I nod.
“Barbaric,” he says softly—but if he’s trying to win me over, he’d have done better not to dose his own witch with opium in front of me. I say nothing.
“I can see why Och Farya would value you,” he says at last. “Don’t we all wish that we could pass through the world invisible at times! It is a remarkable gift. I’ve heard of spells that hide a thing from view, but they work on the senses of the viewer, not the object itself, and as far as I know, they do not allow for movement. Besides, as with any magic affecting the senses, they are notoriously unreliable. You can travel freely, unseen, and yet it is not magic, or at least you do not use writing or language to do it. How do you do it? How does it feel?”
“I don’t know how,” I say. “It’s just something I can do.”
He turns and speaks to the empress dowager. She is watching me in a way that makes me anxious. Like I’m a snack. She replies to him in her gravelly voice.
“I understand your reticence,” says Si Tan. “I am interested in you, Julia. I think we could be friends and help one another.”
“Not sure I like how you treat your friends,” I say, nodding at Cinzai in the corner.
His lips curl back in something that could be a grin or a snarl.
“She is not my friend,” he says. “She is a weapon. Tell me, where can I find Och Farya? She and I need to have a conversation.”
“No idea,” I say. “She contacts me when she needs me, but I don’t know where she hides out.”
“If I keep you here, will she come for you, do you think?”
“Doubt it,” I say. I have a feeling Mrs. Och would as soon let me rot.
“Well, we shall see,” he says, and then there is a knock at the door. The empress dowager answers sharply. I think she is telling the knocker to go away, but the door opens and a young man in a splendid yellow robe comes in. He is maybe twenty-five or thirty, dark and very handsome, with the kind of simmering gaze that would turn my knees to jelly under somewhat different circumstances. He sees me on the bed, and his face registers astonishment. His eyes travel to the drugged witch in the corner, and his expression turns to one of distaste. He asks a question in Yongwen, and Si Tan answers, bowing deeply and calling him Your Highness. I realize with a jolt of surprise that this is the young emperor.
The emperor speaks to the dowager, ignoring Si Tan, his eyes straying to me a couple more times. She answers him curtly, flicking her long golden nails at him. He starts to reply, raising his voice, but the empress dowager cuts him off, ordering him out. The emperor gives me another long look, and I can’t help thinking I’d enjoy this whole thing a good deal more if he were the one taking me prisoner.
“Are you…treated well?” he asks in halting Fraynish.
I look at the ribbons binding me. “I’m not sure. I’d like to go home.”
The empress dowager lets out a stream of invective. The emperor scowls while Si Tan just stares off into the middle distance. Then the emperor bows to his mother, saying something between clenched teeth, and he goes out, slamming the door—sadly, without any more smoldering looks in my direction. I think to myself that if I make it out of here alive, I’ll have quite a story to tell—watching the supreme head of the great Yongguo Empire being ordered out of a room like a dog by his mother.
In the silence that follows, Si Tan takes out the now familiar sketch of me, Mrs. Och, and Bianka. It seems everybody has got their hands on a copy.
“Somebody else is looking for you in Tianshi,” he says. “Who is it?”
I shrug.
“Casimir’s people?” he asks.
“Not sure people is the word I’d use,” I reply.
“I was curious about you in particular when I saw these,” he says. “I knew the moment I first laid eyes on you that you were not the educated, aristocratic girl you were pretending to be. I saw in you something far too shrewd for a girl who’d led a sheltered life.”
“So you told your witch to chew on my face?” I ask.
“When you vanish, where do you go?”
The question is sudden, less considered than most of what he says, and there is something alert and hungry in his expression. It strikes me that nobody has ever asked me that before. It has never occurred to anybody else that I go somewhere.
“Nowhere,” I say. “Just…nowhere.”
He stares at me for a while and then says, “What is she like?”
“Who?” I ask stupidly.
“Och Farya. I have wanted to meet her for a long time. The eldest of the Xianren!”
“She’s…I don’t know. The more you get to know her, the scarier she is, I suppose.”
