Armistice

by Lara Elena Donnelly

  * * *

  Pulan’s office took up prime real estate within the walls of Hadhariti: Just off the upper terrace, its row of arched windows opened onto a view of the ocean and caught the breeze. Sunset flooded the room each evening just as the temperature began to drop, giving it the benefit of natural light without turning it into a sauna.

  It was at the apex of perfection when Daoud answered Aristide’s knock and stepped back to let him in. He was impeccably polite, in front of Pulan, but coldness rolled off of him like fog.

  The scent of the potted frangipani on the terrace mingled with the smell of coffee, carried on a gentle current of salt air. Golden light spilled across the polished floor and made dust motes glow. It caught in the fine hair on Pulan’s arms, in the fly-aways that had escaped from her pomade, making a halo that moved with her. She looked like some sort of blameless celestial being. Which is why, he suspected, she had agreed to see him at exactly this time of day. Perhaps, in fact, the entire reason she had situated her office just so. Anyone other than Aristide, who knew how the trick was accomplished, might have a hard time accusing her of subterfuge.

  As it was, he had a hard time seeing her, once he was sat opposite and staring into the sun. He felt as though he were the one being interrogated. Smugly, Daoud stationed himself at his own desk, tucked into a corner and shaded by a delicate teak screen. From the plates and coffee detritus on Pulan’s desk, and the stool tucked behind her chair, it was clear he’d been perched at her elbow until Aristide entered. Discreetly—he hoped—Aristide scanned the papers on Pulan’s desk but found nothing beyond correspondence and invoices. He wished he could do the same for the sheaf of documents Daoud was straightening into a pile across the room.

  “Well,” said Pulan, sweet as treacle. “What can I do for you this evening?”

  “I’m just curious.” He plucked a sugar cube from the coffee tray and turned it in his fingers so the crystals caught the light.

  “About?”

  “What kind of business are you running, exactly? A film studio? Something else? A little bit of both?”

  “Aristide, you work on my films. You know what we do here.”

  “And is Asiyah financing your next one, in partnership with the Geddan government? Or perhaps Memmediv represents some splinter group in Tatié. Though why they’d spend their money on a picture when they could spend it on machine guns, I don’t know.”

  “I thought you were not interested in this kind of thing anymore.”

  “Because I didn’t want it in my life, Pulan. But it seems to have crept in without my looking for it.”

  “You would not be asking questions if you did not want to know.”

  “If I want to know,” he growled, “it’s because I’m frightened.”

  That caught her off guard, as he’d meant it to. She tried to cover with a smile. “Aristide Makricosta, frightened of a little arms deal?”

  “So you admit it. Mother’s tit, Pulan, of course I’m frightened, and you know what it costs me to say that. You are my bulwark. If you’re caught at this it could mean my neck in the noose.”

  “The queen abolished capital punishment ten years ago.”

  “Idiom,” he snapped. “And it isn’t the queen I’m worried about.”

  Much to his chagrin she laughed, bell-bright. Too bright, so he knew it was a front. “I am cautious, duladhush. I will not be caught. And if I am, you may claim ignorance. But only if you stop asking questions and demanding answers.”

  “Nobody will believe that. Not given my past.”

  “Ah yes,” said Pulan, changing tacks. “Your past. It seems to have made a sudden reappearance. What can you tell me about this Nellie Hanes? Because I made several calls to people who should know. There were any number of Nellie Haneses in Amberlough at the time, but none of them ever danced with you.”

  “Of course not,” he said evenly. “Nellie Hanes is an awful stage name. Malcolm never would have allowed it.”

  “Then what name did she go by?”

  “Why don’t you ask her?”

  “Because I do not think she will tell me.”

  “And you think I will? After the secrets you’ve kept?”

  She went on as if she hadn’t heard him. “Maybe you will not say because you do not know.”

  He sneered. “I know who she is.”

  “But what is she running from?”

  “I should think that’s obvious.”

  At that, she only raised an eyebrow and said, “Mm.”

  A knock on the door kept things from escalating. «Enter,» said Pulan, dropping back into her seat and back into Porashtu.

