The Forbidden City (The Dragon's Legacy Book 2)

by Deborah A. Wolf

  “I have drunk enough already,” Jian said. He was not lying. The room spun dangerously.

  “He acts as if he had never conspired to overthrow the emperor before,” Latukhan grinned.

  “Welcome to the ranks of Sen-Baradam,” Kouto declared, “where our plans to rid the Forbidden City of Daeshen Tiachu are exceeded only by His Illumination’s plans to rid the world of us!” Everybody laughed but Jian, who reached for the peach wine.

  Perhaps I am not quite drunk enough yet after all.

  “You men,” Giella chided as she swayed into the room. “Stop teasing Jian. And you have had enough of that,” she continued, snatching the peach wine from the table. “You landborn are likely enough to get yourselves killed without drink urging you on to ever greater feats of idiocy.”

  The men, as one, hung their heads and looked like boys who had been caught shirking their chores. She clucked her tongue, shook her head, and with her fan shooed the saiku from the room. When the last painted youth had wiggled his way out, she shut and locked the wide door behind him and turned to face the suddenly serious, and very sober, Sen-Baradam.

  “My Lords of Lesser Twilight,” she intoned, and her eyes were pools of shadow in her white, white face. “Shall we begin?”

  “Ahai,” they agreed in unison, and the Nightingale smiled and began to sing as she set before them the bitter cup, and the sweet, and the blooding cup of binding vows. That summer night, in the four hundred and ninety-ninth year of Illumination…

  …as his beloved lay frowning in her sleep, one arm flung over her belly,

  …as his mother walked restless by the moons-lit sea,

  …as some few among his Bloodsworn lay with saiku, drowning their loneliness in lust.

  Jian Sen-Baradam, the pearl diver’s son, declared war upon the emperor of Sindan.

  “Truth is treason in the eye of a tyrant.”

  —General Yu Fengui, on the day of his death

  Long they drank into the night, loath perhaps to stand and depart. It was as if they believed that as long as their budding plans were contained in one room, to one group of men and women, it would remain a perfect floret nurturing beautiful possibilities.

  Once they stood and made their goodbyes, once the door was opened, and the breath of the world let in, the tree of their dream would be shaken. What manner of flower might that unblemished bud reveal, once it was kissed awake by the hot sun? Would it be a shining thing, fragrant and whole? Or might it reveal instead petals of pestilence and rot, fated to kill the branch upon which it grew?

  * * *

  Just as the first light of dawn touched the peaks of the Mutai Gonyu, igniting the mountains with violet flames, a house-servant hurried wide-eyed and quaking with fear into the room where the Sen-Baradam sat, playing cards and drinking. She fluttered like a little bird to Giella’s side.

  “Mistress!” the girl cried. “The emperor’s own soldiers are come!”

  “Of course they have come,” Giella said, “you silly thing. Fetch more peach wine—we wish to make the emperor’s soldiers feel welcome!”

  Jian would have leapt to his feet but for Mardoni’s hand on his arm. “Be still,” the older man said. “You are Sen-Baradam, playing cards with friends in a comfort house, nothing more. You have nothing to fear.”

  Even as he spoke, the guards at the doors folded as rice paper in the hands of an artist, swiftly and silently, and the saiku fell to the ground like petals in a storm, pressing trembling lips to trembling floorboards. All, that is, except Giella, the White Nightingale. She laughed and threw the windows wide, letting their plans loose into the dying of the night.

  “We will meet again, you and I,” she promised, blowing Jian a kiss. “My brothers.” With a flutter of robes and a whisper of song, she was gone.

  Mardoni shrugged and poured himself another glass of peach wine. “Three,” he said, discarding two cards and drawing new ones.

  “Hold,” Kouto said. Latukhan made a face and tossed all his cards in. “Bu sing dai. Luck is not with me tonight,” he complained.

  Jian drew a deep breath and willed his trembling hands to be still. “Hold,” he said, even as the doors burst open and Xienpei blew into the room before a storm of imperial soldiers, broad-shouldered and horn-helmed and with the white bull of Daeshen Tiachu emblazoned upon their breasts. Their swords were long and long-blooded, folded a thousand times over in the House of Steel Prayers, and their eyes were hard as diamonds.

