Pride of Empires (The Powers of Amur Book 3)

by J. S. Bangs

  Sadja raised an eyebrow. “She, too, hates your father?”

  “I don’t know that,” Basadi said. “But she got married very quickly to Yasma-dar of Gumadha. I was young at the time, but she told me later part of the reason was to keep her from playing widely. Like I did.”

  She rolled onto her back and looked at the ceiling, scratching absent-mindedly at her stomach. “She got lucky, though. Yasma-dar was young. Pole like a palm tree, in your words.”

  Sadja laughed. “I’ll be sure to spread that fact around Majasravi while I’m here. And if I ever get a chance to go to Gumadha.”

  “You have it straight from his wife’s mouth,” Basadi said, smirking.

  Sadja bent over and placed a kiss on Basadi’s naked breast. “Too bad no one can help you out of your marriage, though.”

  Basadi made a groan of annoyance. “I wish someone could. I’d be grateful to the right man….”

  “I’m a lowly khadir, not even from Majasravi,” Sadja said with a shrug. “There’s nothing I can do to help.”

  “I know,” Basadi said. She looked at him crossly. “But, goat piss, there’s always someone scheming something in the Emperor’s court. If I hadn’t been locked in my rooms for two years—”

  “You would have found them?”

  “Or at least I would have enjoyed myself.”

  “You realize any plot which took down your father would probably take you down as well.”

  Basadi frowned. It seemed she actually hadn’t thought of that. “Well, not if I’m keeping the plotter warm, it wouldn’t.”

  “So what you need,” Sadja said casually, “is some young and ambitious player in the Emperor’s court who will fill you up at night and take your father down in the morning.”

  Basadi rolled her eyes. “No such person exists. Thank you for tempting me with impossible fantasies.”

  “All you have at the moment is me.” He gave an exaggerated mock bow.

  Basadi grabbed his hair as he bowed and pulled him down to her for a kiss. “And you’ll be staying here for a few more days.”

  “I will?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “The Emperor’s daughter says you will. I’ll be delayed here, unable to continue to Majasravi. And you’ll be delayed as well.”

  “If I must….”

  “By order of the Emperor’s daughter, you must.”

  He sighed and stretched out atop her. “And once you go into the Ushpanditya—”

  “You’ll never see me again,” Basadi said. “So no excuses.”

  She raised her head and kissed him deeply, biting his lower lip. Her fingernails ran lightly down his back. “Now, have you rested enough to keep me entertained again, or will you force the Emperor’s daughter to wait until morning?”

  He pressed himself against her. “Let’s find out.”

  Kirshta

  A curtain rustled. Kirshta awoke. Something was wrong.

  He lay for a moment in his bed attempting to discern from where this sudden surety came. There were footsteps in the hall. Insistent whispers. All very quiet, but a strained and deliberate quiet, the quiet of someone who was trying very hard not to be heard.

  Another rustle of movement. Someone was in his room. He pushed himself up to a crouch. A thief? No thief got into the Ushpanditya. An assassin was much more likely here—

  A hand touched his shoulder. His hand snapped up and seized the intruder’s wrist.

  “Ow,” a familiar voice said. “Let me go. It’s me, Apurta.”

  “Oh,” Kirshta said, releasing the wrist. “What are you doing?”

  “I was trying to wake you without making a sound. Listen.” His voice was low and insistent. “We have to go.”

  “Go where?”

  “Out of the Ushpanditya. The Emperor is going to capture us.”

  “You mean—”

  “There was a list, people in the Ushpanditya whom he no longer trusts. They’re going to take them into the Dhigvaditya tonight, try them, and probably kill them tomorrow. A friend warned me. I left a few moments before the men set out. Come quickly, we don’t have time.”

  Kirshta was already on his feet. He considered quickly what he wore: a simple cotton dhoti, undyed. The yellow silks of the Emperor’s Lotus were locked in a chest. He couldn’t possibly take those, they were far too conspicuous. But he had nothing else. What else could he carry with him? The books…. But no, it was impossible. With a tremendous pain in his heart he bade the books farewell.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “I’m bringing nothing.”

