The Assassins of Tamurin

by S. D. Tower

  ‘Tossi!” Mother cried, leaping to her feet.

  The terrible, neck-snapping wrench didn’t come. I heard two soft quick footsteps, Tossi gasped, the vise loosened, and my throbbing arm dropped free. Still half blinded with pain, I ahnost fell over, then looked behind me.

  Tossi lay sprawled on the floor, facedown. A Taweret murder knife jutted from her spine, just where I'd driven my own blade into Ardavan. And beside her stood Nilang, who said, in a cracked voice, “The binding has me. Kill her, Lale.”

  She dropped to her knees and toppled sideways; her lips drew back to bare her teeth, and her back arched into a bow. I spun around to face Mother, who was on her feet, wide-eyed and staring.

  But it was not me she was looking at, nor Nilang, nor Tossi, but at the doorway. Something shimmered beneath the lintel, and then the air seemed to split like a snake bursting its skin.

  A narrow door opened there, a gateway into somewhere else. And I knew that place. It was the Quiet World, and a creature was stalking out of it toward us. It seemed most like the thing that wanted to devour me long ago, but it was worse, and I knew it was coming for Nilang. Only that knowledge saved me from mindless terror.

  “Kill her!” Nilang groaned. And then she made a noise, a soft noise, but it was worse than any scream I'd ever heard.

  I struggled to my feet. My arm throbbed and my shoulder blazed with pain. Now I had to tum my back on the approaching horror. It was the last thing I wanted to do, but I did it. Then, wincing, I drew my knife.

  Mother did not move. She seemed to have no fear of the thing from the Quiet World, for her attention was wholly on me. I hadn’t thought she’d mn, for she had too much pride for that. But I knew she would fight for her hfe somehow, and I was still very dizzy. I must be cautious.

  “Wait, Lale,” she said softly. “Can you really do this, child? Can you really kill me?”

  “Yes, I can,” I told her. “For my tme sister. For Terem. For Nilang. For everyone you betrayed.”

  Mother looked down at the blade in my hand. “Let me go,” she said. “What harm can I do anyone now? I'll go back to Chiran and never trouble you again.”

  “Nilang will die if I do, and I owe her my hfe. And if I don’t kill you, Terem will. There’s no way out for you, not now.”

  She seemed to ponder this. I took a step toward her. Would she just stand there and let me drive the knife into her breast? And could I do that, in cold blood? But I had to. She had to die.

  “Can you really kill me?” she asked again. “I’m defenseless, Lale. Can you really stand before me and stab me to death?”

  From behind me, Nilang groaned, ''Lale!''

  It distracted me for a heartbeat, and that was almost our undoing, for Mother seized the dish of beets and vinegar from the table and dashed it into my face. The stinging liquid blinded me; sightless, I threw myself aside and felt a thin pulhng sensation across my forearm. It instantly became a line of searing pain; fool that I was, she’d had a knife of her own. I saw a moving shadow through my tears, dodged, parried, clink of steel, her breath on my cheek, my training with me now, thrust the blade upward and twist. A resistance, then softness, a gasp, ting of metal striking tiles. She’d dropped her knife. Her weight slid away from me, tugged at the hilt in my hand. My blade pulled free.

  On my left arm I felt the slick wet warmth of blood, but it seemed a shallow cut. I pulled my other sleeve across my burning eyes until the tears had washed the vinegar out. Then I could see her clearly, lying on her back on the floor with a red brook flowing from her bodice. My knife had gone in near the heart but had not struck it, for she was still breathing in husky gasps. But there was so much blood that I knew I must have pierced one of the great veins. She would not live long.

  I spared a glance for Nilang and for the portal into the Quiet World. The dreadful creature had halted, and as I watched, the eerie doorway took on a translucent aspect and began to fade. The binding was loosening with the ebb of Mother’s life, and the terror and agony began to slip from Nilang’s contorted face.

  I knelt beside the woman who had raised me. Spittle and blood trembled at the comers of her mouth.

  “Why?” I asked. “Why couldn’t you have been different? Why couldn’t you have loved me?”

  “Useless slut,” she gasped. “Who could love you?”

  If she hadn’t been dying, I would have struck her. “I loved you once,” I whispered.

