The Prince of Shadow

by Curt Benjamin

  Llesho took them from his friend’s hand and slipped into them. “Outhouse?” he asked, and Hmishi pointed the way. When he returned, Master Jaks was waiting for him, and so was Habiba.

  “You are looking better.” Habiba smiled at him, and Llesho wondered what he looked better than. He hadn’t been wounded, or sick. But he realized that the tight knots between his shoulder blades were gone, and that the tension had smoothed away from his forehead. He did feel better, though he could couldn’t quite figure out how the unclenching of muscles all through his body had been accomplished, or why the mere fact of it made him feel so much freer when he still wore the governor’s silver chain around his neck.

  “Yesterday was rest-day,” Habiba continued, “But you missed it. Her ladyship wishes me to inform you that she grants this one day of celebration for your safe delivery. Use it well.” He smiled then. “And give her ladyship’s announcement to your companion, Lling, when she comes in.” He left then, with a little bow in Llesho’s direction that drew a warning frown from Jaks and sent a pained look across his face. Hmishi turned to him in amazement. “I don’t get it,” he said. Llesho shrugged, unwilling to trust his secrets to voice and air.

  Master Jaks watched the healer leave and then came forward himself. “Here in her ladyship’s gardens, you are as safe as you can be in Farshore Province,” he said. “But soon it won’t be safe anywhere. Learn what you can in the time you have, but if it comes to a choice, choose to heal.”

  “Tell that to Kaydu,” Hmishi interrupted.

  Kaydu picked that moment to enter the low house with Lling in tow and a white-faced monkey with soft brown fur on her shoulder. The monkey wore a practice shirt tied with a warrior’s knot and a tiny wizard’s hat upon his head. The monkey’s hands wrapped around Kaydu’s chin, and his long, supple tail curled over her opposite shoulder.

  “He doesn’t have to tell me,” she said, “Habiba already has.”

  The monkey shrieked and jumped up and down on Kaydu’s shoulder. Master Jaks gave her a pained expression, but ignored the monkey. “Will that stop you?” he asked her, and she laughed.

  “Nope. I’ll push him until he cries uncle or until he pushes back. That’s my job.

  “Oh, and by the way, I caught a spy.” Kaydu reached behind her and dragged Lling into the room, causing the monkey to screech again and lunge for Lling’s hair.

  “I’m not a spy!” Lling twisted her arm out of Kaydu’s grip with a glare of special loathing for the monkey. “I was keeping watch. And you didn’t catch me; that horrible creature did.”

  “No better a guard than a spy, to let Little Brother find you out!” Kaydu taunted.

  “If you’d meant Llesho harm, I’d have killed you with my bare hands, and your stupid monkey, too.”

  The monkey seemed to understand, because he screamed at her again and jumped up and down on Kaydu’s shoulder in a flurry of agitation. Llesho figured Little Brother still wasn’t safe from Lling’s wrath.

  Kaydu studied her intently, then smiled. “This one will kill.”

  “Kill?” Hmishi whispered.

  Kaydu raised a scornful eyebrow. “His excellency wasted his money on that one, should have left him to Yueh.”

  “Not if you want anything out of me,” Lling warned, and moved to stand at Hmishi’s left shoulder.

  Llesho didn’t understand the argument, but he knew where he stood on it. “Nor me,” he said, and took up his position at Hmishi’s right. “We are a team.”

  Exasperated, Kaydu looked to Master Jaks for support, but he shrugged. “As familiars go, a pearl diver is at least one step up from a monkey.” A smile tried to escape his tightly pursed lips, and he didn’t work very hard to suppress it. With a last nod to Llesho’s companions, he ducked out of the house, leaving Kaydu and her monkey to level matching glares at Hmishi.

  “If you screw up,” she said, “I will feed you to Lord Yueh’s men on a platter.” The monkey screeched his own disdain before leaping from Kaydu’s shoulder and scuttling away through the open window. Secure in having had the last word, Kaydu followed Master Jaks out the door.

  To Llesho’s surprise, Hmishi was the first to collect his wits about him. “What have you got us into, Llesho?”

