“Prince Tang, that will never be,” Ruha said, speaking sharply. She climbed out of the wagon and moved several paces away. “But I have a better way to show my gratitude. I shall let you leave the wagon before I throw my fireball into it.”
In the blink of an eye, Ruha was surrounded by Tang’s battered and bloodied guards, each holding a long-bladed halberd or square-tipped sword within an inch of her body. Wei Dao stood behind them, looking more than a little disappointed that she had not been able to draw her dagger quickly enough to kill the witch before her husband’s soldiers got in the way.
Tang eyed the witch’s fireball and did not climb from the wagon. “Burning blossoms would be unfortunate mistake for all concerned—especially Yanseldara.”
Though the heat of the fireball felt as though it were melting her arm, Ruha stopped short of flinging it into the wagon. “Do not lie to me. I heard you say this morning that Cypress needs something more from you to complete his spell.” The witch waved her flaming sphere toward the wagon. “It seems obvious enough that what he needs is fresh ylang oil.”
“Yes, that is true.” Tang scowled at Wei Dao and motioned for her to return her dagger to its sheath. “Cypress needs fresh ylang oil to make love spell.”
“Love spell?” Ruha gasped.
“You know what ylang blossoms do,” Tang replied. “You see that this morning.”
“A dead dragon—a dracolich—wishes the love of a half-elf?”
Tang nodded. “He loves Yanseldara for many years, since she wounds him and sends him away from Elversult.” Tang placed a hand over his heart. “Love unrequited is most sad.”
Wei Dao rolled her eyes, then gestured at the fireball still burning in Ruha’s palm. “We have no time for this foolishness, Wise Husband. Tell witch why she cannot destroy ylang blossoms.”
Tang looked into Ruha’s eyes and, finding no sympathy there, reluctantly nodded. “Very well. Love is matter of spirit. To save Yanseldara’s spirit or to steal it, same thing is needed—powerful love potion.”
“Then there must be a difference in how it is used.”
“It is not necessary that you know that,” said Wei Dao.
The witch ignored Wei Dao and hefted her fireball. “Perhaps you would prefer that I assume you are lying about the blossoms?”
Prince Tang looked genuinely hurt. “You call me liar? I risk my life—life of royal Shou Prince—to save you, and this is how you repay my love?”
Ruha lowered the fireball and used her free hand to snuff it out. She had learned all she was going to about the blossoms, and it was just enough to keep her from destroying the wagon.
“Prince Tang, you cannot love me, any more than Cypress loves Yanseldara.” Ruha spoke softly, for her intention was more to explain than to hurt. “Only a man can love, and you have yet to become a man.”
Tang leapt out of the wagon, pushing several guards aside as he stepped toward Ruha. “Shou prince becomes man in tenth year. I am man for twenty years!”
Ruha shook her head. “You want me because I deny you, and that is the emotion of a child, not a man.”
Tang’s face contracted into a shriveled mask of rage and pain. His mouth opened as though he were going to speak, but all that emerged was an unintelligible sputter.
Wei Dao stepped to the prince’s side and took his arm. “She knows nothing, Great Prince.”
The princess motioned to the guards and spoke in Shou. A pair of them sheathed their swords and seized Ruha by her arms. They started to drag her from the spicehouse, and Prince Tang made no move to stop them.
Ruha glanced over her shoulder. “A man takes responsibility for his actions, Prince Tang.”
As she spoke, the witch tried to summon to mind the incantation of a wind spell and discovered she could not. Only the faintest hint of the lasal haze remained in her mind, but it was enough to prevent her from using her magic.
Keeping her gaze fixed on the prince’s face, Ruha continued, “A man does not allow his fear to dictate his actions, and a man does not hide his mistakes from those who can help him correct them.”
Prince Tang looked away, and Wei Dao urged, “Pay her no attention. After Lady Feng is returned—”
“Returned?” Ruha snapped her arms free of her captors and spun around, then found the tips of several halberds pressed against her body. She ignored them. “Prince Tang, if you believe Cypress intends to return your mother, then you truly are a child.”
