“A plant,” Alizhan said. “If people eat it, it makes them impervious to magic. Thiyo, you’re brilliant—”
He was already shaking his head. He’d poked plenty of holes in his own plan in the last few seconds. “Merat manipulated me after I’d been living in Estva and eating it for months.”
“Sardas had to poison you first, and Merat did something so crude and obvious that you knew she’d touched you as soon as you were awake,” Alizhan said. “That’s not Iriyat’s style. She’s careful. Unobtrusive. And she won’t expect anyone to have any protection against her. Best of all, if she tries to alter their memories and fails, they’ll know.”
“Whereas if we use medusa venom on Iriyat, she can simply spin it into more personal tragedy and victimhood,” Kasrik said. “I see. Your way makes the Council turn on her. It’s a step in the right direction.”
Thiyo blinked. If taking down Iriyat was only a step, what was Kasrik’s ultimate goal? What was in those pamphlets?
“We might still need the venom,” Alizhan said. “My… grandfather said some things in our brief acquaintance about how no prison could hold her.”
“We’ll keep it in mind for after we catch her,” Thiyo said. “Right now our problem—or, I should clarify, one of our many problems—is that nightvine grows in Estva, and that’s a long way from here.”
“Eliyan, can I borrow one of your robes?”
Eliyan stared at Alizhan. The question had emerged from nowhere. “Can you borrow one of the sacred robes of my office as a priest for the Temple of the Balance?”
“Yeah,” Alizhan said. She knew exactly what Eliyan’s tone meant, and everything beneath it, and chose not to be bothered. More than that, there was a note of impatience in her voice. She was waiting for the rest of them to catch up, but Thiyo was depths-drowned if he could figure out what connection she’d made.
“I suppose this has something to do with what we were discussing?” Eliyan asked, resigned.
“Yes. I know where we can find some nightvine and I need one of your robes to get in.”
“I do so much more skulking ever since you entered my life,” Thiyo complained. Alizhan had rushed him all the way across the city so she could watch the entrance to the priests’ quarters in Temple Street from a hiding spot tucked between two buildings. “We’re always jumping into rivers and hiding in bushes. Or lurking in shadows, as the case may be.”
“You love it,” Alizhan said, only half paying attention to him. She was watching the guard. “Besides, didn’t you and Ev traipse through all kinds of wilderness together? I saw it. You took her to that spring—”
“The islands are clean,” Thiyo said. “Mainlanders don’t wash often enough and they keep all sorts of foul animals around.”
“You’re afraid of horses,” Alizhan said. Their ride from Adappyr had cemented her suspicion into certainty. And he’d been fussy about that straw-filled stall back in the stables of Estva. “We might as well say it out loud. It’s not like I don’t know. You hold it together pretty well when you’re forced to ride somewhere, but you’re afraid.”
“I readily admit my own cowardice in many domains, but not this one. I am not afraid, I am disgusted.”
“Uh huh,” Alizhan said. “The guards are changing.”
Beside her, Thiyo muttered something that sounded like “they’re entirely too large,” and then added, more audibly, “Tell me about that guard.”
“It’s a man. He likes women,” she added, answering the question Thiyo hadn’t asked aloud. “I don’t see why that matters, since I’m just going to knock him out—oh.”
“Find me something to wear under this dress and I’ll save you the trouble.”
She nodded slowly, sifting through possible options. It might work to their advantage to come back at the end of the shift when the guard would be tired. “I’m not used to having help. Except for Ev.”
“I recall helping you break out of a Nalitzvan prison and into the palace.”
“Yes, but I didn’t know those places. And you…” Alizhan didn’t know how to finish her sentence and experienced an instant of profound gratitude that Thiyo couldn’t read her thoughts. She’d almost said aren’t what you used to be, which wasn’t fair. Thiyo hadn’t had any trouble speaking Laalvuri since they’d arrived, and he’d gotten through the gates without her help. “Well, you’re not Ev,” Alizhan said, adjusting her sentence. She trusted herself to win a fight more than she trusted Thiyo, despite his height and reach.
