around the west flank of the fortress, and started down a broad canal leading toward the heart of Kuijain.

  It was early evening and the city’s colors were radiant in the westering sun. I say radiant, because its builders had used not only the amber brick I'd seen at the fortress but stone of many hues of yellow and orange, so that the air itself seemed to glow witfi the colors of a ripe peach. Sunlight danced across the canals, touching the ripples with gold and glimmering on the walls of the buildings, many of which rose straight from the water. They were of three and four stories, with curving roofs of red tile or dark blue slate; the upper floors had tall windows that opened onto iron balconies. The Kurjainese seemed very partial to flowers, for these balconies brimmed with cascades of them, and their fragrances sweetened the damp watery smell of the canal. Other, smaller canals sprouted off the one we were on. Some were so narrow a slipper couldn’t enter, and at high tide even the tall stems of the periangs would just slide under the arched bridges that spanned them.

  “This is Red Willow Canal,” Perin told me. She and I were side by side in the bow with Imela and Harekin; ahead. Master Luasin’s slipper wafted over gilded ripples. “It’s one of the main ones. The villas on each side belong to well-off families. See the periangs by the water steps? The designs and colors on the hulls tell what bloodline the owners are.” “Which is that one?” I asked. “The purple and yellow, with the ... it looks like shells.”

  “Oh, I don’t know all of them. It’s not one of the great houses, or they’d have something better than a periang. Almost all the magnates live on Plum Flower Canal. I do know those.” She laughed. “It pays to.”

  “You said ‘almost all.’ What about the others?”

  “Ah. Those live near the Sun Lord’s palace in Jade Lagoon. They’re very haughty indeed.”

  “I see.” The idea of such people didn’t alarm me; I was a Despotana’s daughter and could be haughty with the best of them. “There are streets here, though,” I added. “It’s not all water.” By now I'd seen two or three narrow avenues leading back between the high walls of the canalside villas. At the canal they descended in steps to little stone quays with black iron mooring posts shaped like leaping fish, sea birds and lions. Periangs bobbed at the quays, their scullsmen chewing on rounds of flatbread as they waited for customers.

  “There are streets, yes, just not as many as in normal cities. Some islands are big enough to have squares, though you can’t see them from the canal. Many of the villas even have gardens inside their walls. Ours does.”

  “Oh, good.”

  “And wait till you see the Round Market,” Perin added happily. “You’ll love it. I certainly do.”

  We were to live in a villa on Chain Canal, about half a mile from tiie Sun Lord’s palace. The house had belonged to one of the Tanyeli clan, the bitter rival of the Danjian bloodline that had included Mother’s husband. After the extermination of both families, the ownerless place was confiscated for the use of the Sun Lord. He didn’t need it, having plenty of ac-commodations of his own, and had instructed his Ministry of Personnel to let the Elder Company live there during its annual visit to Kurjain. We were fortunate to get our quarters this way, as Kuijain was a very expensive city, and the inns charged what they liked. While we stayed there the ministry furnished a domestic staff; the cook was very good and could do marvelous things with fish, which were delivered fresh to the villa’s water steps every day, along with vegetables and bread.

  The villa’s original furnishings had remained, and the building itself was unaltered except by time. It still had glass in most of its windows, of the fine colorless grade that only the very rich can afford. When I first entered the family quarters I received an impression of antique opulence, which made me exclaim in delight, much to Perin’s amusement.

  But a second look revealed that the opulence had much faded. The furnishings were very old and dark, like the villa itself, so that everything had an oppressive air of age, accentuated by the flaking frescoes and cracked mosiac floors.

  The two upper stories were fresh enough once we aired them out, but the ground floor always smelled of mildew and canal water.

  Inexplicably the villa had no ghosts, or no obvious ones. Given the murderous deeds and the ultimate bloody extinction of the Tanyeli clan, I thought it should have at least a dozen, but the villa’s atmosphere was merely gloomy, not malicious. Still, I liked only parts of it: the sunny stone terrace overlooking the canal, the outer courtyard with its fish pool, and the garden of the inner courtyard. The balcony outside my bedroom window was also pleasant, and I liked sitting there when I was reviewing lines or eating my breakfast of fresh bread and grilled silverfin. The villa was so big that each of us had our own sleeping chamber, a luxury I’d never before experienced.

  Master Luasin, the musicians, and the stagers spent the next two days going out early and returning late. The latter were unpacking our stage gear at the theater where we were to give our public performances, and Master Luasin was with the officials at the Bureau of Arts, arranging our schedule for the palace theater. We performed whatever works the bureau told us the Sun Lord wanted to see, and since it sometimes changed this at the last moment, we had to be ready with almost anything in the classical repertoire.

  The company’s first performance of the season, which was always for the Sun Lord, normally occurred a couple of days after reaching Kuijain. But to Master Luasin’s disgust, the Bureau of Arts had neglected to inform him that the Sun Lord would not be in the city when we arrived, because he’d gone to the eastem frontier to inspect the border armies.