He laughs politely, like I’m trying to be funny, which I’m not, and then a loud bell starts jangling somewhere outside the building.
The empress dowager grunts and draws a little pistol out from under a cushion. Si Tan hauls the drugged witch up by the arm and murmurs in her ear. She goes stumbling out, her jaw slack.
“Do you suppose it is Och Farya come to rescue her precious vanishing girl?” he asks me.
That doesn’t seem terribly likely to me, but I am holding out some hope for it. I hear shots and shouts at a distance, then footsteps running nearby, more shouting, an awful scream, and still the bell clanging on and on. My heart is pounding, but I lie there bound in Cinzai’s ribbons, unable to move.
The door swings open and the witch comes reeling back in, screaming. She’s clutching her head, flailing and lurching around the room. There is something dark hanging from her left ear for a moment, and then it is gone—inside her ear. Si Tan sees it too and lets out a cry of rage. He snatches the scimitar from the wall and swings it. Her body goes limp and drops. Her head rolls toward me. A scream reaches my throat and gets stuck there. The black thing that vanished into her ear drops out of it and scuttles across the floor. It looks like a bug, a big centipede or something. Si Tan slices it neatly with the scimitar and it sparks and smokes and goes still. It is some piece of tiny machinery. Something small and red crawls out of the broken metal shell on threadlike legs. Si Tan’s lips curl. He stomps on the thing, leaving a wet scarlet mark on the floor, and curses bitterly in Yongwen. We all look at the door then, and I see with a sinking heart who has come for me. It isn’t Mrs. Och, of course. It’s Pia.
She stands in the doorway, cool as anything, with a carbine the length of her forearm pointed at the dowager in one hand and a short sword in the other. The dowager is pointing her little pistol at Pia, her chest rising and falling fast.
“Get up,” says Pia to me.
“I can’t,” I say. “They’ve got me all tied up.”
She jumps, kicking herself off the wall so that she ends up behind Si Tan, the muzzle of her carbine pressed against his jaw while the empress dowager’s shot explodes against the wall. She shoves him closer to me with the gun, and then she cuts the ribbons around me with her short sword and tosses them aside. Si Tan watches me, expressionless, from the corner of his eye. My limbs feel heavy and slow, but I can move again. I get up off the bed unsteadily, trying not to look at Cinzai’s head, her body bleeding blackly all over the floor, her tattooed fingers still twitching like they are trying to write something.
“Go get her gun,” Pia orders me. To the dowager, she adds in Yongwen something to the effect that if she gives it over nicely, Si Tan might come back to her in one piece. Once I’ve got the gun, Pia tucks it into her belt and unloops a sort of harness on her back.
“Climb in here,” she tells me. It is an awkward thing to attempt with my limbs still feeling so rubbery, but I manage it. The empress dowager watches us, her eyes little points of rage, her chins quivering.
“Casimir is bold,” says Si Tan, very coldly, but Pia makes no reply. She yanks a strap on either side of her and the harness tightens around me, fastening me to her back so that I am like an overgrown child piggybacking on her psychotic mama. She shoves Si Tan’s face with the carbine and instructs him to go down the hall ahead of us.
The bell is still clanging, and I hear what sounds like a great many footsteps approaching at a run, but Pia seems unconcerned. At the end of the hall, she takes a small cylinder from her belt and releases a blast at the ceiling, leaving a smoking hole above us. Then she swings her elbow, striking Si Tan in the face. He goes down like a log. Pia clambers up the wall with me on her back. I’m terrified I will throw off her balance, but as far as I can tell, my weight does not even slow her down. Broken wood and tile scrape against my back as she hauls us both through the hole in the roof. I bury my face in her shoulder to protect my head.
When I look up, she is running along the rooftop gable, and then she leaps a terrifying distance to the slanted edge of another roof. I am certain we will fall, but her footing never fails her, and she goes running up the side of that roof and over it. The Ru are milling in the streets below us, pointing crossbows. Something whizzes by us, but Pia is moving too fast to make an easy target. She flies from rooftop to rooftop and then suddenly down into the Imperial Gardens proper. Through gardens and galleries and residences—it is dizzying, and I have to close my eyes again. The clanging bell is receding in the distance now.
