by Fonda Lee
“Expectations are a funny thing,” Wen said. “When you’re born with them, you resent them, fight against them. When you’ve never been given any, you feel the lack of them your whole life.” Wen had finished her tea. She took the bottle of whiskey, poured a straight shot into her cup, and tipped it back. Shae glimpsed in the single, swift motion a hidden sharpness to Maik Wen. She realized she did not know the woman at all.
The Pillar’s future wife said, “Let me work for you, Shae-jen. On something that’ll help us win this war.”
“There are positions in the Weather Man’s office,” Shae said slowly. “However, I don’t think you have the educational background I’d need for them …”
“What’s the most useful role a stone-eye can play in the clan?”
Shae knew the answer; indeed the disquieting thought had already occurred to her, but it was a long moment before she met Wen’s eyes and replied. “White Rat.”
Wen said, “Could you use a White Rat, Shae-jen?”
The woman was leading her into dangerous territory, Shae could see that now. She followed cautiously, as if stepping through a bog. Stone-eyes could safely and discreetly handle and transport any amount of jade without exuding an aura. Unlike the Abukei, who were suspect and discriminated against, stone-eyes blended in as ordinary Kekonese civilians. As a White Rat, a stone-eye could be very useful indeed, as a spy, a smuggler, a messenger, or a thief. Another reason to distrust them.
“You’re too well known,” Shae said.
“Only by my name, and only in No Peak. No one in the Mountain knows who I am or would recognize me. They know my brothers, but I don’t look like my brothers.” She was unflinching about her uncertain parentage.
“Hilo would never allow it.”
“Never,” Wen agreed. “He couldn’t know. I’d have to have another job as well, a simple one, as cover. I’m sure you could come up with something.”
“You’re willing to lie to your future husband,” Shae said, not able to mask her astonishment. “And you’re asking me, as Weather Man, to go against the wishes of the Pillar. I’d be putting you in danger if I did this. Aisho would no longer protect you.”
Remorse gathered in Wen’s full lips and dark eyes. “Shae-jen, did you become Weather Man to please the Pillar, or to save the clan?” She smiled sadly to say she knew the answer and turned her face away, her voice falling slightly. “Hilo’s brilliant as Horn. He’s honest and fierce, and his men revere him. If heart alone could win the war, we’d already be victorious. But he was never meant to be Pillar. He’s not farsighted or politically shrewd, and all the jade in the world won’t change that.”
She turned back to Shae, who sat nonplussed by Wen’s flat assessment. “He knows he needs your help. If I can be of use to you as a White Rat, I’ll be doing everything I can to help the family survive. He insists he loves me too much to let me get involved in the war in any way … and I love him too much to obey.”
It must’ve been at least one o’clock in the morning, but Shae was wide awake and her mind had begun chewing at fearful possibilities. She looked around the renovated surroundings again, slowly. It had taken Wen a few weeks to completely change the house, to put together a skillful artifice of sights, smells, and textures, all working together to create a pleasing, polished appearance for the formerly ugly but honest residence of No Peak’s most savage men. She realized now that she had misjudged Maik Wen, had seen her warm, pliable, sensual demeanor and overlooked the Green Bone core beneath the stone-eye stigma, forgotten that she was sister to the ferocious Maik brothers. She’d resented Wen before; now she was uneasy.
She thought, Two strong-minded women in a man’s world, if they do not quickly become allies, are destined to be incurable rivals. Going around Hilo was something Shae was accustomed to, but this, she knew, he would not forgive.
She’d have to think about this more and proceed carefully.
Wen took Shae’s empty cup from her and stood. “I’ve taken enough of your time and kept you from sleep tonight, Shae-jen.” Without shoes, Shae realized, Wen was taller than her, with curves that years of hard training had sloughed off Shae.
The Weather Man stood up. “Thank you for the tea, Wen. We’ll talk again soon.” She made her way to the door and put on her shoes. The delicate fragrance of winter-flowering plum blossom swept in from the garden when she opened the door. She paused in the doorway, turning back for a second as the light in the hall elongated her shadow across the stoop of the Horn’s house. “I think,” she ventured, “that it’s possible my brother has better taste than I’ve given him credit for.”