“Ev and I have different skills,” Thiyo said, affecting great patience. He was guarding his thoughts. He must have guessed the unkind direction of her own. Damn it. “Now, if you have time to explain your plans to me, I’m available.”
She’d grabbed his arm and rushed here after leaving Eliyan and Kasrik to compose their warning pamphlet. Obviously she wanted to break in, but Thiyo had no idea why.
“That bag of dried nightvine that Ayat gave you,” Alizhan said. “It was still on the ship after you and Ev… well, I had it, but Sardas confiscated it.”
“Sardas. He’s here in Laalvur. In the priests’ quarters.” There was a chilling pause. Alizhan couldn’t sort out if Thiyo was angry with her for not mentioning this earlier, or if all of his anger was reserved for Sardas betraying him. “Does this plan of yours involve murdering him?”
“I thought we weren’t supposed to murder people,” Alizhan said. “I’ve been trying really hard to do the right thing. It would be a lot simpler if we just killed…” Alizhan reconsidered her next word and cleared her throat. Their hiding spot wasn’t private enough to say her name. “You know. But I haven’t because I thought Ev wouldn’t approve.”
“That’s the only reason?”
“Well,” Alizhan hedged.
“I don’t think it would solve much, in any case,” Thiyo said. “She’s a beloved public figure. If she dies before we discredit her, there’ll be trouble. And as for our friend in the priests’ quarters, in case you’ve forgotten—I certainly haven’t—he drugged and abducted me, causing me to be on the ship where I was thrown overboard into the venomous embrace of a giant medusa. And Ev’s position on killing people is more complex than you give her credit for, but that’s irrelevant, first because she’s not here, and second, because she’s not the one who was drugged and abducted.”
“We don’t need to kill him. Just rob him.”
“Speak for yourself.”
At first, he was speaking brashly, covering the doubt in his heart over whether he needed or wanted to kill Sardas, or if he was capable of such a thing. Then Thiyo’s shield slipped and his thoughts took a dark turn. Oh, but all those weeks of silence. All those words I have yet to win back. All those dreams of ghostly creatures sliding under the surface of the sea trailing pain and poison behind them—dreams that will plague me for the rest of my life. None of that would have happened if Sardas hadn’t abducted me. That depths-drowned slippery fuck was working for Iriyat the whole time. Every friendly word was bait for a trap. I could squeeze the breath out of the old man’s traitorous throat and watch while he struggled.
“I think we should take a walk,” Alizhan said.
The sound of Thiyo’s voice surprised her, as calm as it was. “Don’t you need to stake out the entrance?”
She shook her head. If Thiyo would distract the guard for her, she could slip inside and figure out the layout of the place from someone’s thoughts. She’d handle the rest once she got in. It seemed wise to keep Thiyo away from Sardas. She grabbed him by the hand—still such a novel pleasure—and took off, leading them up and away from the ocean.
She chattered during the walk, commenting on shops and houses and neighborhoods and anything that passed them by, and eventually Thiyo paid attention to her. “This is the neighborhood called The Knuckles?”
“Yes. Very wealthy. Quiet kind of place.”
“This is where the house was, then.”
Alizhan hadn’t meant to lead them here. She’d been distr
acting Thiyo, not plotting a course through the city. They were only one street over from Gold Street. “Maybe we should leave.”
“No,” Thiyo said after a moment. “I think you should show me.”
“There won’t be much to see,” Alizhan said, but she took him there anyway. The charred stone remains of the house had been removed, but new construction hadn’t started yet, so there was a bare, dusty pit in the middle of the lot, surrounded by overgrown gardens. “It looked a lot like the other houses in the street, when it was here.”
“Do you think she plans to build another house here?”
“I don’t know. Probably.”
Thiyo glanced to either side, checking for observers, then approached the walled garden and its gate. “Can we get in?”
Alizhan shrugged. It didn’t seem worth it to her, but if Thiyo was curious, she could satisfy him. She found handholds in the garden wall and scrambled over the top and down into the bushes on the other side. Then she opened the gate so Thiyo could stroll in.