I open my eyes a crack when I feel that we are going straight up. She is climbing the outer wall. She reaches the top as the Ru are converging on us, but she is over the side before they reach us, dropping to the city below. I feel the impact when she lands jolt through me, but it doesn’t slow her for even a second. I am bouncing on her back along the streets of Tianshi, people pointing and shouting as she sprints through the city, tireless. I think I’m going to be sick.
We reach the Hundred Lantern Hotel from the side. Up and through a window of a room, where a woman screams and ducks into the closet and a half-naked man leaps from the bed, scrambling for his pistol on the night table. Pia kicks the door wide and is down the hall, over the railing of the stairs to the floor below, and through another door. She closes the door and lets the harness loosen. I fall in an ungainly sprawl to the floor, scrambling out of the ridiculous contraption. I am gasping for breath even though she was the one running, my heart hammering. She is pointing the carbine at me now.
“I need to speak with you,” she says. “Don’t disappear.”
I disappear.
The sun is getting low by the time I reach the house in Nanmu. I can hear Frederick’s voice in the main room, loud and desperate: “You haven’t the right! We must be allowed to discuss—”
“There will be no discussion of what I deem necessary,” Mrs. Och is saying, pure ice, when I come in. She turns toward me, her expression unchanging. “Julia, where have you been?”
Bianka is crumpled on the floor like a rag doll. Her face has a sickly yellow tinge to it. Frederick looks a little better than when we left him this morning, but not much.
“The Imperial Gardens,” I say. “Si Tan got hold of me.”
“Are you hurt?” asks Frederick.
I shake my head, still trying to put together the picture before me and make sense of it. Mrs. Och is practically bursting with vitality and power. The table is covered with Frederick’s notes, and the stele rubbing is spread out across it.
“Did you reveal our whereabouts?” Mrs. Och asks sharply. “Were you followed?”
I shake my head again, and her face relaxes.
“Tell me everything he said.”
“He just wanted to know what we were up to. And he wants to meet you. He said we should have gone to him from the beginning.”
She gives a short laugh at that. “I walked right into his trap,” she says bitterly. “The impostor was most convincing. He knew things that he could only have heard from Ko Dan himself, wherever he is. There were details about the magic he worked with Gennady, and I was so eager to see…well, it doesn’t matter now. I am glad you are safe, Julia. These two wanted to run off into the city to rescue you, but given your propensity to set off on your own little jaunts without informing anybody, I felt we ought to wait.”
“I wanted to tell her brother,” growls Bianka, trying to get up. “I knew she wouldn’t stay away if she was all right…not without checking that we’d made it back safely.”
“Well, she is here now,” says Mrs. Och. “If you have all calmed down, we have a great deal to do. I must send a message to the professor immediately. Julia, you will take the message, and there is something else I need you to do.”
“You’re going to send her on an errand?” cries Bianka, managing to get up this time but looking rather like she wished she hadn’t. “Look at her!”
“What do I look like?” I ask. And then my legs fold under me and I sit abruptly on the floor. “I could use something to eat,” I say. I haven’t eaten since breakfast.
“Get her some food,” says Mrs. Och, and she sweeps off into her room to write her message.
“Where’s Theo?” I ask.
“Sleeping,” says Bianka. “Quite worn out from today’s adventures.”
“There’s some stew,” says Frederick. “I’ll fix you a plate.”
“I’ll get some water,” says Bianka, teetering a bit.
“You’re worse off than me,” I say. And then we get the giggles, all of us so utterly used up and pathetic we can hardly get a plate of food and a cup of water between us. It isn’t really funny, of course—to be so helpless when we’re being hunted. But I’m giddy with relief to have made it back safely, and touched beyond what I can say that Frederick and Bianka were so concerned about me, set to go and find me.
“What happened?” asks Bianka.