Wen smiled. “Good night, sister.”
CHAPTER
44
Return to the Goody Too
Bero thought about the tunnel beneath the Goody Too. He thought about it a lot, and whenever he thought about it, he was filled with bitter rage. Janloon was at war over the death of Kaul Lan—his doing!—and there was jade being won and lost on the streets every day, but Bero was nowhere nearer to a single pebble of it for himself. Instead, he’d been forced to flee and hide, like a roach before a bright light.
He hadn’t fled far. After stumbling through the darkness for what felt like an eternity, wondering with each step when his flashlight batteries would run out and leave him to wander blind until he collapsed and died, Bero had felt a breeze on his face. A faint air current pungent with the smell of the harbor—sea salt and boat fumes, fish and wet garbage. The breeze preceded a distant circle of evening light, which Bero ran toward as if running toward his own dead mother. As Mudt had promised, the tunnel let out under an escarpment near the wharfs of Summer Park. In heavy spring rains or a summer typhoon, the tunnel would flood, but in the dry winter season it was an excellent smugglers passage. Dirty and exhausted, Bero paid for passage on a small private ferry, but he did not take Mudt’s advice to flee far from Janloon.
For weeks, he’d laid low on Little Button. The island was only forty-five minutes away by ferry boat, and it wasn’t officially part of Janloon, though on a clear day Bero could see the city from across the strait. Little Button was its own municipality. For centuries, there’d been a Deitist monastery here, before the Shotarians had turned it into a labor camp, and now it was a touristy sort of place with a restored Deitist temple, a nature preserve, and a quaint town full of little shops selling overpriced knickknacks and handmade items. Bero hated it.
It was, however, a good place to not be recognized. Full of Janloon day-trippers and foreign visitors, it was easy enough to get a motel room and nurse the injuries to his body and his pride in glum solitude, watching television, eating takeout food, and plotting his return to the city. Little Button was run by a minor family clan that was a tributary of the Mountain, but from what Bero gathered, it was largely left alone by the Janloon clans. Just to be safe, he moved to a new motel every week, so no one would start noticing him.
From the news, Bero knew that the city was a patchwork of street violence and there were parts of Janloon where it wasn’t clear which clan was in charge, if any. The Mountain had taken a good chunk of the Docks, but No Peak still held the Armpit and had conquered much of Sogen. Fishtown was anyone’s guess. Bero had been gone for more than a month. In all this chaos, surely no one was still looking for him. On a clear morning, he went down to the marina and took the ferry back across the strait.
Bero blamed Mudt and the goateed Green Bone for his situation. They’d set him up. They’d promised him jade and then reneged on him. They’d never intended to bring him in. The more Bero thought about it, the angrier he grew. Also, he thought about the tunnel under Mudt’s store and the hidden boxes he’d been too hurried and panicked to inspect or steal. Again, he kicked himself. All his misfortunes came from haste. What was in those boxes?
He knew where to get the jade that was rightfully his: from Mudt himself. He didn’t have the Fullerton anymore, which was a shame, but he had plenty of money, and although civilian ownership of handguns was
technically illegal in Janloon, conditions of disorder in a clan war ensured that the street sale of them was common. It took Bero one afternoon in the Mountain-controlled side of the Docks to get his hands on a decent revolver. His plan was to hold Mudt’s son hostage at gunpoint until Mudt paid with his jade. If that didn’t work, he would kill Mudt and take the jade.
An unexpected sight met his eyes when he got to the Goody Too that evening. The store was dark and the building was boarded up. The store’s large banner had been torn down, and there was no sign of anyone in or around the place. Bero wandered up to the window suspiciously and peered through. It was a mess inside. The place had been ransacked. Shelves were empty and fixtures were tipped over. Most of the merchandise was gone, but what remained was scattered on the ground and already picked through—useless stuff like old magazines and sun hats.
