‘With you along, I cannot afford to be careless. The added responsibility will steady me, when, for the first time in my life, I feel the urge to be reckless.’ Frowning, self-absorbed, Arakasi regarded his bound hands. His knuckles flexed, testing the knots. ‘Mara is special to me. I feel for her as I never did for my former master, even when his house was obliterated by his enemies.’
Surprised, Hokanu said, ‘I did not realise you had served another house.’
As if wakened to the fact that he had shared a confidence, Arakasi shrugged. ‘I originally established my network for the Lord of the Tuscai.’
‘Ah,’ Hokanu nodded. That stray fact explained much. ‘Then you took service with the Acoma at the same time as Lujan and the other former grey warriors?’
The Spy Master nodded, his intense eyes following every nuance of Mara’s consort’s bearing. He seemed to arrive at some inner decision. ‘You share her dreams,’ he stated.
Again Hokanu was startled. The man’s perception was almost too keen to be comfortable. ‘I want an Empire free of injustice, sanctioned murder, and slavery, if that is what you refer to.’
The horses plodded on, making confusion of an approaching caravan as drovers and the reinsman of a cook wagon all started shouting and pointing. Arakasi’s quiet reply cut without effort through the din. ‘Her life is more important than both of ours. If you go on with me, master, you must understand: I will risk your life as ruthlessly for her as I would my own.’
Aware somehow that the Spy Master spoke from the heart, and that he was uncomfortable sharing confidences, Hokanu did not attempt a direct reply. ‘It’s time for us to move out again.’ He thumped his heels into his gelding’s ribs, and dragged both mounts to a canter.
The back alleys of Kentosani reeked of refuse and runoff from the chamber pots of the poor. Spy Master and Shinzawai Lord had left the horses in the care of a trembling hostel owner, who bowed and scraped and stuttered that he was unworthy of caring for such rare beasts. His face showed stark fear as the pair left; and the stir the horses’ presence caused among the hostel’s staff masked Arakasi and Hokanu’s departure. Every servant was still outside, along with every patron, staring and pointing at the Midkemian horses as stablehands used to dull-tempered needra fumbled with the much more active animals.
In a change of roles like irony, now the Spy Master affected the upper hand, and Hokanu, wearing only his loincloth, played the part of a penitent on a pilgrimage as the priest’s servant, to appease the minor deity he had reputedly offended. They blended into the afternoon crowd.
On foot instead of carried in a litter, and for the first time in his life not surrounded by an honor guard, Hokanu came to realise how much the Holy City had changed since the Emperor had assumed absolute rule in place of the High Council. Great Lords and Ladies no longer traveled heavily defended by warriors, for Imperial Whites patrolled the streets to keep order. Where the main thoroughfares had generally been safe, if crowded with traffic – farm carts, temple processions, and hurrying messengers – the darker, narrow back lanes where the laborers and beggars lived, or the fish-ripe alleys behind the warehouses at the wharf, had not been a place for a man or woman to venture without armed escort.
And yet Arakasi had a knowledge of these dim byways acquired years before Ichindar’s abolishment of the Warlord’s office. He led a twisted path through moss-damp archways, between tenenents too close-packed to admit sunlight, and, once, through the malodorous, refuse-choked channel of a storm culvert.
‘Why such a circuitous route?’ Hokanu inquired in a pause when a shrieking mob of street children raced by, in pursuit of a bone-skinny dog.
‘Habit,’ Arakasi allowed. His smoking censer swung at his knee, its incense only a partial palliative against the assault of stinks from the gutter. They passed a window where a wrinkled crone sat peeling jomach with a bone-bladed knife. ‘That hostel where we left the beasts is an honest enough house, but gossipmongers congregate there to swap news. I didn’t wish to be followed; when we left there was an Ekamchi servant on our tail. He saw the horses at the main gate, and knew we were of the Acoma or Shinzawai households.’
Hokanu asked, ‘Have we lost him?’
Arakasi smiled faintly, his slim hand raised in a sign of benediction over the crown of a beggar’s head. The man was wild-eyed and mumbling, obviously touched to madness by the gods. With a twirl of the cord that spun the censer and clouded the air with incense, the Spy Master replied, ‘We lost him indeed. Apparently he did not wish to soil his sandals in the garbage pit we crossed two blocks back. He went around, lost sight of us for a second …’
‘And we ducked through that culvert,’ Hokanu concluded, chuckling.