  The hallway outside the chamber of the Emperor’s Lotus glowed with oil lamps hanging from chains, spaced far apart with deep shadows between them. Kirshta saw no one, but he followed Apurta in the drape of shadow between the lamps. They crept into the colonnade around the courtyard.

  Red Men were in the yard. Twelve, Kirshta counted, some holding torches, the others with swords. They moved with quiet, careful precision through the chambers that surrounded the yard. The courtyard itself shone with silver moonlight, but the shadows beneath the colonnade were black as obsidian. In the shadows behind the pillars, Kirshta and Apurta were unseen, but they would have no way to cross.

  Apurta shook his head. “Too light here. We’ll never get past. Is there another way to get to the Rice Gate?”

  “Not from here,” Kirshta said. There were other halls and passages, but eventually they all opened into this yard before they descended to the great gate that let out into Majasravi. “Let me try something.”

  He reached for the inner stillness, by now an old friend. He closed his eyes, and with his inner sight he saw the elements of the yard around him: stone and water, the breath of the air, the souls of the men, fire leaping from their torches.

  Fire, like men, needed breath to live. With a flicker of his will he scattered the breath away from a torch. The flame coughed, died, and went dark. He scattered its heat into the air, then released the breath. The embers flared with heat, but no flame.

  A curse. Kirshta opened his eyes. The soldier in the middle of the yard whose torch had gone out called for one of his comrades to come and relight him. Kirshta closed his eyes again, found the next torch, and stole its breath. The flames died. Without pausing, his will leaped from flame to flame, capturing the breath which kept the fires alive and holding it back so that, one by one, the fires died.

  “Good enough,” Apurta whispered. When Kirshta opened his eyes again, the lamps and torches were all dark. Only a single flame remained, burning in a distant corner. The stars overhead glittered in a sky of iron, and the full moon washed the flagstones in white light. The colonnade was as black as ink. But the soldiers were shouting now, bringing out flint, alert.

  Apurta led the way. They crept through the blackness behind the columns, taking swift, silent footsteps around the margins. Any sound and they would be doomed—the soldiers already knew the darkness was unnatural. But the passage to the Rice Gate was just ahead of them. No Red Men guarded it, and a moment later they turned the corner, and the shouting of the courtyard receded.

  Kirshta let out his breath. There were lamps lit here, but no Red Men. Kirshta pulled Apurta close and whispered in his ear, “Walk straight and slow, and let me follow you as if I’m a servant. Most won’t recognize me as the Emperor’s Lotus dressed this way.”

  Apurta nodded. He stood up straight, slowed his pace, and let Kirshta follow him with his head down. Kirshta put on the downcast, expressionless face of a slave, and followed Apurta with shuffling steps. Just a servant following one of the Red Men on an errand. They passed two other servants on their way down the passage. They walked past without a word or glance. It was as good as being invisible.

  And then they emerged onto the top of the stairs which descended to the Rice Gate. Majasravi opened before them as a vast field of jumbled black shapes, punctured here and there by the light of fires, and closed overhead by a veil of brilliant stars and the white coin of the moon. At the bottom of the stairs, befo
re the bulk of the bronze-clad Rice Gate, a brazier burned and a lone sentry waited.

  “Is there no other way?” Apurta said. “I don’t know if we can get the gate open.”

  “We have to talk to the sentry,” Kirshta said. “But the Emperors built the Ushpanditya this way. There are only two ways in, the Rice Gate and the Bronze Gate, unless there are secrets I don’t know about.”

  “I thought you knew all the secrets.”

  Kirshta guffawed. “Come on.”

  They descended the stairs. When they reached the bottom, the sentry stood up straight and said, “Halt.”

  Apurta took a sharp breath, then let out a laugh. “Oh, it’s you. Hello Daudya.”

  “Apurta?” the other soldier said. “What are you doing here at this time of night?”

  “I have to take this slave for an errand in Majasravi. Orders.” He shrugged.

  Daudya grunted. “I haven’t heard anything.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I need orders from my lieutenant to open the gate at night. Otherwise, no doing.”