  Djihar, her steward, stepped softly into the room. «Mistress, a telegram from Myazbah.»

  She held her hand out for the onionskin and snapped her fingers. Djihar slipped past Aristide to place it in her palm, then bowed and backed out of the room.

  Perhaps she was less a celestial being, and more a wrathful god.

  Pulan slit the seal on the telegram and read. He watched her thinly plucked, darkly penciled eyebrows rise by degrees.

  “What does it say?” Even he could hear the sharp edge on his voice. There was a rustle of papers, and when Aristide looked over, Daoud had lifted his head from writing to watch Pulan’s face.

  “Nothing important.”

  “You’re usually a better liar.”

  “Usually I am trying,” she said. “You can go. Find your friend Nellie and send her up. If I am putting her on my payroll, I want to ask some questions.”

  An awful pettiness in his heart whispered that he shouldn’t warn Cordelia. That if everyone else was going to keep secrets from him, he ought to turn their tactics back on them, let them fend for themselves in this whispering garden of poison and thorns. But she had lost her fingers for him, and almost her life, and who knew what else besides. And now he’d gotten her into another mess.

  So he would go and find her, and send her up, with a warning that Pulan had caught an inconvenient case of suspicion. But after that …

  Something in him, crabby at having been woken, was beginning to stretch. If everyone around him had their secrets, if he was already in the thick of something nasty, why shouldn’t he pursue an avenue of his own? Nobody had to know—he could storm off in a huff, and Pulan would put it down to masculine volatility or artistic temperament. He’d be leaving Cordelia to her own devices, but Queen’s sake, she’d more than proved she preferred them to anyone else’s.

  * * *

  From what Ari told her, Cordelia didn’t think this meeting with Pulan was going to go her way. But her choices were run for the road and hitch up to the city, or see what Satri had to say. She didn’t think a gunrunning Porachin was going to tip her into the Ospies’ open palm, at any rate.

  Cordelia had to ask a couple domestics—a young boy dusting light shades, and a woman in a hurry down the hall—where to find Pulan’s office. By the time she got there, evening was rolling in and the freshly dusted electric lights had come on underneath their decorative silk tassels.

  The doors were closed. She had to knock. And when they opened, she had to blink.

  The eastern half of the house might have been cast into gloom, but this room looked west and was soaked in red light like someone had put a color gel over the spot, then aimed it straight into Cordelia’s eyes.

  “I apologize,” said Pulan, from somewhere in the glare. “The sun will set in a few minutes. Daoud, could you perhaps slide the screen?”

  Cordelia heard casters roll. The light dimmed and she could see her way clear to an empty chair in front of Pulan’s desk.

  “Can I offer you some wine, Ms. Hanes? Or perhaps coffee?” There was an ironic kind of weight on the name. But there were manners in it, too: Pulan got the game and she was going to play it. For now.

  “I’ll take the wine,” said Cordelia, and sat on the edge of her seat.

  There was a bottle by the desk, in a bucket on a stand. Pulan pulled it free. Cordelia heard i
ce clatter, and saw drips land on the floor. By the time she looked up from the spatter of water on wood, her glass was full and Pulan was pouring for herself. The same pale green wine she and Ari had drunk in the city. She reminded herself to go slowly—no good to jaw with Pulan like she had with him.

  “I understand you are looking for a position with my studio. You are a choreographer?”

  “Yeah,” said Cordelia. “Yes. I dance, and I can put together a solid routine, even on short notice. Did it for years.”

  Daoud tapped away at his typewriter at a smaller desk in the corner. Pulan ignored the metallic thwack of keys, the crank of the platen knobs. “You used to work with Aristide.”

  “We walked the boards together a couple of times. Stage work pays swineshit, but there were other perks.”

  “Selling tar?” asked Pulan, face prim and perfect as a doll’s. “Or something else?”

  Cordelia snorted into her wineglass, fogging the inside of the globe. “A lot of something elses, most of ’em good-looking and keen to get between a girl’s thighs. But yeah, I ran a little for Ari. Why? Didn’t seem like it stopped you hiring him.”