They passed the shuttered front of a weaver’s shop, and paused at a baker’s, while Arakasi bought a roll and spread sa jam in zigzags across the buttered top. The bread seller attended another customer and waved to his apprentice, who showed the apparent priest and penitent into a curtained back room. A few minutes later, the bread seller himself appeared. He looked the pair of visitors over keenly and finally addressed Arakasi. ‘I didn’t recognise you in that garb.’
The Spy Master licked jam off his fingers and said, ‘I want news. It’s pressing. A spice seller ostentatiously dressed, and wearing metal jewelry. He had barbarian bearers. Can you find him?’
The bread seller scrubbed sweat off his fat jowls. ‘If you can wait until sundown, when we toss the dough scraps out for the beggar children, I could have an answer for you.’
Arakasi looked irked. ‘Too late. I want the use of your messenger runner.’ Like sleight of hand, a twist of parchment appeared in his fingers. Perhaps the Spy Master had hidden it all along in his sleeve, Hokanu thought, but he could not be sure.
‘Get this delivered to the sandalmaker’s on the corner of Barrel Hoop Street and Tanner’s Alley. The proprietor is Chimichi. Tell him your cake is burning.’
The bread seller looked dubious.
‘Do this!’ Arakasi said in an edged whisper that raised hairs on Hokanu’s neck.
The bread seller raised floury hands, palms out in submission, then bellowed for his apprentice. The boy left with the parchment, and Arakasi paced like a caged sarcat the entire interval he was gone.
The leather worker Chimichi proved to be a whip-thin man with desert blood, for he wore sweat-greasy tassels with talismans under his robe. His lank hair fell into his eyes, which were shifty. His hands had scars that might have been made by a slip of the knife at his craft, but more likely, Hokanu thought, from their number and location, by the skilled hand of a torturer. He ducked through the curtain, still blinking from sunlight, a roll decked with jam in the precise pattern of Arakasi’s gripped in one fist.
‘Fool,’ he hissed at the priest. ‘You risk my cover, sending an emergency signal like that, and then summoning me here. The master will see you burn for such carelessness.’
‘The master will certainly not,’ Arakasi said drily.
The leather craftsman jumped. ‘It’s you yourself! Gods, I didn’t recognise you in those temple rags.’ Chimichi’s brows knotted into a scowl worthy of his Tsubarian heritage. ‘What’s amiss?’
‘A certain spice seller, decked with a gold chain and carried by Midkemian bearers.’
Chimichi’s expression lightened. ‘Dead,’ he stated flatly. ‘His bearers with him. In a warehouse on Hwaet Broker’s Lane, if the footpad who tried to exchange chain links for centis at the money changers can be relied on to tell the truth. But that such a man had gold at all belies the chance he fabricated his tale.’
‘Does the imperial patrol know about the corpses yet?’ Arakasi broke in.
‘Probably not.’ Chimichi laid his roll aside, and rubbed a jammy knuckle on his apron. The deepset, shifty eyes turned to the Spy Master. ‘Ever see a money changer report what he didn’t have to? The taxes on metals are not small, these days, with our Light of Heaven needing to increase his army against the threat of the hard-line trad
itionalists.’
Arakasi cut short the man’s rambling with a raised hand. ‘Seconds count, Chimichi. My companion and I are going on to that warehouse to inspect the bodies. Your task is to stage a diversion that will occupy the Emperor’s patrol long enough to see us in and out of the building. I don’t want an Imperial White left free to investigate those murders beforetime.’
Chimichi flipped back dark hair to reveal a grin, and startlingly perfect white teeth. The front ones had been filed into points, deep desert fashion. ‘Keburchi, God of Chaos,’ he swore in evident delight. ‘It’s been long time since we had a good riot. Life was starting to get boring.’
Yet by the time he had finished his sentence, he was speaking to an empty room. He blinked, startled, and muttered, ‘The man’s mother was a damned shadow.’ Then his face knitted in concentration. He hurried off about the business of turning an ordinary, peaceful day of business in the trade quarter into unmitigated chaos.
Dusk fell, deepening the gloom in the already dim warehouse. Hokanu crouched beside Arakasi, a burning spill in his hand. Outside, shouts and the sounds of breakage echoed from the adjacent streets; someone howled obscenities over the din of shattering crockery.