  We couldn’t begin our performances until he retumed. To do so would have been a grave insult, possibly leading to the loss of his patronage, and Master Luasin would have boiled his own grandmother for glue before taking such a risk. Of course, the Sun Lord wasn’t our only audience in Kuijain, although he was our chief and most generous patron. We presented dramas for him every five to ten days, but the rest of the time we performed for paying audiences in Kuijain’s largest public theater. We always played to full houses, too, for the High Theater was greatly esteemed by people of elegance and refined taste, and there were plenty of such people in Kuijain. But protocol kept us from declaiming so much as a line in public until we had played before the Sun Lord.

  Thus we had time on our hands that couldn’t be completely filled by rehearsals. Always curious, I nagged Perin to show me the city, which she good-naturedly did. As we went about, I wondered if anybody would
remark on my likeness to the dead Surina. I did receive a few puzzled glances, but that was all. This wasn’t really surprising, since few commoners, even in Kuijain, had seen the Sun Lord’s consort from close enough to detect how much I resembled her.

  As for the Elder Company, Harekin had snidely suggested that the Kuijainese might think I was the ghost of the dead lady and try to exorcise me, but everybody else had lost interest in the coincidence. Master Luasin no doubt had received instructions from Mother to place me in the Sun Lord’s view, but he said nothing about it because of the odd relationship into which we had settled. He knew I was more than I seemed, and I knew he worked for Mother, and you’d think we’d have exchanged occasional whispered confidences. But we never acknowledged it, not by so much as a glance. For my part, it was because I preferred to keep my own counsel, and as for Master Luasin, I think he was too afraid of Mother to speak to me without her permission. Or maybe Nilang had shown him her wraiths; I never knew, for he was dead before I had a chance to ask him.

  Perin had promised to take me to the Round Market, and about a hand after settling into the villa, we went. The excursion was as much for her as for me, because she liked searching out knickknacks and small articles of adornment—she had a special weakness for gossamin scarves and bracelets carved from opalescent chank shells. So we furnished ourselves with a couple of hemp bags and set out, but we didn’t go there directly; she told the periang’s scullsman to take us past the Sun Lord’s palace first.

  The palace stood in Jade Lagoon on Stone Bar Island, one of the largest of the islands that made up Kuijain. On the island’s east side ran the Honor Canal, and on die west lay the lagoon’s glittering breadth, with the opulent villas of Bethiya’s greatest magnates basking beside its esplanades, like frogs around a pond.

  Every inch of Stone Bar Island was covered by the palace, whose amber brick walls stood with their feet in the lagoon. Its only land gate was on the Honor Canal side; this was the ceremonial entrance of Dry Gate, connected to the rest of the city by a bridge. There were three water gates, the main one being the suitably named Wet Gate, which opened onto the canal a hundred yards from the bridge.

  Our scullsman rowed us along the Honor Canal beside the palace walls. They rose so high above us I couldn’t see much of the interior, except some beautifully upswept roofs of blue tile, edged by bright, gilded carvings, and a tall tower with round windows. Dry Gate was closed, but the iron portcullis of Wet Gate stood open, and inside I could see a walled basin containing brightly painted watercraft. Just by the gateway was a guard boat, with two soldiers in it. They watched us as we passed, but it was only because we were women and they Uked the look of us.

  “It’s so big,” I said, as the island drew away astern and we emerged into the lagoon. I was impressed, even though I’d known that Terem Rathai wouldn’t be Uving in a prefectural residence left over from the old days. This was because Kurjain, for all its size and importance, had never been the prefectural capital of Bethiya; that distinction had belonged to the city of Tanay. However, Tanay was on Bethiya’s eastem border and too close to the Exiles for safety, and it had also been badly damaged in the wars. So the first Sun Lord took himself and his government to Kuijain, and there he built his palace. He’d had a taste for grandeur and pomp, not surprising in someone who claimed to be the successor of the Emperors of Durdane, and if his creation was not as vast as the old imperial palace in Seyhan, it was nevertheless immense. Its name was Jade Lagoon Palace, but everybody in Kuijain simply called it Jade Lagoon.

  “It’s at least four times bigger than Yazar’s,” Perin told me. “I’ve been inside, but I’ve only seen a tiny bit of it—one of the small banquet halls, and the lesser audience hall. Oh, and the Porcelain Pavilion, because that’s where the theater is.”

  I pondered those golden ramparts, knowing that somewhere behind them was the Water Terrace, where Mother’s baby son had died. I grimaced at the thought, but Perin didn’t see.

  We swung out of the lagoon into Copper Bell Canal. At intervals there were gaps between the buildings, where a street or alley met the water in a flight of steps, with a stone landing at the foot. Once in a while an esplanade ran alongside the water; here the landings were larger, so that a dozen or more craft could moor at their iron posts.

  And everywhere was the bustle and hum of Kurjainese life. At the major canal intersections you could hardly see the water for boats: periangs with their passengers; waterspoons carrying white radishes, lettuces, early melons, leeks, strings of dried mushrooms, ducks and geese in cages; fishermen’s skaffies piled with the silvery mounds of their morning’s catch; slippers in from the Short Canal, deep in the water with timber, stone, hides, grain, wine, and the gods knew what else. Among these humble craft, like swans among ducks, rowed the ornate sequinas of the rich. Their hulls were vividly painted and their upperworks were a riot of gilt, silvering, and gossamin awnings striped like rainbows; Perin said the size of the sequina and the number of its oarsmen denoted its owner’s wealth, with six rowers indicating moderate riches and twenty, opulent.