  Pulan lifted her wineglass but didn’t drink. “Aristide is an old friend, and I have a debt to him. I will risk things for him that I will not risk for you, if you require them.”

  “You,” said Cordelia, one eyebrow canted high. “You have a debt to him?”

  “Family business.”

  “Uh-huh.” Cordelia twisted her wineglass on the table, watching the liquid slip against the crystal. “He said he did some work with your dad.”

  “Did he?”

  “Don’t worry. He didn’t tell me what kind. I guessed.”

  “You are clever. That is good.”

  “It’s a little more than just mush and raisins up here,” she said, and tapped her forehead.

  “Then you will understand the danger when I tell you the Ospies are looking into my affairs very closely at the moment.”

  Cold swamped her gut and her hands went numb, but she kept her teeth together. The sun had finally sunk below the horizon, and suddenly she felt the shadows like a smothering weight.

  Daoud clicked on his desk light, and she jumped.

  “Depending upon your level of involvement with Aristide’s … enterprises, you may or may not be aware that they went beyond simple smuggling. Things that made him very interesting to the Geddan government. But nothing that surprised me, and nothing outside my ability to protect him.” This time when she paused, she did drink. Her lipstick left a smutch on the glass, which she examined closely as she said, “I like to know what I am hiding. And I am certainly hiding something, if I put you on my payroll.”

  “Why are the Ospies prying into your business? You got something going on in your dad’s line, maybe?”

  Pulan tapped her wineglass pensively. Her fingernails, Cordelia noticed, were varnished beetle-green.

  “Drugs?” asked Cordelia. “Whores?” Then, thinking about the Lisoan prince on Pulan’s doorstep, about the reports of border skirmishes she’d gotten just before she ducked and ran, she added, “Or maybe guns?”

  Daoud’s typewriter bell dinged. This time it was Pulan who jumped, though barely.

  “It’s guns,” said Cordelia, “ain’t it?” Then, thinking back to earlier in the day, to Aristide’s careful identification of the strangers on the steps, “From Liso, to Tatié. You’re some kind of broker.”

  Pulan leveled a stare over the wineglass. Her words, when she spoke, were crisp and sharp as creased paper. “If you pose a threat to me, I will not hesitate to throw you to the sharks.”

  Well, that was nothing new; how else did folk live their lives?

  “Y’know,” said Cordelia, an electric crackle of excitement growing in her chest, “I’m getting an idea.”

  When Opal had shaken her hand and stuck her in the Cattayims’ truck bed, the last thing she’d said was maybe Cordelia could work from Porachis. Find them money, backers, weapons, anything. It felt, then, like a petty task, the kind of thing you told a kid to do to keep them out from underfoot. Where was she supposed to find that kind of thing, in a country where she didn’t speak the language?

  Well, she wasn’t a rotten kid, was she? And now she’d found somebody who spoke her tongue, and might have some words she wanted to hear.

  Squaring her shoulders, Cordelia shed her doubts and let her chin come up. “If I was looking to buy from you,” she said, “how much would I have to spend before you forgot I was dangerous to keep around?”

  A small curl at the corner of Pulan’s generous mouth was the only indication she’d been caught off guard. “And are you? Looking to buy?”

  “I represent some people who are. Maybe you’ve heard of us. We’re called the Catwalk.”

  “Oh,” said Pulan. “Yes, I think we have heard of them. Have we not, Daoud?”

  The little secretary laughed politely at her joke, and Cordelia realized she’d forgotten he was there.

  “We have also heard that you are penniless”—when Cordelia opened her mouth to tell some kind of lie, Pulan put a hand up and ran over her—“but very well organized.” She plucked a telegram from amidst the papers on her desk. “And right now, I have a problem that money cannot solve.”

  PART

  2

  CHAPTER

  TEN

  Aristide didn’t stay at the Abna Bhangri this time, but at a much smaller hotel in a less shimmering part of town. They had a garage at least, so he could park his car off the street after making several roundabout diversions through the tangled avenues of old Anadh that had grown up before the queen’s mother’s-mother’s-however-many-back had imposed a grid system. The first in the world, Porachin historians liked to claim.