‘The wine merchants’ stores,’ Hokanu murmured. ‘In a very few minutes we’re going to have company.’ He paused to shift the rolled cloth spill, which had burned nearly down to his fingers. ‘The doors on this building were not very stout.’
Arakasi nodded, his face invisible beneath his priest’s cowl. His fingers moved, furtively fast, over the body of the bearer, which was well past rigor mortis and already starting to bloat. ‘Strangled,’ he murmured. ‘All of them.’
He slipped forward through the dark, while lines of bright light from wildfire or torches shone through the gaps in the wall boards. His concentration never wavered.
Hokanu flinched as the flame in his hands crept lower. He shifted grip, and lit the last wad of linen he could spare from his already scanty loincloth. By the time he looked up, Arakasi was searching the spice seller’s corpse.
The man’s chain and fine silk robes were all gone, looted by the footpad Chimichi had mentioned. The illumination cast by the spill picked out enough details to establish that the man had not died by strangulation. His hands were contorted, and blind, dry eyes showed rings of white. The mouth hung open, and the tongue inside had been bitten through. Blood blackened the boards and his still combed and perfumed beard.
‘You’ve found something,’ Hokanu said, aware of Arakasi’s stillness.
The Spy Master looked up, his eyes a faint glint under his hood. ‘Much.’ He turned over the man’s hand, revealing a tattoo. ‘Our culprit is of the Hamoi Tong. He bears the mark. His posing as a man in residence across the rift speaks of long-range planning.’
‘Not Jiro’s style,’ Hokanu summed up.
‘Decidedly not.’ Arakasi squatted back on his heels, unmindful of the bang of a plank striking the cobbles close outside the warehouse. ‘But we’re meant to think so.’
Out in the night, a sailor cursed, and somebody else roared back in outrage. The din of an irate populace surged closer, overlaid by the horn call of one of the Emperor’s Strike Leaders.
Hokanu also had discarded the parchment with the Anasati seal as a plant. No son of Tecuma’s, and no Lord advised by a devil as clever as Chumaka, would ever condescend to the obvious. ‘Who?’ Hokanu said, the sharpness of his desperation cutting through. Every minute that passed increased the chance that he would never again see Mara alive. Memory of her as he had left her, pale, unconscious, and bleeding, all but paralysed his reason. ‘Can the tong even be bought to do more than assassinate? I thought they took on their contracts in anonymity.’
Arakasi was once again busy sorting through the spice seller’s underclothes. The fact they were fouled in death did not deter him, nor did the stench upset his thoughts. ‘The telling word, I suspect, is “contract.” And does any hard-line traditionalist in this Empire have riches enough to toss golden chains to beggars just to make sure we have a trail to follow?’ His hands paused, pounced, and came up with a small object. ‘Ah!’ Triumph colored the Spy Master’s tone.
Hokanu caught a glimpse of green glass. He forgot the stink of dead men, hitched closer, and thrust the spill toward the object that Arakasi held.
It proved to be a small vial. Dark, sticky liquid coated the inside; the cork, had there been one, was missing.
‘A poison vial?’ Hokanu asked.
Arakasi shook his head. ‘That’s poison on the inside.’ He offered the item for Hokanu to sniff. The odor was resinous, and stingingly bitter. ‘But the glass is green. Apothecaries generally reserve that color container for antidotes.’ He glanced at the spice seller’s face frozen in its hideous rictus. ‘You poor bastard. You thought you were being given your life at your master’s hand.’
The Spy Master left off his musing and stared at Hokanu. ‘That’s why Mara’s taster never suspected. This man ingested the very same poison that she did, knowing it was a slow-acting drug and sure that he was going to get the antidote.’
Hokanu’s hand trembled, and the spill flickered. Outside, the shouts reached a crescendo, and the snap and rattle of swordplay drew closer.
‘We must leave,’ urged Arakasi.
Hokanu felt firm fingers close over his wrist, tugging him to his feet. ‘Mara,’ he murmured in an outburst of uncontrollable pain. ‘Mara.’
Arakasi yanked him forward. ‘No,’ he said sharply. ‘We have hope now.’
Hokanu turned deadened eyes to the Spy Master. ‘What? But the spice seller is dead. How can you claim we have hope?’