The guards seized Ruha’s wrists and started to drag her away, until Tang spoke to them in Shou. The two men stopped, but still grasped the witch’s arms so tightly her bones ached.
“If he wants potion, Cypress must return Mother,” said Tang.
Ruha shook her head. “Does he not need her to cast the magic that will make Yanseldara love him? And even if he can do it himself—which he cannot, or you could not have been confident of her safety until now—remember why he attacked the Ginger Lady. Does he not fear that Hsieh intends to put someone else in charge of the Ginger Palace? Would Lady Feng not make an excellent hostage to guarantee approval of the mandarin’s choice?”
Tang turned to his wife. They began to argue in Shou.
“You need help to recover your mother.” Ruha spoke loudly to make herself heard over the quarrel. “Admit that, and you have taken your first step to becoming a man.”
Tang jabbed his index finger against his wife’s forehead and shouted something angry at her, then whirled away and strode over to Ruha.
“I need no help to rescue Mother!” The prince glared at Ruha for a moment, then stepped past her and started toward the door. “And I am no child—I prove that soon enough!”
Ten
The dungeon beneath the Ginger Palace was unlike any of those dank, deep, dark places from which the Harpers had taught Ruha to escape. Instead of mildew and offal, it smelled of cedar and lamp oil, and the sound that filled its corridors was not the wail of tortured prisoners, but the silken swishing of Shou robes. The doors hung on brass hinges rather than leather straps, and they were made of red-lacquered mahogany instead of rusty iron—a construction that would make them no less sturdy once they were barred shut. The stone walls were smooth-plastered, washed with white lime, and a foot thick; the ceiling, nearly fifteen feet above, was formed by the exposed underside of the floor planks above, and therein lay the only weakness Ruha could find.
The long procession of guards reached an intersection and, when Wei Dao attempted to turn right, came to a sudden halt. The leader of the soldiers spoke to the princess in Shou. She replied sharply and pointed at Ruha. The witch had again been gagged with her own veil, her arms were pinned behind her by two separate men, and she was surrounded by a ring of warriors holding naked sword blades within inches of her throat.
Though the lasal haze had already faded from her mind, Ruha’s escort had been too attentive to allow her to cast any spells, so she could not understand the conversation. Nevertheless, she had explored the dungeon during her initial search for Yanseldara’s staff and could imagine what they were discussing. Down the left corridor lay the palace’s tidy prison cells; down the right lay the gruesome chambers of torture and death, where there were certainly enough shackles, fetters, and jaw clamps to keep even a wu-jen from escaping.
Wei Dao prevailed over the commander and led the column to the right. Ruha brought a two-syllable sun spell to mind and, as the clumsy ensemble around her struggled to turn the corner, pretended to stumble. The ring of swordsmen jerked their blades back—Prince Tang had been most emphatic in saying he expected the prisoner alive when he returned—and that was all the room the witch needed.
Slipping her gag as she had once before, Ruha picked her feet off the brick floor and kicked them both backward. Only one of her heels landed on target, smashing the knee of one of the guards holding her arms. The other missed its mark and slipped between the fellow’s legs. As she pitched forward, the witch brought her foot up, catching the soldier squarely in the groin. Bo
th men screamed and released her arms, then landed beside her on the floor.
At once, Ruha rolled onto her side, looked toward one of the oil lamps hanging on the wall, then closed her eyes, covered her ears, and uttered her spell. There was an ear-splitting boom and a flash of light so brilliant it pained the witch’s eyes even through their closed lids.
The next thing Ruha knew, she was lying beneath a heap of writhing Shou guards. If they were screaming, the witch could not hear them; the ringing in her own ears was so loud she could not have heard a thunderclap breaking over her head. Half expecting to feel a long steel blade driving between her ribs, she opened her eyes and crawled from beneath the heap of soldiers.
The entire line of guards lay on the white bricks, their open mouths voicing screams the witch could not hear. Some of the men held their ears and some covered their eyes, but they all remained too stunned to do more than writhe in pain. The oil lamp she had used for her spell was gone, leaving a huge sooty smudge above the sconce where it had hung, but neither the wall nor the ceiling had suffered any material damage from the detonation.