  She gave a strangled laugh. “Yes, you did, girl, I saw to that, didn’t I?” She closed her eyes but she still breathed, and it came to me suddenly that the Mother I thought I knew had never existed. And to this woman who lay on the cold tiles before me, I owed nothing.

  With a terrible effort she roused herself again, and in that beautiful voice, touched now with the rattle of death, she said, “Girl, I curse you with a mother’s curse. I curse you and all that spring from you. You’re the worst of daughters, and your own daughters will hate you.”

  A vast burden slowly began to lift from my heart. I had borne it for so long that only now did I perceive the weight I’d carried.

  “You can’t curse me,” I said. “You’re not my mother. My mother died in Istana a long time ago. I’m not your daughter, and I never was.”

  “Traitor,” she breathed, and then blood came from her mouth. For a moment I felt her idu-spirit hanging in the air, seething with malice and hatred, and then it was gone like a bead of water on a sun-warmed stone.

  Kneeling beside her, my blood mixing with hers on the cold floor, I felt a sudden strange sensation of lightness, as if I had become part of the sunlit air around me. I didn’t understand it at first, and then I did.

  I was free.

  Thirty-two

  There’s much between us that we must face,” Terem said. “And there is the question of what to do with you once we’ve faced it.”

  We were in the covered veranda of the Reed Pavilion, seated at the table where we had shared so many meals. I’d had my servants set it with cakes and wine, but the cups remained unfilled and the cakes uneaten.

  He’d been back from the east for two days now, but until this evening I hadn’t seen him. I’d worried that this delay was a bad sign, but I kept reminding myself that he had a lot to do at the Chancellery and the Ministry of War. His message that he would attend me had come as a relief of sorts, aldiough it was mixed with a great deal of apprehension.

  The weather was fine. We were halfway through the month of Rain, but the sky had been clear all day and the air was soft and warm. Spring had arrived in Kuijain, with the sea lavender and basket-of-gold coming into bloom at the margins of the pond, and small black and silver frogs chirring from the shallow places among the reeds. The slash on my arm had healed well, although I’d bear a faint scar to the end of my days.

  “Then where should we start?” I asked diffidently. I didn’t expect the worst fate possible, but I didn’t expect the best, either. For I could guess how much pain I’d caused him, if only by measuring it against my own. All month I had lived with remorse and anguish; neither had diminished as the days passed, and why should they? I was the author of a hideous drama of deceit, treachery, lies, death, and love betrayed; and not an hour passed wherein I did not think of what had been, and what might have been, and what I had lost forever.

  Terem didn’t answer me, but gazed sadly at the young flowers at the margins of the pool. So I said, “But I would ask one thing from you. Will you let Nilang and Master Aa and the others go?”

  They were still at Jade Lagoon, living in a pavilion uncomfortably near the Arsenal and its dungeons. The Chancellor had invited them to stay there, and me here, to await the Sun Lord’s retum from the eastem war. It was an invitation he did not intend any of us to refuse.

  Nor did he leave us idle. Much of our time we spent being interrogated about the School of Serene Repose, Three Springs, and the web of spies Mother had woven throughout the Despotates and Bethiya. How the Chancellor would deal with that web, he hadn’t ind
icated, at least not to me. But I reckoned that, with neither Mother nor Nilang to direct its actions, there was no immediate peril to anyone.

  I often wondered, as he questioned us in his Chancellery office, with the clerks writing everything down, how my Three Springs sisters would be coping with the news of Mother’s death and Nilang’s disappearance. They’d certainly know about the former, because Mother had been entombed in state here in Kuijain, and Terem had sent condolences to Ashken on her adoptive mother’s death. The new Despotana was no danger, for according to Nilang she knew nothing about the women of Three Springs. Also according to Nilang, with Mother’s death the wraiths would no longer be a threat to my erstwhile sisters; perhaps they did not realize it yet, but they could now babble Mother’s secrets as they liked and be none the worse for it.

  As for Nilang, her new freedom had not appeared to change her a jot. When I asked her why she’d come back to help me, at such terrible risk, she’d given her usual Nilang shrug and answered, “If you failed, I was worse than dead. You were loyal to her for a long time, and I thought you might falter at the last moment, so I returned.” The fact that her lack of faith had been justified had done little to improve my mood.