  The King of Seas smiled up at him from the cards in his fist, and Jian washed the fear down his throat with a mouthful of peach wine. The King of Seas, if played at the right time, was a powerful card. With cunning, and courage, and a bit of luck, Jian might yet win this game.

  * * *

  “I am most disappointed in you, Daechen Jian.” Xienpei drew her mouth down into a sorrowful mask. The expression did not reach her eyes any more than did her false smiles.

  We are still playing games, Jian thought, but he knew they were playing with her deck now, her dice.

  “I cannot fathom why,” he said, and tugged at the neck of his blue-and-silver robes, as if the fit were not perfect, or the fabric less than the finest spidersilk. “I was winning. Unless you were disappointed to find me enjoying such low entertainment as a comfort house?” This last was a deliberate barb. Xienpei, herself, was known to have… exotic… tastes.

  “You think you hold the winning hand,” she told him, striking a blow to his heart, “but you do not even know what game you are playing. You are a Yellow Road prince who fancies himself a warrior, yes? A noble hero from the old stories, come to topple the evil empire, and set the sky alight with the fire of a new dawn.” Xienpei reached up to his face and drew her sharp nails across his skin, making him shudder. “Oh, to be so young again, Daechen Jian, so sweet, to think that one might play the game without cheating, and still win.” Her laugh was a cold storm, blowing in the window and scattering his cards.

  “Jian Sen-Baradam,” he reminded her, as if she had spoken no other words. He bared his teeth at her. His sharp teeth, so like those of his sea-bear father. “Lest you forget… Yendaeshi.”

  “Of course, Sen-Baradam,” she replied, bowing low. “A thousand apologies to you and your house. Speaking of which, and lest you forget, I have a gift for you.” She dipped her clawed hand behind her wide silk belt. “From your beloved wife.” Her jeweled smile was wide and brilliant. It reached her eyes, and Jian’s blood ran to cold seawater. He accepted a small scroll from her, and let it unwind.

  “Ah,” he cried out, stricken, as a severed finger fell to the floor. He knew, before he bent to snatch it up, he knew.

  “You see, Sen-Baradam,” Xienpei crooned, “I hold the winning hand, after all. The cards are mine, and the dice, and the cups.” She touched her fingers lightly to his chin, forcing him to look up and meet her eyes, filled with malice and mirth and murder. “The game is mine, and you are nothing more than a playing stone. Do you wish to live to see the end of this game? Do you wish Tsali’gei to see the end of this game?”

  “Yes,” Jian whispered, and bowed his head. Let Xienpei think him defeated. If she believed he still bent to her will, Tsali’gei might yet survive.

  “Yes what?” Her voice was a whip.

  “Yes, Yendaeshi. I wish her to live.”

  “Then you will do exactly as I say, Jian Sen-Baradam, or I will carve your beloved wife into pieces.” She smiled. “And feed them to you myself.”

  FORTY-FOUR

  The hem of Ismai’s touar whispered mournfully as he walked through the burnt remains of his people. Like the sky at twilight, the fabric of his robe and trousers grew heavy and dark, sliding from bright indigo to violet and finally, at the very edges, the mute and angry black of funeral ashes.

  For that is what Aish Kalumm has become, Ismai thought as he bent and sifted through what little remained of the City of Mothers. A funeral pyre. Not a proper funeral pyre, either, meant to send the beloved dead on their way with songs a
nd flowers and memories of sunlight. This was a cold, nasty, stinking hole in the ground filled with bones and the end of everything. His sandaled foot struck something small and light that skittered across the ground in front of him. Unthinking, Ismai picked the thing up and held it before his eyes. Half a jawbone, charred to a feather’s weight, studded with tiny teeth like pearls, with bigger teeth just beneath them.

  A child, he thought, horrified. His fingers tightened on the bone and some of it crumbled away into dust. A little child. He put it in the basket at his waist, along with the other bits and pieces, and then bent back to his task. Ismai was a warden, sworn to serve the people, and the only service he could render now was to find what little the flames had not devoured, that these innocent ones might be properly laid to rest.