  He got in late and slept badly, but he didn’t like the idea of being spotted around town, so he stayed in the stifling confines of his room until dawn broke.

  Breakfast was a potato turnover, purchased hastily from a cart on the street. The steam burned his mouth, and the peas burst scalding on his tongue. It hurt on the way down, but he swallowed it anyway.

  He caught an omnibus heading into the center of the city, got off before they crossed Noonaplati, caught a second bus into the garment district, and then finally boarded a third headed east. The first two had been crowded, full of commuters on their way into the city’s heart. This one, aimed uphill at the desert, was nearly empty.

  Well, it was hardly desert now. More like slums. Porachis’s famous aqueducts had watered a dusty hollow around a natural harbor until the city of Anadh grew from the parched earth, and spread like creeping ground cover. Over the lip of the rise, out of sight of the sea, shanty towns straggled into the rocks and sand.

  One could measure desperation by distance from the cliff’s edge. The address Sofie had given him clung to the margins of the lower middle class. He waited two stops past the most convenient and meandered back along a convoluted path, casually catching reflections in what glass he could find, and listening for footsteps. He hated that he’d come; hated that he’d returned to dodging around corners, laying false tracks. No one followed him, and his suspicion felt ridiculous.

  He’d been largely insulated from surveillance, under Pulan’s protection. She hired staff rarely and with great care. Yes, there were spies in her house and company, but she knew who they were and knew the strength of their loyalty to the last gram. Daoud, for instance, had been approached by the Ospies at one point early on, and promptly informed Pulan of the offer. For a while he had made a handy conduit for falsehoods, until they clocked he was feeding them spoiled meat and cut the connection.

  Besides, Pulan could out-bribe any government, and Aristide hardly ever gave them anything to report. This adventure would certainly be an exception, if the story made it back to anyone who cared what he got up to. But he didn’t intend that it should.

  Eventually, just a little after noon, he arrived unmolested and—as far as he knew—unobserved, at his desti
nation: a low, dark coffeehouse cloudy with the exhalations of multiple hookahs.

  He didn’t see her, even once he’d blinked away the smoke. He did see half a dozen women in foreman’s hats and cheap wool tunics having their lunch-hour smoke and coffee. A few of them shot sharp glances his way as he crossed the room to the counter, asked for his own pipe and cup, and settled into a corner booth to wait. He didn’t shoot back—it was no good to ask for trouble, and he’d learned the hard way that returning a glare from a certain kind of woman in Porachis meant exactly that, especially if one talked back with a Geddan accent.

  Sofie arrived ten minutes late, hair escaping from its pins, dusty to the knees. She wore a shapeless tunic over tight trousers and cheap rope sandals. He might not have recognized her—they’d only met for what, ten minutes in an attic, once?—but she was the only foreigner in the coffeehouse, and her pale face was drawn into a searching squint. Her eyes passed him once, as she scanned the room, but snapped back when she realized there were no other men present.

  No other pale women, either. Which wouldn’t matter too much until she opened her mouth. She could’ve been Enselmese, Hellican, Ibetian at a stretch.

  Her approach was tentative. She stood several feet back from his table when she asked, “Mr. Makricosta?” Her voice faded toward the end of his name, and she looked over her shoulder when she said it. A couple of women at the bar had overheard and sent some nasty looks her way. He hoped they would get out of here without a memorable incident.

  “Sit.” He held out the hookah’s hose. “You don’t speak Porashtu, do you?”

  She collapsed with an alacrity that might have alarmed him, if she hadn’t then snatched the hose and taken an ambitious drag. The cloud of smoke that issued from her mouth when she exhaled engulfed her head, so that when she spoke her voice came from within. “Blessed Queen. You came.”

  “I almost didn’t.”

  She waved away the smoke, and with it, his qualification. “Badly. Porashtu, I mean. I know it’s not ideal.” She looked around again, nerves plain on her sunburnt face.