  They were both looking at him now. Llesho considered telling them the truth: who he was, what Master Jaks thought he had done, and even the vow he had made to Lleck’s ghost in that terrifying hour in Pearl Bay. But he still hadn’t figured out why he was here, or how much any of those who wove their plots around him actually knew. So he threw himself on the bed, sat cross-legged with his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands, and shrugged. “I don’t have the slightest idea.”

  “Well, that’s just great.” Hmishi sat beside him, his own hands clapped to his forehead. Lling joined them, so they were like three monkeys sitting in a row. “But if you need anyone killed, it seems I am your girl.”

  The two boys grunted their indignation. But none of them could think of anything else to say.

  Chapter Thirteen

  WHEN the three friends were alone again with the promise of a day off, Hmishi turned to Llesho with a crooked smile. “Time for the grand tour,” he said. “Lling can protect us both if we come across any assassins in the cookhouse.”

  Lling cocked her head at a superior angle, but followed Hmishi out of the wooden house. They wandered along a flagstone path that snaked between ferns and clumps of bamboo, winding beside one of the narrow canals that threaded the compound. First they took Llesho to the cookhouse. A lean tyrant with a stick in his hand ordered his undercooks with the precision of a military review while the Thebin friends raided his pantry for cinnamon buns. They found no assassins, though Llesho wondered about the cook.

  Juggling the hot buns from hand to hand between bites, Hmishi and Lling showed their companion the practice yard, a small island cut off from the rest of the compound by dreamy pools of dark water adrift with water lilies and lotus blossoms. Two small foot-bridges gave access to the island, where a cadre of the governor’s guard were drilling spear exercises. Llesho recognized the forms, and his muscles jumped in sympathetic flexure to the grunts and curses of the fighters.

  “Jaks taught us to do that one a little differently,” Llesho commented, watching the guards go through their passes, “though I work better with the trident than with the spear.”

  Hmishi snorted around a mouthful of sticky bun. “Kaydu says I’d be better off with a rake and a hoe, but she’s trying to teach me trident and spear. Lling is the one you have to watch out for. She fights like a demon.”

  “Only compared to you,” she parried with a sniff of derision. Then she asked Llesho, “What was it like to actually fight in the arena?”

  “You’ll find out soon enough.” Llesho tried to sound more superior than he felt about his demonstration bout.

  “No, we won’t,” Lling corrected him. “Only slaves fight in the arena. Since the governor’s house keeps no slaves, it fields no stable of gladiators.”

  “I fought Kaydu in the ring myself,” Llesho reminded them, licking the last of the sticky cinnamon from his fingers.

  Hmishi shrugged. “That was a demonstration bout. At some point she tests us all. I don’t think it is just a fighting test, though, or I wouldn’t be here. She’s a witch, like her father.”

  Llesho hadn’t needed anyone to tell him that. But he wasn’t convinced about Her Ladyship’s good intentions. He lifted the silver chain he wore at his throat. “What about this?”

  Hmishi shrugged. He didn’t need more explanation of Llesho’s question—he had a similar chain around his own neck, as did Lling. “Something to do with the law, and that we need a legal guardian or owner until we are of an age of independence.”

  “There was a big argument when they first brought us here,” Lling added, her attention bent on catching a raisin that had leaped from her bun when she bit into it. “Her ladyship wanted an adoption contract or a guardianship for another couple of sum
mers. The governor wouldn’t hear of it, of course. He made a few pointed remarks about dragging every pig farmer and dirt scrabbler from Thebin over his threshold to stain the honor of his house. Habiba was on the governor’s side for that one, and her ladyship seems to take his advice more often than not.”

  “He’s the governor’s witch,” Llesho stated, referring to Habiba, who hadn’t seemed that frightening except in the power he wielded. “Even the governor’s lady must be afraid he’ll put a spell on her if she opposes him.” But he didn’t believe that for some reason. Nothing about the lady testing him in the weapons room led him to believe she would back down from anyone, not even a witch. Lling seemed to read his mind.

  “I think maybe he’s her ladyship’s witch, actually,” Lling said. “She’s not afraid of him, that’s clear.”