  How all these scullsmen and rowers managed to avoid collision, capsizing, and sinking was beyond me, yet they did. But they all yelled good-natured abuse at each other, and to add to this the merchants on their waterspoons and skaffies shouted their prices and stock, calling people to come alongside to haggle and buy. The high walls beside the canal bounced the racket back and forth, and in some places you could hardly hear yourself think for the din.

  Copper Bell Canal led straight to the Round Market in White Crane Pool. Kuijain had a score of these circular basins, of which White Crane was the largest. The basins were landmarks; in another city you might send someone to Pear Orchard Square, but in Kuijain you’d tell him to go to Pear Orchard Pool.

  I’d expected an impressive market, but the Round surpassed all my expectations, for it was enormous, and almost all of it was on the water. Every kind of merchant boat I’d seen was gathered here in a vast raft of commerce.

  Each boat was a floating shop. To do your marketing, you either sculled up and down the lanes that meandered among them, or hopped from boat to boat, using planks laid for that purpose. People rarely fell into the water, but when they did, there was great hilarity as the dripping, grumbling shopper was hauled out, mopped off, and offered a cup of wine to settle the stomach—a necessity, since the canals were very dirty. Kuijain got its water from island wells, but these were not trustworthy, so nobody drank water unless it was boiled or mixed with vinegar or wine. Small beer was the most common drink; it was brewed in huge quantities upriver where the water was clean and shipped to Kurjain in enormous casks. Even so, there were many fevers and bowel complaints during the hot months, and people died of them. Kuijain, for all its opulence, could be an unhealthy city.

  But sickness was very far from my thoughts on that bright spiing moming. Perin paid off the scullsman, we climbed the steps from the boat landing, and I found myself in the biggest market in Kuijain.

  Not quite all of it was on the water. An esplanade ran around the circle and there, facing the great raft of boats, was a many-arched arcade with a shop tucked under each arch. Most of the crowd was Durdana, but there were others, too, both buying and selling. I'd seen lots of foreigners in Istana, but in Kuijain there were half the races of the world: Erallu, Ris Rua, Daisa, Yellow Smoke Islanders, Avashan, Khalaka, Abarite, and others I couldn’t name. Two of these were weirdly painted men with amber eyes, dressed in outlandish garb of fringed deerskin despite the morning’s warmth. Perin told me they were Chechesh, from the islands behind the north wind.

  We sauntered along the arcade, inspecting the shops. These were of the better sort and it wasn’t long before Perin decided she must have a pair of ivory earrings, and set to bargaining for them. Being uninterested in baubles, I wandered a little way on and discovered a bookseller’s stall.

  To my delight, it had plenty of new books. Istana’s single printer had stuck to popular classical texts
, most of which I already knew, and its market had offered mostly old discarded volumes of the sort nobody wants to read. But here I found not only secondhand books but mint-new ones, smelling of ink and glue, with titles I'd never seen: Lives of Famous Immortals, The Ten Thousand Infallible Arts, Records of the Unworldly and Strange, Mysteries of Nature, Dreaming of the Good Old Days. There were books of stories as well, equally unknown to me: The Seven Beauties, The Game of Love and Chance, The journey of Sisima, The Horn of Gold.

  The middle-aged woman in the shop was cheerful, and we fell into conversation. I was pleased to realize that she took me for a native of Kuijain; I'd been in the city only a little while but had already picked up the accent. It tumed out that her husband was the printer.

  “I’ve never heard of some of these,” I said, setting down Mysteries of Nature.

  “Oh, those would be the new ones.” She showed me The Game of Love and Chance. “This just came off the press. The author lives here in Kuijain.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Hm, well, that’s between him and my husband. You see, the book’s a bit rowdy and adventuresome, not serious stuff, and when a scholar writes such a book, he needs to keep it quiet.” She snickered. “Such a man has passed the Universal Examination. He doesn’t want his literary reputation to suffer.” “Why does he write it, then?”

  “For the money, what else? This fellow is as poor as a road-mender’s widow, so my husband says.”

  “Your husband must have an army of page carvers working for him,” I said, examining The Game of Love and Chance. Every letter was beautifully executed, without a single burr or splinter mark. “So many pages to cut. And so well cut, too.”

  She laughed delightedly. “Everybody says that who doesn’t know. But he has no carvers at all.”

  I looked up at her. “He doesn’t? Then how does he—” “It’s a new thing. There’s two or three printers doing it now. You don’t carve a whole page at once, you see, and you don’t use wood. Instead you have every letter cut on the end of a little bar of metal, lots of bars for each letter. You might have ten bars with mishan and twelve with sessan, for example. Then you clamp the little bars together in rows, as many as you need to make all the words on a page, and you print from that.”