And at that moment, yes, I definitely wished for kafi.
Worth the Coin
D’ri and Atyarik searched the house from roof to cellar; Redfist and Ninefinger slipped out to examine the courtyard and the outer wall. Gavrin, of course, we knew was not dead, for he was snoring with abandon, audible even through the door, and barely stirred when Redfist eyed his room. The barbarian caught sight of a flicker of movement and had almost bellowed, but found it was Diyan, one hand out-flung, beside the Pesh lutebanger.
He had found a warm place to sleep after all.
A babe in arms, that one, Redfist had said, with the ghost of a smile, before he had shut the front door, and he could have meant either of them.
I searched the assassin’s corpse while Janaire lit candles and kindled a lamp, letting the zaradai wink out with a rueful expression, rubbing at her temples as if it pained her.
Two new-moon knives, stilettes and lockpicks as well. Small sealed clay cylinders of differing sizes—poisons, or acids, or navthen-and-ortrox to spark a flame. A dark cloth wound about the head—not black, for that makes one more conspicuous at night, but a well-worn deep blue. When I unwound the dhabri, carefully, I found a young Antai woman, her head lolling strangely on its broken stem of a neck, her teeth painted with semtar so no gleam would betray her location. I propped her mouth open with a knifehilt and found the poison tooth—back right molar, still intact—and settled to searching her clothing more thoroughly. A length of flexible wire with handles—garrotte, and a finely made one at that—and various other odds and ends.
No thin inkmarks upon her chest, or on the inside of her thigh. She was Antai, she was not Shainakh.
She was not a Hand.
When I glanced up, Janaire had her fingers pressed to her mouth. In the wavering lamplight, she looked very young. “Is it another?” she whispered, the blur of her lowlander accent softening the words into a child’s intonation.
“Not a Shainakh.” I tried to sound reassuring. “I was certain nobody in Antai wishes me dead this badly.”
“And now?”
G’mai threatened to burn my throat, so I forced myself to speak softly and slowly in tradetongue, to give myself time to think. “It is not at all characteristic for the Guild to send a blackback to the wrong house. Bad for business.” What did I do when I was here last? Nothing too drastic. There was that priest, and the tree-gems. Oh, and those two port guards. Neither of them were merchant-noble.
“There is a guild?”
“Thieves and assassins. The Council wants peace in the streets, purse-cutters and throat-cutters want to make a living. Business works best that way.” Like every other city. Pesh has no Guild, but they have their hungry god. I felt along the body’s calf, found another knifehilt. “Ah, now. This is something.”
“What is it?” Janaire shivered, pulling her shawl more tightly. It was silk, of course, and its weave was peculiarly stippled, marking it as G’mai instead of Kshanti or Hain fabric. The fringe was very fine, too, and I wondered once more why she was so determined to stay outside G’maihallan’s borders. “Assassins have a guild? It does not seem...”
“Not quite polite. But profitable.” And the infighting is enough to keep them mostly occupied. I carefully tugged at the hilt with two fingers, and it slid free with distressing ease. Was it oiled, or smeared with poison in some oily base? “Mother’s tits,” I breathed, tipping the short, thin blade this way and that. The hilt was plain and leather-wrapped, but the curve of the guards and the etching along the flat would tell me much. “Bring the lamp closer.”
Footsteps, then. I played the light along the blade as D’ri and Atyarik reappeared. My shoulders drew tight with cold, henflesh spreading from my nape down either side of my spine. Three angular glyphs, two of them married at a stem—that would be her use-name, given by her sponsor. The last glyph was three curved lines meaning smoke in the Pensar symbol-language, carved deeply into the foundation block of every temple those cruel, pale conquerors laid. It was always seen with another oddly scratched and twisted mark, one no Antai native, from merchant to hinterland peasant, from Port Guard to lowly Guild pickpocket, rouged Featherseller or common street daub, would pronounce, even as a loan-word.
Death. It is a slippery, sinuous word in Pensar, and held to be great unluck to voice. They use instead a term borrowed from the ruins of Corthuar, something like breath-halt-choke. Still, the Pensari death-word looms behind that smoke-glyph like thunder behind lightning.