  “Why should I let Nilang and her retainers go?” Terem asked. “Or let you go, for that matter?”

  From his tone, I couldn’t tell what sort of answer he expected or wanted. But my spirits sank even lower. I’d been hoping for exile, not imprisonment, but the latter seemed to be in the wind.

  “Ardavan’s dead and the Exile Kingdoms are doomed,” I reminded him. “I had a hand in that and so did Nilang.”

  “Yes, you did. I would say that you very likely assured our victory at Gultekin.” I was glad to hear him admit it. That victory had been great indeed, greater than any of the past two centuries, because Ardavan’s death had not only beheaded the beast that was the Exile army but also thrown it into turmoil. Some of his officers accused the allied Kings of contriving the assassination; then, on the very brink of battle, the King of Suarai demanded the army’s leadership for himself. Ardavan’s generals, beside themselves with grief and fury, refused, and the King ordered his men to withdraw from the field. And at that moment, in the faint light just before dawn, Terem hurled the Army of Durdane at the quarreling enemy ranks.

  They were not ready for him, and his triumph was complete. The surviving Exiles fled toward the River Savath, with Terem in grim pursuit. But at the Savath, our brigades from Tanay blocked the fords so the Exiles could not cross, and the Army of Durdane took them from behind. Sixty thousand of their best soldiers died that day, with all three allied Kings and most of Ardavan’s surviving generals. Of the hundred and twenty thousand men who had set out to destroy Bethiya a month ago, scarcely a battalion remained.

  After the Battle of the Savath, Terem sent the army ahead into Lindu, and now he had retumed to Kuijain to mobilize new forces and complete the freeing of the eastem lands. It would take time and much fighting, but it would come, for Durdana rebellions now flamed in Jouhar and Seyhan and Suarai, and few Exile troops remained to crash them. Better yet, it was said that Exiles by the thousands—man, woman, and child— were fleeing northeast toward the Juren Gap and the steppes from which they had come. If you listened to an easterly wind, you could hear the death ratde of the Six Kingdoms.

  “It’s going to be a different world,” I said. “When and where will you proclaim the Restoration?”

  “In Seyhan, before the leaves fall. We’ll have the city by then. I will be raised as Emperor there, as it was in the old days.”

  “So we’ll have our empire back.” A frog was sculling across the pond, leaving an arrowhead wake. It risked sudden death from the carp beneath, but reached the bank without being engulfed. Lucky frog.

  “Yes, we will, but that will be just the beginning of the work. We’ll need two generations to rebuild what’s been rained, but rebuild it we will.”

  “Terem,” I said, when he didn’t go on, “please, what are you going to do with me and the others? We need to know. It’s not like you to make us wait like this. It’s cruel.” Suddenly he had an utterly unfamiliar expression on his face. It was an anguish such as I’d never seen in him, and it cut me to the heart; my throat closed up and my eyes stung with tears. I couldn’t look at him and instead fixed my gaze on my lap and on my trembling, clasped hands.

  “In the case of Nilang,” he said in a strained voice, “she was never my subject, so there is no taint of treason. I would consider her a prisoner of war, but she fought Ardavan on my behalf, which makes her an ally of sorts. If she gives me her word, in the name of her gods, that she won’t oppose me again. I’ll release her and her companions.”

  At least the Taweret would salvage their freedom from the wreckage. “Thank you,” I said. “But will you help her in the matter of her daughter?”

  “I’ll do what I can to bring the girl here. In the meantime, Nilang and the other two can move as they wish, beginning tomorrow. You, however, are another matter.”

  A dull ache settled under my breastbone. I was to be punished after all. Was it to be prison or exile? If exile, where would I go? It hardly mattered. When I reached wherever it was, perhaps I could get my hands on a little money and try my luck as a printer or bookseller. I had no heart anymore for acting. I had paid for its joys with misery and suffering, both my own and that of many other people.

  Yet I knew I’d miss the life I’d led, my life in the palace, my life among the great and beautiful of Bethiya and Kurjain. Not so much the luxury and ease, though I’d loved that, too, but the excitement of being at the center of things, the sense of power over my own fate—illusory though that had been—and the feeling that I somehow mattered.

  Most of all. I’d miss Terem.

  “What do you want of me, Lale?” he asked.