Arakasi’s teeth flashed in fierce satisfaction. ‘Because we know there’s an antidote. And the poison vial has a maker’s mark on the bottom.’ He tugged again, hauling a numbed Hokanu toward the loosened board by the dockside through which they had originally made entry. ‘I know the apothecary who uses that stamp. I have bought information from him in the past.’ The Spy Master bent and ducked out into the steamy, odorous dusk of the alley behind the fishmonger’s. ‘All we have to do is avoid this ruckus that Chimichi started for our benefit, find the man, and question him.’
• Chapter Eight •
Interrogation
Hokanu ran.
The streets were a bedlam of noise and fleeing citizens, with Arakasi a shadow among them distinguishable only by his voluminously flapping priest’s robe. Hardened to a warrior’s fitness as he was, Hokanu was not accustomed to bare feet. After stubbing his toes on raised bits of cobblestone, sliding precariously through slime in the gutters, and once landing heel first on a broken bit of crockery, he would have welcomed even ill-fitting sandals despite the resulting blisters. Yet if Arakasi was aware of his difficulty, he did not slacken pace.
Hokanu would have died rather than complain. Mara’s life was at stake, and every passing minute made him fear that she might already be beyond help, that the hideous slow-acting poison might have damaged her beyond healing.
‘Don’t think,’ he gasped aloud to himself. ‘Just run.’
They passed a pot seller’s stall, the proprietor rushing about in his nightshirt, shaking a fist at passersby. Arakasi pressed the Shinzawai to the right.
‘Warriors,’ he murmured, scarcely out of breath. ‘If we go straight, we’ll run right into them.’
‘Imperials?’ Hokanu obeyed the direction change, a grimace on his face as his toes squished through something that stank of rotted onions.
‘I don’t know,’ Arakasi replied. ‘The light plays tricks and all I see are helmet plumes.’ He took a deep breath. ‘We won’t stay to find out.’
He ducked left into an alley yet more narrow and noisome than the last. The sounds of the riot were fading, replaced by the furtive skitter of rats, the dragging steps of a lame lamplighter on his way home from work, and the creak of a costermonger’s cart being hitched to a bone-skinny needra.
Arakasi drew up his hood and ducked into
a moss-crusted doorway. ‘We’re here. Mind the portal – the arch is very low.’
Hokanu had to bend over to enter. Beyond lay a cramped courtyard, choked with weeds and what looked to be a physician’s garden, overgrown with medicinal herbs. There was a fish pool at the center, also overrun with weeds and sedges; Hokanu stole a moment to wash his feet. The water was piss-warm, and noisome. He wondered in disgust if people or dogs had used the spot for a privy.
‘That was originally a cistern,’ Arakasi whispered, as if in answer to his thought. ‘Korbargh dumps his wash water in it, by the smell.’
Hokanu wrinkled his nose. ‘What sort of a name is Korbargh?’
‘Thuril,’ the Spy Master answered. ‘But the fellow’s no native of the highlands. By blood, I’d say he has more of the desert in him. Don’t be deceived. He’s smart, and he speaks as many tongues as I do.’
‘How many is that?’ Hokanu whispered back.
But Arakasi had already raised his hand to knock at the plank that served Korbargh as front door.
The panel opened with a jerk that caused Hokanu a start.
‘Who’s there?’ A gruff voice snarled from within.
Unfazed, Arakasi said something in the gutturals of the desert tongue. Whoever he addressed tried to yank the door closed, but the stout wood jammed ajar as the Spy Master shoved his censer in the opening. ‘Let us in t’see your master, skulking dwarf, or your tongue I’ll have out’f your face!’ he said in a gutter Tsurani dialect used by thieves and beggars. His tone was one that Hokanu had never heard from him, but that made his flesh crawl.
The dwarf said something back that sounded like an obscenity.
‘Not good enough,’ Arakasi replied, and with a swift inclination of his head invited his supposed penitent to help him storm the door.
Frantic with concern for his wife, Hokanu fell to with a will. He slammed his shoulder against the panel with such force that the dwarf was knocked backward, and the leather hinges burst inward. Over a boom of downed wood, Arakasi and Hokanu fetched forward into what appeared to be a foyer, tiled in terra-cotta, and decorated with friezework left over from times when the neighborhood had been more prosperous. The dwarf was yammering in a mixture of languages, that his fingers felt crushed, and his head was bruised by the door bar, which had been kicked from its brackets, and now lay in splinters on the floor.
The Complete Empire Trilogy Page 150