My braids felt lopsided, from sleep and combat. I shook my head as the front door creak-groaned its opening song. Redfist was a shadow, his odiferous friend looming behind him. “Nothing, K’ha.” Weariness tinged the shortening of my name, and I suspected he was fighting back a yawn. “What have we here, then?”
“A junior member of Shandua-hua. The Smoke Clan.” I settled on my haunches, repressing the urge to hunch my shoulders protectively. “Thank the Moon it wasn’t a full-grown viper.”
“Assassin.” Muscle flickered on D’ri’s chest and shoulders as he crouched too, examining the body and the assorted implements ranged neatly on the floor. His heat touched my own bare arm, and the blond giant Ninefinger piped up.
“Lass, here.” He began plucking at his shirt, and I glanced at him curiously. His name was strange—he had all ten of his digits—but the explanation for it was an ancestor who had wrestled some sort of reeking beast in the far north and lived to tell of it, losing only a finger. “Catch your death, ye will.”
A bit late for that. “I am well enough.” My torn shirt lay on the floor too, crumpled and bloody. The shallow slice along my forearm was already clotted fast, and G’mai do not worry overmuch on the wound-rot. The antiseptic property in our blood is a gift from the Moon, and I was confident now that the little assassin’s blades had not been painted. Besides, the Moon grants our people some various immunities to the venoms of the world. “Simply very, very curious why one of their sprats would be sent after me. It is almost insulting.”
Atyarik bent, touched the corpse’s chin with one long finger, tilted her face into the light. “A waste.”
Very young, a scar on her upper lip and her dark hair cropped short as a Pesh bondslave’s. I did not like to think upon what might have driven her into the viper-nest—poverty, vengeance, sheer ill-luck. “At least the Shan do not poison their promise-blades,” I murmured.
Darik’s hand closed on my wrist. I let him examine the slice, and his jaw hardened. “I do not like this.”
“No s’tarei would.” I reclaimed my arm and forced my knees to unbend, combat-weariness settling in my bones. Now I wanted to go back to bed. “Tis a very good thing I could not sleep.”
“Kaia?” Janaire’s brow was creased. “I have a thought.”
“Oh?”
“Are you so certain...forgive me, but are you absolutely certain this blade was meant for you?”
I considered it, and the blond barbarian let out a muffled curse, his head lost in his shirt. He seemed determined to strip. Well, D’ri and I were both simply in trews, perhaps it was a custom of theirs to bare their chests when their hosts were threatened. D’ri rose too, slowly, and the scar at his throat was glaringly visible even in this dim light. An assassin had reached the heart of the Dragaemir palace and attempted to remove his head with a garrotte, he said, and that was a troubling table indeed. It would have to be a long arm to stretch this far, but with enough coin, many things are possible.
Yet a scar-lipped snakelet not even old enough to lay eggs...now that I had my wits working, I had a dismal feeling I knew who had sent her.
“We shall see.” I realized I had spoken in G’mai, repeated it in tradetongue.
“Here.” Ninefinger offered me his shirt. It was big enough to reach my knees, and perhaps he wished to be kind, or generous, but the cloth was rough and I had no desire to smell like him.
I shook my head. “No need. We must set the body outside the gate before dawn.”
“Ou
tside? But—” Janaire protested, and Atyarik said, “We shall not bury or—” at the same moment.
I silenced them both with a look. “Tis the custom, in this place. And,” I added thoughtfully, “it will signal that if they wish to come for me, or anyone else in this house, they had best send someone worth the coin.”
As A Reed
Pearl-cloud mornglow fell through small, thick glass panes; the window was probably older than Atyarik. D’ri, the glow picking out blue-black highlights in his hair and touching his tight-knotted shoulders under silk and leather, polished the hilts of his dotanii and showed a small portion of his cheek. I yawned, blinking, and calculated the angle of the light. “Tis past dawn.”
“You needed rest.” He did not turn. Arms folded across his chest, his back very straight, his boots resting precisely as if he expected an attack at any moment.