  “Are you serious?” Apurta stamped his foot. “I’ve got my own orders, and I can’t be stopped here.”

  “You could go wake Makthan-kha—”

  “Now I know you’re not serious. You want me to wake up my lieutenant in the middle of the night so he can tell you to open the gate.”

  “Listen,” Daudya said, leaning forward so the amber light of the brazier lit his face in garish colors. His voice was a harsh whisper. “Opening this gate without orders isn’t worth my head. You know how it’s been.”

  “And I know how it’ll be if I don’t get this slave to the majakhadir tonight,” Apurta said.

  Daudya stepped back. “I can’t. Go through the Dhigvaditya and go out the Bronze Gate. Maybe their sentry got the orders.”

  Apurta made a noise of annoyance. He glanced aside to Kirshta with an eyebrow raised in question.

  “I have an idea,” Kirshta said. He raised his hands, and they began to flicker with fire.

  “Merciful Jakhur,” Daudya said, and he pushed himself against the wall. “What are you—”

  “Open the gate for us,” Kirshta said, “or I’ll burn you alive and pluck the gate key from your ashes.”

  Daudya’s eyes went from the flames on Kirshta’s fingers to the torn edge of his maimed ear. “You’re the Lotus,” he said, his breath heavy with realization. “I saw what you did to Dumaya in the Dhigvaditya. What is going on here?”

  He shot Apurta a look of desperation and panic.

  “We’re the only ones here,” Kirshta said. The fire was beginning to burn his fingers. He bit his tongue. “Open the gate, let us out, and no one knows.” The fire on his hands flared into white-hot gouts of flame. He almost cried out from the pain.

  “You can say, truthfully, that you were threatened,” Apurta said.

  “Okay, okay,” Daudya said. He quickly pulled the key from the chain around his neck and tossed it to Apurta. “But I’m not saying anything. I never saw you.”

  Kirshta doused the flames, clenching his teeth against the burning. He focused on the inner silence. His breathing softened.

  Apurta undid the mechanism holding the gate closed and pulled it open just enough for one man to slip out. The well-oiled hinges made no sound. “Go,” he told Kirshta.

  Kirshta left, and Apurta followed a moment after. The gate slid silently shut. They ran until they put the first of the streets of Majasravi between themselves and the gates of the Ushpanditya, then Kirshta dashed into a side-street and collapsed against the walls of the alley. He held his hands in front of him, shaking.

  “What is it?” Apurta said.

  “My hands,” Kirshta said. Apurta reached out and touched one, and Kirshta yowled in pain and curled them into his chest. They were covered in blisters.

  “It looks like you stuck them into a brazier,” Apurta said. “What did you do?”

  “Didn’t you see?” Kirshta said.

  “The fire on your hands? I thought you could—”

  “So did I,” Kirshta said. “Ruyam could make fire on his hands like that. But evidently there’s a trick to it I don’t know, because…” He doubled over, gasping. He found the inner stillness again, where pain was nothing, and anchored himself to it. He had no time to stop and pity himself. “Where do we go now?”

  “Ah,” Apurta said, looking aside abashedly. “I hoped that you knew.”

  “You don’t know anyone in Majasravi?”

  “Everyone I know in Majasravi is back there,” he said, gesturing toward the menacing stone hulk of the Ushpanditya and the Dhigvaditya.

  “Me too,” Kirshta said, leaning his head against the wall. “Except…” What was the name? “Udagra-kha.”

  “Who?”

  “A majakhadir who has his house here in Majasravi. Vapathi was sent there.”

  “Vapathi? Can she help us?”

  “I don’t know,” Kirshta said, “but we need her help again.”

  “So can we find it?”

  “At light,” Kirshta said, “we can locate the house of Udagra-kha. We can ask, somebody will know. But you, are you still wearing your Red Men’s sash?”

  “Oh, right,” Apurta said. He tore the sash off and tossed it to the ground. “I’m a deserter now,” he said with a little wistfulness in his voice.

  “You’d probably have been dead in the Dhigvaditya,” Kirshta said. “Vapathi was sent away, and I was slated for death. You were friends with both of us. How long do you think you had?”