Bero kicked the front door and jiggled the padlock angrily. He looked around. The street was empty. This part of town was so close to the border between Junko and Spearpoint that apparently no one in their right mind wanted to be loitering in it. He pounded the sidewalk-facing windows, which shook in their frames. A homeless man on the corner, the only other person in sight on what was typically a busy intersection, called out, “Haven’t you heard? Mudt’s dead, keke!”
Bero turned around. “Dead? Who killed him?”
The man grinned a toothless grin from under his blankets. He shrugged and giggled. “He did! Walking around with jade, you’re killing yourself!”
Bero found a heavy rock and broke one of the Goody Too’s windows. It made a gods-awful amount of racket, but there was no one but the hobo nearby to take notice. As Bero kicked in the glass and climbed gingerly into the ruined store, he was fuming with a peculiar mixture of disappointment and hope. So Mudt was gone, and his jade with him. Someone had beaten Bero to it. That was just to be expected, wasn’t it? Always, something would happen; fate would shine on him, it would dangle what he desired, then it would snatch it away. Lucky and unlucky, that was him. And now, maybe bad luck would turn to good again. Maybe. Maybe.
The closet in the back of the store was open. The drawers of the wheeled filing cabinet were open and the contents pulled out and dumped in the mad search for cash and valuables, but the thing itself hadn’t been moved. His heart in his throat, Bero leaned his weight against it and pushed it out of the way. He felt around in the dark to find the break in the carpet. When he rolled it back, he found the trapdoor he’d escaped through five weeks ago.
Bero closed the door of the closet and blocked it with the filing cabinet. He pulled the chain of the single bulb overhead, flooding the small space with yellowish light. Bero tugged at the metal ring of the trapdoor; it lifted with a heavy scraping sound and a small cloud of dust. Queasy with anticipation, he descended warily down the steps into the tunnel.
It was still there, boxes and crates, untouched by the scavengers who’d torn through the rest of the store. Bero took one of the top boxes and set it on the steps. He cut the packing tape with a pocketknife and gaped at what he’d found.
Then he stared back at the small tower of containers. How had Mudt hoarded all this? Surely it hadn’t all come from the goateed Green Bone, who’d only brought him the one small box that first night Bero had seen him. Mudt must’ve been a dealer. A grin spread across Bero’s face as he pulled one of the small sealed bottles out of the open carton in front of him.
Shine. A lifetime supply of shine. All of it, now his.
His hands shaking with eagerness, Bero scooped up as many vials as he could fit into his pockets. Then he replaced the half-empty box on top of the others, and with an avaricious backward glance, climbed back out of the tunnel into the store. He dropped the trapdoor into place, rolled the carpet over it, and moved the filing cabinet back to exactly where it had been over the entrance to the secret tunnel. Bero turned out the closet light and stepped back out into the demolished store, his pockets laden and his mind galloping. This building would probably be taken over by someone else soon. He would have to move his treasure trove to somewhere safe that he could more easily access …
A noise behind him and a flashlight beam falling across his shoulders made Bero jump and whirl in the dark. He scrabbled for his revolver and brought it up into the face of a boy, thirteen or fourteen years old. Mudt’s son.
“What are you doing here?” Bero shouted.
“I thought you might be him, coming back for me.” The boy’s voice was high and strained. He held a cheap, folding talon knife in his fist; his knuckles were white on the handle. The flashlight beam stayed on Bero as the two of them stared at each other.
“Who’s coming back for you?” Bero’s finger hugged the trigger of the revolver. He didn’t want this kid telling anyone he was back in the city, or getting the idea that his dead father’s store of shine belonged to him instead of Bero.
The junior Mudt trembled, shaking the weak flashlight beam, but there was wild hatred in his voice as he spat, “Maik. He killed my da. Maik Tar killed my da, and if it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to kill him!” Tears sprang into his eyes.
Bero’s finger was still curled, but now he hesitated. Slowly, he lowered the revolver. “It’s hard to kill a really powerful Green Bone,” he said.
“I don’t care; I’ll do whatever it takes!” Both the flashlight and the talon knife dropped to the teenager’s side and he stood nearly panting, glaring at Bero with flushed cheeks and maddened eyes, as if daring him to say otherwise.