Perhaps he did. His inflection was still intimate, but his tone was only slightly less than forbidding. It was a strange and uneasy pairing.
I asked you to wake me, if I did not wake myself. Irritation served no purpose, so I aimed for diplomacy. For once. “As did you.”
“Mh.” A light noise, neither affirmation nor denial. “The body vanished.”
“Ah.” I stretched, luxuriously. The bedstead was old, but a fresh mattress and clean linen will make any pile of ancient timber a comfortable nest. “Now that is interesting.”
“How so?”
“If she had failed on proper business, they would leave it at the gate as a warning to expect more.” I rolled up to sitting, tested my arm. Only the usual aches in my joints and muscles, and the scratch looked a few days instead of hours old. Janaire’s healing was a wonder. “As it is, perhaps she thought to take matters into her own hands, or made a mistake. We should see no more of the Shan. Especially after today.”
“Ah, yes. Your errand.” He still did not turn. “Tell me again why it is so necessary.”
“I would prefer to know, instead of guess.” I drew my knees up, clasped my arms about them. Both legs and arms were livid-bruised from stone. “D’ri?”
“Hm?” Another short sound.
“Do you think it likely tis related to your scar?”
He did not stiffen, but I felt the shortness of his breath in my own chest. “We are at some distance from G’maihallan.”
“That is no answer, s’tarei’mi.” I rubbed gently at the slice on my forearm with my fingertips. “Serves me right, afoot without a weapon.”
“I wondered at that.”
“I could not sleep. I thought perhaps to brew some kafi and think.”
He nodded. “I...am sorry I did not wake as well.”
“You were exhausted, D’ri.” I used the gentlest inflection possible. “And you were quick enough when the battle began.”
“It troubles me.”
“Do not.” I hesitated, slid my bare legs off the bed, and winced slightly at the cool wooden floor. Perhaps a cartload of sweetrush would help downstairs, and buskins. I found my second-best shirt, pulled it over my head to at least keep some warmth in, and padded to the window.
He stared down at the side-garden and the wall beyond, jaw set and eyes half-lidded. A fine profile, the Dragaemir harshness with enough youth to soften the cheekbones—but not too much. I closed my hand about his shoulder, tentatively. “D’ri.” As softly as possible. “Do not trouble yourself. You dispatched the threat handily enough.” I was about to add I had been too mazed with lack of sleep to take proper precautions, but he glanced at me, and a scalding flush ran from my cold feet to the top of my half-undone braids.
“Perhaps I am not quite a failure as a s’tarei, then.”
“Ah.” It was, I decided, faintly amusing we both thought in the same channels. “What a pair we make, each feeling unworthy of the other. Do you suppose others feel thus?”
His chin settled, somewhat stubbornly. “I would not know.”
“I think it likely.” I held his gaze. “I should have stayed in Anjalismir, perhaps. Waited. For you.” My throat was very dry, and morning in my mouth was not as foul as leftover hanta, but foul enough.
“I should have disobeyed the Queen and left.” He shook his head slightly. “I am of a mind to no longer be dutiful.”
Did he truly think one of the People would set assassins on him? To kill a s’tarei is to kill an adai, and to kill an adai is the only crime there is no forgiveness for within G’maihallan’s borders. And yet, the scar glared at his throat. “Of all the terms I could use to describe you, dutiful is...well, perhaps it does suit.” I used the term for a slightly balky animal that had good reason to protest, with the slight lift at the end that made it affectionate.
His lips curved slightly. I watched them, and the certainty that I could rise on my toes, lean forward, and he would more than meet me halfway froze me in place.
I am accustomed to tolerating such attentions, and nothing more. To feel the other side of that coin was...disturbing. There was none of the softness of Kesamine’s bed, or the moonturn or so I had accompanied a male Rjiin courtesan on a caravan to Shaitush. He had been slim-muscled, flexible, and of a pliant nature, that one, but possessed of good business sense and a wry wit. I had gone through the motions of physical joining out of curiosity. Nothing in me stirred even to such an artist’s attentions, and he ruefully admitted he had tried his best. Perhaps elvish women are different, he had said, and even though I hated that word, I had laughed. I had not told him of the twinning—why bother? And a lack of the bodily urges that seemed to make such a fine mess of the people in every city was welcome, for it meant I was thinking with a clarity they did not possess.