Ruha searched for Wei Dao’s form at the head of the column, weighing the wisdom of wading through the tangle of bodies to retrieve her late husband’s jambiya from the princess. Unfortunately, the witch could not be sure how soon her captors would begin recovering from their shock. The effects would normally last long enough for her to run an eighth league, but she had no way to tell how long she herself had been incapacitated. Besides, there were a dozen more guards at the entrance to the dungeon, and it would not be long before they arrived to investigate the detonation.
Ruha pulled a dagger from a soldier’s belt, then stepped over him and three other quivering men and started down the left-hand corridor. As she moved, the witch kept a careful watch on the floor, stopping to pry out any pebbles lodged between bricks. It took only a few moments to fill her hand, for even the tidy Shou could not keep from tracking tiny stones inside, and it hardly seemed worth the effort to scrape them from the seams of a dungeon floor.
The witch glanced back down the corridor. Although Wei Dao had not entirely recovered from her shock, she had risen and was picking her way down the corridor. The princess’s eyes had the blank, inert stare of sightlessness, and she was moving her open hands in front of her body in an ever changing pattern of circular motions. Ruha found her pursuer’s determination more than a little alarming; only a very good fighter would feel confident enough to carry the battle to a foe while both blind and deaf.
Ruha shook her pebbles and uttered the incantation of a sand spell. The stones began to oscillate in her palm, scrubbing off two layers of skin before she could hurl them at the ceiling. They struck in a circle as broad as her shoulders and continued to vibrate, much too fast for the eye to follow. She heard a faint drone above the ringing in her ears, and a steady shower of powdered wood rained down on her shoulders. The witch hiked up the hem of her aba, then pressed her hands and feet against opposite walls and began to chimney up the walls of the corridor.
Ruha had climbed about ten feet when Wei Dao passed beneath her, still circling her hands before her body and staring vacantly ahead. The drone of the sand spell must have been loud enough for the princess to hear, for she stopped directly beneath the scouring pebbles and cocked her head. She turned her palm up to catch some of the powdered wood raining down her, then seemed to guess what was happening and started after the witch.
Ruha climbed to the ceiling and waited beside her circle of buzzing pebbles. The stones had dug a deep labyrinth of wormy grooves into the wood, and it would not be much longer before they scoured clear through. Already, islands of plank were trembling as though they would fall at any moment, but the witch did not dare reach up to pull them loose. The whirling pebbles would take her fingers off.
A short distance below, Wei Dao had nearly climbed within arm’s reach. She carried Ruha’s jambiya clenched between her teeth, and her blinking, squinting eyes were fixed vaguely on the hem of the witch’s aba. Down the corridor, the guards were beginning to rise and rub their heads. Deciding to attack before they gathered their wits, Ruha pulled a foot away from the wall and thrust it at the princess’s head.
Wei Dao continued to squint until the approaching kick had nearly reached her face … then she calmly slipped the blow by looking away and allowing the witch’s heel to glance off her brow. Instantly, the princess’s hand snapped back, smashing the hard bone of her wrist into the tendons of Ruha’s ankle. A sharp, tingling pain shot up the witch’s shin, and her leg went numb below the knee.
As Ruha tried to pull her foot back, Wei Dao trapped the witch’s ankle in the crook of her elbow, then locked it in place by clasping her hand against the back of her neck. She pulled her legs away from the walls and dropped, already raising her free hand toward the jambiya between her teeth.
The witch pushed against the walls with all her might, barely keeping herself from falling to the floor when Wei Dao’s weight hit the end of her dangling leg. From behind Ruha, barely audible over the ebbing roar inside her head, came the muted clamor of the guards gathering themselves up to help the princess.
Wei Dao took the jambiya from between her teeth.
Ruha swung her second leg away from the wall and smashed her heel into the back of her foe’s skull. Wei Dao’s head snapped forward; then the knife slipped from her hand and her body went limp. The princess dropped a man’s height to the floor, landing in the semi-rigid heap of someone caught halfway between consciousness and unconsciousness. A pair of guards appeared beside her immediately.