  She thought about the question for a moment before she gave a further explanation. “It is more like she understands that bringing her father’s position against slavery to Farshore is a political weakness that leaves her husband vulnerable. Habiba doesn’t like slavery either, but he doesn’t let that cloud his judgment. There is more going on than philosophy between them—get your mind out of the outhouse, I don’t mean that.”

  Hmishi gave her a less than chastened nod. They hadn’t spent months in Markko’s back room, or a night in Lord Chin-shi’s bed while the lord struggled with the Blood Tide destroying Pearl Island, however. They hadn’t taken weapons testing under her ladyship’s cold eye, or watched Habiba kill a good man with sorrow in his eyes but no hesitation in his hands.

  “Her ladyship is playing a deeper game than we know, I think,” he advised his companions, uncertain whether he helped or hurt them with the knowledge. “I suspect that Farshore doesn’t matter much in her plans at all. So I wonder why we do matter, and why we remain slaves if our freedom was important enough to bring three fairly useless pearl divers into the governor’s house guard.”

  “Slaves in name only,” Hmishi objected. “His excellency showed us the papers, already signed, but dated for our seventeenth summers.”

  He could have argued that the governor could tear up those papers as if they had never existed. When He thought about it, though, he had to admit that whatever plots her ladyship wove with her witch, she was still alive, and so was Llesho, which was more than he expected.

  Markko would have burned Kwan-ti to death in the training compound at Pearl Island, and Lord Chin-shi would have let him. Now Lord Chin-shi was dead and Kwan-ti was gone, vanished like a god from the roadside. If Llesho had to choose, he’d take the witch over the poisoner. It still left them with the governor’s silver chains around their necks, however, and the governor’s lady laying her plots around them.

  “Whatever we will become at seventeen, we are slaves now,” Llesho argued. “They can use us, or throw us away in the arena any time they want.”

  “Not the arena,” Lling insisted. “Kaydu is training us to be soldiers. I heard her talking to her father when they brought you in; the governor bought the freedom of the man you call Master Jaks because he wants to hire him on contract to train us. Kaydu doesn’t have the time to train novices; she is needed to run the standing guard through its paces.”

  She didn’t volunteer how she had heard this, and Llesho carefully didn’t ask, but let her distract him with a finger pointed at the fighters now divided into pairs and thrashing at each other with swords. Some of them, Llesho noticed, were women, though all were older than he and his companions. Their swords were curved differently than the one Llesho was used to, and they worked with a buckler on the weaker arm rather than a knife in hand, but the stances and motions seemed familiar, if combined strangely.

  Curious, he rose from his place beside his friends and slipped over the narrow footbridge, sliding around the perimeter of the combat area, until he came to the thing he was looking for, a rack of swords and bucklers, and a smaller collection of knives. He picked up a knife and a sword, and danced them through their paces. He became so lost in the motion and the weapons in his hands that he did not notice the experienced house guards falling still around him. Finally, no sound could be heard in the practice yard except for the frenzied dance of thrust and parry and underhand, overhand, sidewise slashing strokes of Llesho’s knife.

  He ended his exercise up on the ball of his right foot, his left poised like a crane about to take flight, the sword held high over his head for a downward penetrating strike while the knife flicked at the end of a curved sweep that protected his belly. Going still at the apex of his thrust, he blinked as the silence filtered into his consciousness. Six months ago, this sudden awareness of the rapt audience would have sent him scurrying in embarrassment for anonymity at the back of the crowd. Or, he would have pulled about him the dignity of his father, the tilt of his chin and the cold stare he had perfected by seven. Six months of training with Masters Den and Jaks had set new instincts into his muscles, however; he looked about him with the flinty challenge of a warrior in his eyes.

  At first, it appeared that he had no takers, and he began to relax his stance. But then, Kaydu herself came forward, armed as he was with knife and sword and the same look in her eyes. She threw down the sword like a dare and he did likewise, shifting his stance, curving his spine to draw his gut as far from the reach of her arm as possible, his knife held in a horizontal line like a fence between himself and his foe. Then his wrist turned and his body shifted around the axis of his knife arm to present a narrow sliver of a target. His knife snaked forward, curved under her guard, and rested with the point wedged beneath her chin.