  Most of the residents of Aish Kalumm had been herded away from the city before that snake woman and her priestesses burned it to the ground. Most… but not all. Those who were too ill, too elderly, or too unworthy to be allowed to live—by Mah’zula standards—had been left to perish. “To strengthen the pride,” Ishtaset explained to them all as they stood watching their home burn. “A hard sacrifice, but necessary.” No few of the people had cried out at that, had broken away toward the city or had thrown themselves at the Mah’zula. Those people were thrown back, beaten senseless, or killed.

  A handful of others, Ismai had noted with horror, had nodded thoughtfully at Ishtaset’s words. “To strengthen the pride,” they agreed. “A necessary sacrifice.”

  Istaza Ani would have had an apt reply.

  “Fuck that.”

  The crepuscular robes of another warden shushed along the ground ahead of him. “Monstrous,” someone said in a low voice. Ismai glanced up and met Jasin’s eyes, and they both flinched back.

  “You look terrible,” Jasin offered. His own face was streaked black and gray and white, as if he had been trying to emulate the warriors’ paint, and his eyes were pools of bitter water.

  “You look like you were dragged ass-backward through the seven gates of Yosh,” Ismai countered, and he sighed. “What are we doing here? How is this helping our people?”

  “We are doing what we can… for now.” Jasin pointed with his chin toward the Mah’zula and their vash’ai who stood watch along the edges of the ruined city. “Helping those we can help… for now.”

  “For now,” Ismai agreed. “But when we can—”

  “Sssst,” Jasin cautioned. “Trust no one, at least for now. Too many agree with the Mah’zula and think we should return to the old ways. Too few think this was wrong.” He gathered spit in his mouth, looked at the ashen ground, and swallowed instead. He lowered his voice further. “How is your Ruh’ayya? Is she still safe?”

  Trust no one. Ismai took a deep breath through his nose and bent to pick up a shard of rock, avoiding Jasin’s eyes. “I do not know,” he lied. “She does not speak to me. Perhaps she has gone back to the wild vash’ai.” He stood and looked at the stone, shrugged, threw it over his shoulder.

  Jasin nodded so slowly that Ismai knew he had not been fooled. “A necessary sacrifice.”

  Wait—had that been stone? He turned to retrieve the pale bit of rubbish, turned it over in his hands. Bone, he decided, and bent again to peer at the dirt and ash. Where had he picked it up? There, he thought, just by his sandal print. A charred piece of door lay there. The wardens turned it over and stared in horror. The jawless skull of a child stared up at them, hopeless and lost, and the tiny bones reached up with one good arm as if Ismai had come to save him.

  Jasin looked at his face, looked down, and bent to gather up the child’s bones as gently as if Sammai were only sleeping.

  “Ismai,” he whispered, and his voice broke. “Ismai, I am so sorry.”

  Ismai took the boy’s skull from Jasin, kissed the paper-thin forehead. The ashes burned on his lips, and tears unshed burned his eyes. He cradled the skull to his breast for a moment before placing it into his basket with the others.

  “They lied,” he said at last.

  “The Mah’zula?”

  Ismai knelt to gather up Sammai’s bones, careful not to miss the tiniest fragment, careful in his words. “First Warden. First Warrior. My… my mother. All of them.” The words were foul black soot, and he choked on them. “Ehuani. Saghaani. Mutaani. Where is the beauty in truth? In youth? Where is the beauty in death? Where is the beauty in any of this—Ja’Sajani?” In fury and in grief, he tore the touar from his head and threw it upon the ground. “They lied to us!”

  “Sssssst,” Jasin hissed, whites of his eyes pale against the filth of his skin. “Sssssst, Ismai, keep it down. They are coming for you now.”

  “Let them come.” Ismai groped at his waist for the golden shamsi and nearly howled with rage to remember that it had been taken from him. “Let them come! What else can they do to me? What else can they take from me? Everything I had has been taken. Everything I loved has been lost. Let them come!”

  Jasin grabbed his robes. “Ismai, Ismai, do not do this,” he begged. “I know you have lost—”

  Ismai’s heart was dead as ash, brittle as charred bone. “You know nothing of what I have lost,” he ground out. “Nothing.”

  He tore himself free of Jasin’s grip, and turned toward the sound of approaching hoofbeats. Ishtaset herself was riding toward him, a fist of her Mah’zula—and no few Ja’Akari—close behind. They looked like the heroes out of one of Daru’s books, before the Mah’zula had destroyed them. They looked like a painting that might have hung in his mother’s rooms, before his mother’s rooms had been burned to ash.