“I’ve done it before,” Bero told him with a thrill of pride. “I’ve killed a Green Bone. No one figured I could do it, but they were wrong, all of them.”
The other teen’s eyes widened with greedy curiosity. Whenever he’d seen the younger Mudt before, Bero had paid him little attention. He’d always seemed obedient and unremarkable. He was skinny and his hair was greasy and his face had a ratlike quality. But he wasn’t as much of a pussy as either Sampa or Cheeky had been.
It wasn’t good to do things alone, Bero decided. Fate was like a tiger encountered on the road; best to divide its attention. When things had gone most wrong for Bero, someone smaller and weaker had always been there to draw the bad luck to themselves.
“I’m not scared of Green Bones,” Bero said. “They’re the ones who are scared of us, you know. They killed your da because they’re afraid of people outside the clan having jade. What we need is some jade of our own, keke.”
“Yeah,” said Mudt fiercely. “Yeah, that’s right.”
“And I know where to get it.”
Mudt’s flashlight beam came back up. “You do?”
CHAPTER
45
A Shared Joke
Hilo surrendered his weapons to one of the uniformed Green Bone guards standing at the entrance to Wisdom Hall. The guard was a young woman whose jade aura hummed with intense concentration as Hilo approached. The members of Haedo Shield were purportedly trained to an especially high level of Perception to detect signs of murderous intent. She would have to relax her standards for Perceived hostility if she was going to let anyone into the building today, Hilo thought, smiling to himself as he unstrapped his moon blade, unbuckled his talon knife, and unholstered his gun, placing them side by side on the table in front of the metal detector. It wasn’t that he doubted the guard’s abilities or didn’t understand the sentiment behind leaving weapons outside the negotiating chamber, but both were pointless measures. There was plenty of jade being collectively carried into the room on people’s bodies. The Green Bones in attendance could easily kill each other bare-handed if negotiations broke down.
They would not, though, not with a penitent in the room, and there were three of them present in the meeting chamber where the mediation between the clan leaders was scheduled to take place. Apparently the council thought it wise to arrange triple the spiritual insurance. The penitents stood quietly in the corners of the room, one man and two women, their shaved heads bowed and hands folded in the sleeves of the
ir long green robes. Acts of violence were forbidden not just in any Deitist temple but anywhere a penitent was present. They were in direct communication with Heaven, so the belief went; the gods would know who had gone against the Divine Virtues and struck first. Heaven’s spies, as it were. Not only would the sinner’s soul be damned, but on the day of the Return, his entire family line—ancestors, parents, children, and descendants—would be refused entry into Heaven and be forced to wander the empty earth in exile for all eternity.
Yesterday, Hilo had suggested to Shae that it would be worth risking whatever theoretical metaphysical reckoning would befall them in the afterlife, if the two of them could kill Ayt Mada right where she sat across the table from them.
Shae had turned a stunningly cold look on him. “The gods are cruel, Hilo,” she said, as if she knew them personally. “Don’t tempt them with arrogance.”
There were two doors in the chamber, so he and Ayt did not even enter through the same hallway. Hilo went into the room and sat down in the end chair, nodding to the dozen members of the Royal Council who lined either side of the table and comprised the official mediation committee. They looked officious in dark suits and held expensive pens over yellow legal pads in leather folios.
Four of the committee members belonged to No Peak—stern-looking Mr. Vang, white-haired Mr. Loyi, horse-faced Mrs. Nurh, and smiley Mr. Kowi who had a head shaped like a turnip. Hilo recognized each of them on account of Woon’s briefing the previous evening. The diligent former Pillarman was proving to be a great asset in the Weather Man’s office. Hilo was glad to have spared his life. He did not blame Woon for Lan’s death, no more than he blamed himself, but it was good to see the man turn his remorse into effort for the clan.
Of the other politicians in the room, four were loyal to the Mountain. The remaining four were not clan affiliated. Hilo hadn’t even known there were councilmen who had no clan allegiance, ones who might be bought. “There are fourteen independents, plus two beholden to minor clans, out of three hundred,” Shae had enlightened him. “Try to remember these things.”