“As soon as you all went down the tunnel, I got shot with some kind of sleeping serum. I’m still woozy. I woke up and got interrogated by Si Tan and the empress dowager.”
“The empress!” cries Bianka, impressed.
“You were amazing at the monastery,” I tell her. “That spell!”
“Very quick thinking, to blind them,” agrees Frederick admiringly.
“I dropped the bleeding pencil, though,” she says. “I suppose they’ve broken it by now and undone the spell.”
“Never mind. It held long enough for you to get out,” I say.
Frederick goes tottering out to fetch some water, and when he brings me the cup, I empty it. I hadn’t even realized how thirsty I was. He puts a plate of beef stew in front of me. The smell makes me queasy at first, but as soon as I have a bite, my hunger takes over. He offers some to Bianka, putting a tentative hand on her shoulder. She shakes her head, smiling up at him wearily.
“It was a clever trap, all right,” I say. “Si Tan is keen to meet Mrs. Och.”
“He can have her,” mutters Bianka, but in a low voice.
“How did you get away?” asks Frederick. “They let you go?”
“No. I think they hoped Mrs. Och would come for me. But…”
Suddenly, I don’t know why, but I don’t want to tell them about Pia. I don’t know what to make of her rescuing me—if that’s what it was—and I am not ready to share it yet.
“Well, I got out, anyway,” I finish lamely, and they don’t question it. After all, haven’t I always been able to get out of everything, out of everywhere, so far?
“I can’t tell you how relieved I am,” says Frederick with a warmth that startles me. “We’ve been worried sick.”
“How did you know the man pretending to be Ko Dan was a fake?” asks Bianka. “It was just looking funny to me, with the guards there, but I was going to hand him over, Theo”—she shudders—“and then you turned up.”
“Count Fournier,” I reply. “I showed him the picture Ling drew, and he told me it wasn’t Ko Dan.”
“Thank the Nameless,” says Bianka. “Your friend Jun was fantastic, got us all the way back to Nanmu underground before Mrs. Och sent him off. But then you didn’t come back.”
“We wanted to look for you,” Frederick says, and then trails off.
“Thank you,” I say. “Really.” I point to his notes spread across the table and ask hopefully, “You’ve
been working?”
“Professor Baranyi was kind enough to find me the dictionary I needed. The stele rubbing you brought back is about a place called Ragg Rock.”
“Si Tan mentioned that,” I say, frowning, and then I remember where I’d heard of it before. When I was a spy in Mrs. Och’s house, I read about Ragg Rock in Professor Baranyi’s study. One of his books claimed that the Xianren had joined forces to look for it but did not succeed.
“According to the stele rubbing, it is…I’m not sure how to translate it, exactly, but something like the way station at the edge of the world, just beyond what we might call our reality. It is a place that lies between the world and Kahge, and creatures from either place might be granted entry. They can go as far as Ragg Rock but no farther.”
“Granted entry by who?” I ask.
“By…Ragg Rock,” says Frederick. “That part is a bit confusing. I’ve been reading about Lidari too. I have seen him called a general of the Gethin army, but also Marike’s son and, elsewhere, her lover. The references to him span centuries. He was an important figure, in any case, and closely connected to Marike. It’s written that when the Eshriki Empire fell, Casimir hunted him down and killed him. You told me that the creatures you saw in Kahge were calling his name. If the essence of the Gethin do return to Kahge after their physical death in the world, he might have been among them. Did you see—were they directing it to one of their group?”
I glance at Mrs. Och’s closed door. Feeling rather sick, I say: “They were pointing at me and saying it.”
I can see that shocks him, which makes me feel even worse.
“I wonder if it could mean something more general, beyond the specific name. May I tell Mrs. Och and the professor this, Julia? They will have a better idea than I do of how to interpret it.”
I grimace.
“I promise that I will keep you informed,” he says gently. “But I don’t think I can find out much more without their help.”
“Fine. If you tell me everything they say.”
He laughs a bit unhappily. It’s an awkward position for him, I know.
Julia Defiant Page 17