Now, being subject to the yearning and the heat was uncomfortable, distracting, and downright dangerous. It could so easily be used against me.
The moment passed, I leaned away ever so slightly from Darik’s equally small shifting of his weight. Strangely, his smile widened. “Shall I become as a reed, for thee?”
It had been a long, long time since I had heard any of the courtship songs, and I found myself smiling as well. “And bend in the wind as the mountains cry.” An open, unguarded moment, and for that small space, I saw him as he could have been, a young s’tarei in the first honey-flush of bonding. Hawk-proud, kitten-playful, and hopeful as the flowers that break through snow at the end of winter’s long grasp on the slopes of stone-teeth rising above Anjalismir’s main Keep.
The moment passed, and I squeezed his shoulder, gently. “Breakfast. And we should be gone before too long, morning is the best time.”
He nodded. His breath, his shoulders, and his expression had all eased. He caught my wrist as I turned away, his thumb feathering over the sensitive underside, where even muscle from daily drill could not hide a softness. I halted, and he lifted my hand. Pressed a kiss into my callused palm, seeming not to care about the roughness. “Thank you, adai’mi.”
“I did nothing.” But I did not tug to free myself. “I will need you today, D’ri. Bring breakfast, I do not care to visit the thieves with an empty belly.”
“I thought you fought better a little hungry.”
“This is no duel, s’tarei’mi.” I closed my fingers, still feeling the print of his lips inside the hollow of my hand.
“And thank the Moon for that,” was his parting shot. “I could not survive another.”
I waved him away, and set myself to dress and untangle my recalcitrant braids.
All the time, my hand burned, and when he had left to go downstairs I pressed my own mouth against my palm, closing my eyes and pretending, for just a moment, that I could be what he needed.
Head of Many Bodies
The Customs House is a Pensari palace, shouldering the wharfside warehouses aside and gleaming dully. It lays claim to being the Khan Altai’s last home, but that dubious honor is more likely given to the pile of slowly-rotting Pensari spongestone set on the crown of Low Hatha’huan’ara Hill. They called that malevolent stone nest “the Diadem” when th
ey spoke of it at all, and it is said to be cursed; even though the space around it was valuable enough, it was not crowded with shanties or villas. It lays bare and weed-blown; pale vaporous lights can occasionally be seen in the arrowslits after dark. None admit to knowing who kindle any sort of flame in that spine-broken heap. Some whisper that the Pensar gods of night and ice were still worshipped there secret, by those who wished for vengeance or gain.
Between the Customs House and the Diadem, nestled in the Chuabrhua’lath, there is a large counting-house with red-painted walls and a throbbing tavern in one corner, and that is where one goes if one has business with the Guild. The Chua teems with stink, filth, and scrabble. Its full name means, as far as is translatable, the Naked Anus.
The smell alone will tell you why.
The street-crowds around the Naharl’lath—the Crimson Hole, as the Guild’s home is called—are as orderly as a mass of perpetually tired, dusty, profit-seeking people can be. The streetstalls and shops pay handsomely for the privilege of operating around the Naharl, but profit as well. The reward has to be substantial, because proof of trafficking in stolen property was worth a spell in the gaols. Should a streetstall or shop owner be unlucky enough to be dragged gaol-ward, they would find protection from the other prisoners supplied by the Guild, and their businesses taken in hand until their release. The Guard did not like to draw too close to the Hole, and who could blame them?
I pierced the crowds, Darik in my wake, my left hand almost cramping from the strain of holding my fingers in the accepted manner. An outsider found copying the Guild signs is usually stripped and dangled from a roof on the first offense, and that is enough to dissuade most, even rich or noble brats who wish to appear dangerous to their fellows.
Steelflower at Sea Page 9