He had endless patience for examining the remains of the house. Being here made Alizhan shudder. This was the site of Kasrik’s torture, not to mention the suffering of all the other children. Iriyat had used this place for her horrifying experiments for years, all in the name of curing Alizhan. And because of that damn fire, there was no evidence of any of it. They shouldn’t have come.
Thiyo was trampling the garden, not that it could really be called that. It was a field of weeds dotted with a few enormous bushes. Vines that had once clung to the walls of the house had been hacked back and now sent runners crawling through the undergrowth. Iriyat had always preferred the illusion of wilderness in her gardens, but this was too far even for her tastes. The gardener’s hand wasn’t so much invisible as absent.
No. That wasn’t true. Someone had planted everything here. Maybe not Iriyat herself, but someone working under her. There was still evidence of landscaping if you squinted. The variety of flowers and bushes. Their placement. All the other houses in Gold Street had gardens, so in order to blend in, this one did too. Alizhan wished the fire had taken all of it.
Thiyo was standing in the middle of a thicket of weeds that came up to his knees, staring at his shoes. “These are the same flowers.”
The same flowers as what? There were hardly any flowers blooming in the lot. It was all scraggly stems and leaves. Alizhan went closer until she could see what Thiyo was staring at.
The plants were no taller than his toes. It was strange to find proof of new growth in this place. Everything else had the air of survival, something barely clinging to life. These were freshly sprouted and flourishing despite being in full sun. Iriyat called the tiny, star-shaped lavender flowers shadebloom. Alizhan had never had much of a memory for plants, but she recognized her own nickname easily enough. It was a generic term for any plant that preferred shade to sun, but these particular flowers weren’t generic at all.
Last time Alizhan had seen one, it had been pressed dry and sitting on the tip of Thiyo’s finger. He’d found it among Sardas’s papers in Estva. Alizhan had panicked at the sight of it. That was what he meant by the same flowers—Thiyo remembered, too.
They shouldn’t have been here. Lavender shadebloom were so rare that they only grew in the gardens of Varenx House. In defiance of the laws of God and man, Iriyat had bred them herself.
How had they come to grow here? A seed carried on the wind or caught in someone’s shoe, it didn’t matter. They shouldn’t be growing anywhere.
“Alizhan? Why are you smiling like that?”
For an instant, words failed her and there was only the visceral thrill of the idea taking hold. Her mother had committed unspeakable crimes. Lavender shadebloom were one of the few pure, harmless things Iriyat had brought into the world. Elsewhere, outside the reach of the Temple of the Balance, Iriyat might have been lauded for her talents in the art of breeding new flowers. But here in Laalvur, these delicate little blossoms were a crime and a sin.
Alizhan plucked one and presented it to Thiyo between thumb and forefinger with great care, the way she would have offered him a gem or a vial of poison. “I have an idea.”
30
Letters from Another World, No. 23
It is monstrously unjust that our wealthiest citizens, those with a stake in textile manufacture or shipping or banking, have formed what they call out the Council of Nine, a grouping of the nine richest families of Laalvur, and they mete out what they deem justice among themselves. We who do not possess such wealth can be sentenced without trial, and when we are put on trial, it is by the City Court, an institution that scorns us. But for those nine families—every last member, from their ailing grandparents to their youngest cousins—there is a different kind of justice.
Should a Council member commit a crime—say, for example, that Iriyat ha-Varensi had abducted defenseless children touched by magic and had ordered corrupt Priests of the Balance to perform vile tortures upon their bodies in secret, for the mad and terrible purpose of finding one among them who can predict and perhaps even control quakes and waves*—then the only ones who can pass judgment upon that crime are the other Council members. In such cases where there are only eight Council members who vote, the High Priest of the Balance is asked to break ties. All that is required of these so-called trials is that the Council members come to an agreement. There are no constraints on what they could do to their fellows. Severe punishments are rare. These monsters who would see us shackled to the oars in their ships for petty theft are loathe to think of themselves as subject to any rules, and beyond that, they live in a foul and writhing nest of financial and familial entanglements that ensure they will not turn on one another.