  “Don’t torment me, Terem, even if I am a traitor. What choices have I? Exile or prison? I’ll choose exile, if you’ll let me.”

  “I’m not tormenting you,” he replied quietly. “I’ve thought about you a lot since Gultekin. Yes, you were a traitor. But if it were not for you, I think that I would be dead, and so would all my men, and Kuijain would be nothing but smoking embers.”

  I tried to speak but could not. And then he said, “Lale, I love you still. I forgive you everything, if forgiveness is needed. If, that is, you’ll forgive me for my harshness at Gultekin and for letting you go to face Makina Seval alone. I wasn’t thinking clearly, or I would never have allowed it. I know that Tossi nearly killed you. When I think that she might have, and that you might be gone . . .” He spread his hands. “It would have tumed victory to a heap of ash.”

  Dizziness washed through me. And then that hard knot of grief, which I had believed I must carry with me forever, began to loosen. But I wouldn’t burst into tears, I wouldn’t.

  “You told me in Gultekin that you loved me,” Terem went on, “but I didn’t know whether I could believe you. I should have realized then that you spoke the truth, but I sent you away without a word. Do you still love me, even after that?”

  “Yes,” I answered. By now I was weeping, just a little. “And this time,” I added, “just for your information. I’m not acting.”

  “Lale.”

  “What?” To my chagrin, I had begun to sniffle. Fortunately, the servants had left finger cloths on the table. I picked one up and blew my nose into it.

  “Marry me, Lale,” Terem said. “Come with me to Seyhan, and sit with me on the dais as Empress of Durdane.”

  The world became very still, as if time had stopped. One word hung in the air: Empress. Not Inamorata, not Surina, but Empress. It was the glittering dream of that ragged, determined child who marched up the road from Riversong so many years ago. How overjoyed she would have been at this.

  “Lale? Do you accept?”

  I didn’t answer. I thought about the reality of that dream, for I’d seen enough to predict it. I remembered the stifling rituals of the House of Felicity, an
d imagined all the things I couldn’t do if I were Empress: go alone to the theater or the Round, buy my own books in a bookstall, saunter around the Mirror with friends, decorate my own villa. Even as Inamorata I had been bound tighter than I liked. If I were Empress, those loose bindings would become manacles: golden ones, but still manacles. How would I put up with it?

  But as I thought this, a sudden revelation swept through me. Why was I worrying about such things? For pity’s sake, I’d be Empress. If I wanted to scull my own periang through the Round, who was going to stop me? If I wanted to spend an aftemoon in the Mirror, who would tell me I mustn’t? Terem? Hardly. He’d probably be with me in the boat or at the gaming table. So if I didn’t like the imperial protocol, I didn’t have to put up with it—I could rearrange it to suit myself.

  There were going to be changes in the palace, and lots of them.

  ""Now what are you smiling about?” Terem exclaimed in exasperation. “How hard a question is it?”

  “I'll be a very bad Empress,” I warned him. “I'm willful and headstrong. I hate ceremony and I want my own way too often. And I like going places by myself. And I'm not likely to change, not even for you. Are you sure that’s what you want?”

  “I don’t want you to change. I want the Lale I already know. Will you marry me or not?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  And so, a year later, in the Hall of Heaven’s Illumination in Seyhan, I became Empress of Durdane. Terem and I had already moved from Kuijain to the ancient capital. After our marriage and my ascent to the dais, we settled down together in a restored wing of the imperial palace.

  Perhaps settled down is the wrong phrase. Ours was still a rough-edged, raw-boned empire, and already I sensed that it would be more than a mere continuation of the old, largely because of Terem. With the Juren Gap now secure against the Exiles, he bubbled like a hot spring with ideas. He refounded the Academy of Seyhan, then ransacked both empire and Despotates for men of learning and scholarship to teach there. He established the Imperial Printing Bureau, to replace the myriad books destroyed during the Partition, and ordered the printers to use the new technique of metal letters instead of carved pages. He reopened the Thousand Lilies Theater and attached to it a school for actors and musicians. He set up the Bureau of Original Devices and sought ingenious men to find new ways of doing old things, from glass-making to canal construction. This was greatly needed, for so much in the east needed to be rebuilt after a century of ruin and neglect at the hands of the Exiles. And Terem seemed determined to do it all at once.