Ruha looked up and saw light shining through the grooved planks above her head. The pebbles were gone, having eaten all the way through the wood. The witch did not wait to see if the soldiers below would attack her or tend to their mistress. She braced her good foot against the wall—the leg that Wei Dao had struck was too numb to trust—then made a fist and punched it through the boards above her head. The wood fell apart easily, and she had no trouble widening the hole until she came to a solid edge. The witch grabbed hold and glanced down to see several guards climbing after her.
Although Ruha did not know any wood magic, she sprinkled a handful of decaying wood on their heads and muttered a few mystic-sounding syllables. That was enough to make them drop back into the corridor and scurry for cover. Having bought herself more time, the witch pushed her second hand through the hole—then gasped as her wrists were seized from above by a pair of small, callused hands. Without bothering to tear away what remained of the weakened planks, her unseen captor pulled her up through the floor.
Ruha found herself standing before a blank-faced soldier dressed in Minister Hsieh’s yellow, silk-jacketed armor. She was in a fair-sized room furnished only with kneeling mats, several low tables, and bookshelves, surrounded by a dozen more of the mandarin’s guards, all with long, square-tipped swords in their hands. Along with Yu Po, Hsieh himself stood a half-dozen paces behind his guards.
“When strange events occur, it seems you are always near.” Although Hsieh did not speak loudly, the ringing in Ruha’s ears had faded to the point where, with a little effort, she could understand his words. The mandarin pointed overhead, where the witch’s pebbles were scouring a fresh set of grooves into the coffered ceiling. “Please to stop magic before it ruins Princess Wei Dao’s apartment.”
The man who had pulled Ruha out of the floor released her hands and stepped back, but the witch did not even consider casting a spell at the mandarin or any of his men. Although Tang had ordered his guards not to harm her, Hsieh’s soldiers had received no such instructions and would undoubtedly strike her down at the first sign of danger to their master. Ruha gestured at the ceiling and spoke a single sibilant syllable. The pebbles fell out of the air, dropping through the hole to clatter off the dungeon’s brick floor.
“So much better.” Hsieh kneeled at one of the room’s low tables and waved Ruha to the other side. “Please.”
Ruha allowed her
self to be escorted to the table, then sat cross-legged on one of the reed mats. Although she was not overly fond of the chairs that Heartland hosts always thrust at their visitors, she found the Shou habit of kneeling even less comfortable.
Hsieh waited for her to arrange her aba and veil, and then said, “Please to explain your return to Ginger Palace. I am under impression that Vaerana Hawklyn takes me hostage to get you out.”
“She came too soon.” As the witch spoke, she was frantically trying to calculate how much she should tell Hsieh about events in Elversult. Though he lacked the same reasons as Prince Tang and Wei Dao to conceal Lady Feng’s abduction, he might easily conclude that the best way to recover her was to let Cypress have what he wanted. “I had not concluded my business.”
Hsieh nodded thoughtfully. “And this business—whatever it is—do you finish it now?”
Ruha shook her head. “No, I was … interrupted.”
Hsieh allowed himself a tiny smile, but made no remark about the interruption involving a trip to the dungeon. “Perhaps this business is something I can help you conclude.”
Ruha lifted her brow. “Do you not wish to know what I am doing?”
“You are spying,” Hsieh replied simply. “I have need of spy.”
After a moment’s consideration, Ruha asked, “And who am I to spy upon?”
“I come to speak to Lady Feng, but she is not here.” He leaned forward and spoke so quietly that Ruha could barely make out the words. “I understand she is in Elversult. Perhaps she dishonors Peerless Emperor of Civilized World.”
Ruha frowned, confused by the mandarin’s implication and uncertain what he wanted from her. “What do you think she has done to dishonor your emperor?”
The mandarin flushed and looked at the tabletop. “Perhaps she takes lover.”
“A lover?” Ruha scoffed.
Hsieh frowned and glanced toward his guards. “For spy, you are most imprudent.”
“She is more than spy!” accused Wei Dao’s voice.
The Veiled Dragon Page 17