What would it take for these cruel and selfish animals to see that even among their lot, one is more vicious than the rest? I do not know, readers. How many pamphlets will I have to write before I am believed or sentenced to death? Even now, the guards of every Great House stomp through the city, searching for the writer known as Vesper, or the presses that print his words.
But let us discuss other things. This, after all, is a letter from another world. A world in which we can imagine the same justice for the rich and the poor…
[The remainder of this pamphlet has been excised for brevity, excepting the footnote below.]
*If Ha-Varensi wants me jailed—or more likely, murdered in secret—for what she calls libel and I call truth, she’ll have to find me first. —V
31
People to Deceive and Objects to Steal
“What the fuck are we doing?” Thiyo hissed. Alizhan had dragged him into the shadows and was picking the lock on a servant’s entrance to an opulent townhouse. It didn’t seem like a good idea to sleep in a house they’d broken into, which was what Thiyo desperately wanted, and this wasn’t where they’d find Sardas or his stash of nightvine. Or Ev or Iriyat or any of the other issues they needed to address. Alizhan hadn’t even told him whatever idea had made her grin like a madwoman in the garden in Gold Street. She’d just pulled him along for a few streets until she’d seen this place, then they’d crept around the back to break in for some mysterious purpose. Thiyo was put out about the whole thing.
The door swung open. “Mar ha-Solora owns this place. He used to keep a mistress here. The last one I spied on was a dancer named Isha, but that was before I found Iriyat’s journal, which feels like ten thousand years ago. I think I was here in Pyer, so it’s been four months. Who knows if Isha was the most recent occupant? You should hope it was somebody taller if you want to borrow any clothes. Anyway, I knew this place would be vacant because Iriyat wouldn’t stand for her future husband to have a mistress. She barely tolerated it before, and he wasn’t anything to her then. But that’s not important. You wanted a bath and something to wear, right?” Alizhan stepped into the kitchen and gestured grandly. “There’s time for a rest here before we go back to Temple Street.”
“You’re a marvel,” Thiyo said as he entered. The tiled k
itchen was narrow, without a pot or a spoon in sight. No one had been here in some time. He touched her shoulder, and when she didn’t recoil, he spun her around and kissed her forehead.
She smiled, and then her face fell and she stepped away. Thiyo didn’t have a chance to decipher that reaction before she said, “We’ll have to do some of the work ourselves.”
Thiyo pushed past Alizhan to explore the empty house, which still had all its carpets and plush sofas and its luxurious bed. Mar was wealthy enough that he could kick his mistress out without bothering to reclaim any furniture. What had become of the previous resident? Nothing good. She’d left all her clothes and shoes behind. Her shoes were too small, as predicted, but there was a table in her bedroom littered with bottles of perfumed oil and pots of powder. Thiyo could work with this.
Alizhan made a lot of noise ransacking every other room of the house, and when she joined him in the bedroom, a pair of brown leather sandals dangled from her hand. “Mar’s, I’m guessing,” she said. “You can thank him for the loan after I fix his memory, which I still have to figure out how to do. He won’t let me get near him if he can’t remember who I am.”
“Neither will Ev,” Thiyo said.
“Don’t remind me.”
How would they get to Ev? Maybe that shouldn’t matter to him more than justice, more than protecting the city, but it did. He wanted to talk about it. He wanted to talk about everything, to hash it all out, debate every last detail. Alizhan hadn’t even told him why she was bringing him here, and that seemed a harmless enough piece of information. But she had to know by now how much he wanted to plan—it was killing him, an itch he couldn’t scratch—so her silence on the matter must be deliberate. He decided not to push. He’d wanted a bath and a bed and she’d provided.
They filled the bath. Alizhan stripped, leaving her dirty clothes in a pile on the floor, washed efficiently and then went back into the room and began to search it for something. Thiyo wouldn’t have remarked on her nakedness, except he’d spent so much time with Ev that he couldn’t help comparing their attitudes. He’d had sex with Ev and it was still impossible to imagine her shedding all her clothes and crossing the room naked with such blithe disregard.
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