  He reached into the basket at his hip, and stroked the sad little, brittle little, dead little skull.

  “Let them come,” he said again. “It is a good day to die.”

  * * *

  Ismai clung to Ishtaset’s back for the ride to the Madraj, denied so much as the dignity of his own Ehuani. She was slim and muscular, and rode her mare as if the two of them were a song made of wind. He was dismayed to find his body reacting to hers, and dismay turned to anger so that when they reached their destination and she soothed her horse to a prancing, snorting stop, Ismai slid off the mare’s back and stalked away stiff-legged and bristling like an angry cat.

  I do not stomp like that.

  Ismai froze. Where are you? Are you safe? Then the thought, You should not be here. They will catch you. And kill her, likely as not. The vash’ai who ran with the Mah’zula were bigger and stronger than those who ran with the Zeeranim. Any who opposed them had been slain.

  I am stronger than they, she protested. But they will not catch me. I am Ruh’ayya, and my sire’s brother has taught me well. With that, her voice faded, leaving the faintest impression of her presence. It fluttered in the back of Ismai’s mind.

  “Ah, you speak to your Ruh’ayya.” Ishtaset’s voice came from behind him, a warm purr of approval. “A fine young queen, clever and strong. A jewel to be treasured—as are you, my handsome young warden.”

  Ismai froze, but he did not turn and look at her. “Leave her alone,” he demanded, and filled with shame and fury as his voice betrayed him with a crack. “Let her be.”

  Sareta strode past him with nothing more than an amused sideways glance.

  “We are not her enemy, young warden,” Ishtaset replied, “any more than I am yours. We are your people.”

  “My people are your captives. My people lie dead in the ashes of Aish Kalumm.”

  The beads and bells braided into her pale mane sang a sorrowful tune as she shook her head. “You will see, young Ismai. You will learn.” Her vash’ai joined her and she strode toward the arena, surefooted and tall as any conqueror. Ismai glanced behind. The Mah’zula had taken Ishtaset’s mare away and stood there, a half-circle of hard faces not unlike his own.

  If I ran now, they would cut me down, he thought, and this pain would end. He groped again for the shamsi that was not at his hip, and clenched his fists.

  No, Ruh’ayya urged, her voice the s
hadow of a whisper in his mind. You will serve no people by dying here. These sands are thirsty. All the blood in your body would not slake their thirst. Also, I would miss you. A little. Do not spend your life so easily, Kithren.

  No, he agreed. Ismai turned and followed Ishtaset, with the Mah’zula at his heels. Not so easily. Not yet. They walked through the wide tunnels and into the arena. When Ismai would have turned and walked upon the sand, one of the Mah’zula nudged his shoulder.

  “Ah-aat,” she warned. “Follow her.” So he did, around the edge of the sands, in front of the seats. He was shocked to see how many of the seats were filled, row upon row upon row of Mah’zula and Ja’Akari and ordinary citizens, the latter huddled together like tarbok being stalked by vash’ai. He continued up the steps to the dais. It was strange to stand on high, when all his life had been spent craning his neck to stare up at the people whom life had set so far above him.

  Stranger still to see so many seats filled which once were empty. The air, once redolent with scents savory and sweet, thick with laughter, heavy with anticipation, now rang silent with the hollow bellies of hungering shadows, and smelled of ash and anger. Ishtaset stood in the very center of the high dais where not so long ago his mother had reclined on cushions of silk and dined on figs and honey. The Mah’zula leader raised both arms to hush the silent crowd, and the air around them clotted in anticipation.

  “My sisters,” she said. “My brothers. Proud people of the Zeera. My people.” A low moan rose from the crowd. Like a sandstorm on a windless day it danced among the watchers, and died without becoming much of anything.

  “I come before you today as a rajjha among the Mah’zula, the First Women. We are descended from those who rode and fought—and died—beside Zula Din, in the long ago. We were the first to ride, the first deemed worthy by the vash’ai, the first to lay down our lives for the people. We were here before the Sundering, before Kal ne Mur laid waste our world—and we will be here long after the kings of Atualon are dust and shadows.