  “I know,” Apurta said. “But I was… I’ve been in the Red Men for years. I expected to stay.”

  “Well, now we’re both paupers. Did you bring any money?”

  “A little,” Apurta said. “From my last pay. We could go to a guesthouse.”

  “I have nothing. We should save yours. Tonight we sleep on the ground. Somewhere farther away from the Ushpanditya.” He pointed at the jumbled roofs of Majasravi stretching off to the south.

  “Sleeping on the ground, is that all? I did that marching with the Red Men.”

  “You should get used to it,” Kirshta said. He started down the lightless street, looking over his shoulder at the silent outline of the Ushpanditya. A pang of sorrow passed through him.

  He had been the Emperor’s Lotus; he had been powerful, for a few months. He’d had everything he wanted.

  Praudhu facedown in a pool of blood.

  The image came to him with the force of an arrow. He stumbled and fell to a knee. Apurta put his hands on Kirshta’s shoulders. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” Kirshta said. He looked back at the Ushpanditya again, and the towers seemed to be seeping with blood. “I’m fine. It’s a good thing we’re leaving.”

  * * *

  By morning they looked like true paupers, dirt-streaked, wearing plain, unwashed dhotis and no shirts, with only Apurta’s small purse between them. The found a market where the peddlers would answer their questions, but none of them knew the location of the house of Udagra. They bought a little food, then moped out. At a shrine to Ashti a dhorsha took pity on them and pointed them in the direction of the river, where the great houses of the city were built.

  Kirshta realized that his understanding of the layout of Majasravi was woefully inadequate, as he had spent almost all of his time in the city in the Ushpanditya. He could find the great palaces and the Majavaru Lurchatiya, but beyond that his orientation was weak. They managed to find the river district, where noble house after noble house marched alongside the banks, surrounded by broad gardens, tall stone fences keeping them from the road, with retainers guarding bronze-barred doors. They asked the gate-guards from house to house, until they got to the place.

  Pale granite stones walled in a grassy courtyard, seen only through the door of bronze and wicker which closed the gate. A retainer waited in an alcove beside the door. The name of Udagra was written in calligraphy over the arch.

  They approached the r
etainer, who looked at them with a scowl.

  “No beggars,” he said.

  “We aren’t beggars,” Kirshta said. “We’re looking for my sister Vapathi.”

  “There is no one named Vapathi here,” the retainer said immediately.

  “Are you sure?” Apurta asked. “She was a servant, brought into the house recently, about ten days ago.”

  “Oh.” The man seemed to relax a little. “I think I know who you’re talking about, but I don’t think I can call for her. You say you’re her brother?”

  “I am,” Kirshta said.

  The man took in Kirshta’s broad nose and coarse, kinky hair. It was hard to mistake Kirshta for anything other than one of the mountain-folk, which meant, in most parts of Amur, that he was probably a slave. He looked over Apurta as well, then called for someone inside the gate.

  The gate opened from the inside, and the man said, “Come in.”

  They stepped through the gate, and it closed with a clatter behind them. The man inside the gate grabbed Kirshta and Apurta by their shoulders and shoved them forward.

  “This way,” he said contemptuously. He led them to a side door, and they entered a servant’s passage into a lower storeroom. He closed and locked the door, then crossed to the other side. Kirshta heard a lock slide into place in that door as well.

  “We’re locked in,” he said to Apurta.

  “I see,” Apurta said, looking around. Sacks of rice, strings of dried peppers, little bowls of spices. “Somehow I don’t think we’re going to find Vapathi.”

  “We should have come at night and sneaked in,” Kirshta said. “Maybe from the river—can you swim?”

  “No,” Apurta said.

  “Me neither.”

  They were interrupted by the clap of the inner door opening, and a man in a clean black kurta with a sharp long nose and his eyes narrowed in suspicion stepped in. “These two?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said the voice behind him. “Came in asking for Vapathi.”

  He folded his hands and studied them. “Who have you escaped from?”

  “We are not escaped slaves,” Kirshta said quickly.