  Kaydu stared at him, wide-eyed, while her knife hand opened of its own volition, to offer the knife on the flat of her palm. Llesho flicked his eyes once, groundward, and she let her knife drop. Only when she stood unarmed before him did he shift his own knife from its threatening position, but then her hand was flashing again, coming at him with a knife she had secreted in the cuff of her wrist guard, and his own knife flashed up, in reflex, and he would have severed the hand from her body and followed up on her throat without thought. Master Jaks stopped him—slapped his arm down and held on when Llesho would have twisted the knife into his teacher’s gut.

  “Llesho!” Jaks called to him, and Llesho became aware that the silence had given way to a low rumble, that his friends stared at him with mouths agape, and that Jaks was gazing deeply into his eyes, as if checking him for fever. Then he realized that he still held the knife in his cramped fist, and he dropped it with a dazed grunt.

  “She tried to kill me,” he explained shakily, fighting the urge to vomit.

  “I was testing you.” Kaydu rubbed at her own wrist, shaking as much as he was. Jaks glared at her.

  “I told you not to test him on the knife,” Jaks reminded her with a warning in his voice. “He cannot overcome the reflexes trained into him. You would have been lucky to lose a hand. He might not have been able to stop even after you were disabled.”

  Kaydu studied him through adrenaline nerves. Llesho recognized the feeling; he had it himself. “What did you do to me?” he asked, stunned at what he had almost done, at what Jaks intimated he would have done. Jaks shook his head slowly. “Not our doing,” he said. “We couldn’t reverse the early training, so we honed it. Your knife battles will still be to the death, but we wanted to give you a fair chance of being the one standing at the end of them.”

  “It seems you succeeded,” Kaydu said, more matter-of-factly than Llesho could manage under the circumstances. “Can you teach it to me?”

  “I wouldn’t,” Jaks told her, “even if I could. And your father would have me killed if I tried.”

  “Why?” She almost seemed to be sniffing at the scent of the secret, but Jaks smiled knowingly and shook his head.

  “Ask your father,” he said, with a warning glance at the fighters watching them in their various stages of arrested sparring. She relaxed into a gesture of submission then, and bowed to Llesho with the time-honored formula of respect.
“The teacher becomes the student.”

  Llesho gave Master Jaks a look that told him he would not settle for nonanswers. But first, he had to ease the fears of the guards who had seen the fight, and would now hesitate to engage with him in his own practice sessions. “However,” he said, “the student handles the trident and the spear like a rake and a hoe.”

  Somewhere in the crowd someone snickered, remembering the insult to the skills of the Thebin pearl divers. He smiled, with deliberate mischief in the grin, and bowed to the guards in their training class and to their teacher. When he looked around, Master Jaks had disappeared. From across the narrow watercourse, Hmishi and Lling were watching him with solemn, dark eyes. Llesho didn’t bother to smile at them—no point in it, since he had no consolation to give them, not even the secrets that would only have made them more afraid. With a last bow, he withdrew across the footbridge and rejoined his companions.

  “Where is the infirmary?” he asked.

  “That way.” Lling pointed to an airy building with white cloths blowing at the windows, down another path and across another tiny bridge. Llesho decided that, pretty as it was, he could quickly get quite sick of all the water standing in the way of a straight line to anywhere.

  “Do you want us to go with you?” Hmishi asked, but he had taken a protective stance at Lling’s shoulder, and Llesho could see the hesitation, the stubbornness in the set of Hmishi’s chin.

  It hurt that his old friends looked at him with fear and mystery in their eyes, but he could think of nothing to say that would make things the way they were before. He shook his head, and answered with an effort, “No. I just want to visit a friend.”

  They did not ask him who that friend was, or how he came to have friends other than themselves in the governor’s compound, when he had been there just two days and had spent all of that sleeping. He wondered if they were afraid he only had unearthly answers for all their questions now, but watched them go without a word. Then he headed for the infirmary.