by Marcin Wrona
Pale Queen’s Courtyard
Copyright 2011 by Marcin Wrona
If you will only return to Alu-nin-hura,
We will dance once more in your courtyard.
Chapter 1: A Vase from Akros
Leonine plucked a final note and quietly exhaled. As that last vibrant peal faded to a soft hum and died, applause rang out, followed by the predictable babble of courtiers trying to frame their praise in just the right words.
Sycophants.
There was a time when he would have committed their kind words to memory, but those days were behind him. He was not, in point of fact, listening, although he nodded politely and assumed a mask of humbly bemused gratitude. One did not recite the old lays for nobility as long as he had without learning that their sweet turns of phrase were intended more often for each other than for the artist.
So it was here, in the manor of Ila-uanna, the widow he had come to seduce.
It was not rumoured to be an especially difficult task. She was, after all, a woman who had commissioned scribes to write for her a veritable library of salacious poetry, and this while her husband was still alive. She had even, if the talk of Inatum was to be believed, rewarded the scribes with her body in place of shekels.
Not a rumour – not at all in question – was her wealth. Her husband had been an able and canny merchant. His barges carried cypress and cedar from the woodlands of Karhan in the spring, when the placid Hapur was at its swiftest, and his caravans carried incense, linens and more exotic goods overland during the great river’s sluggish dry season.
Nevertheless, although she was said to have a ferocious hunger for men, and her humble manor bustled with suitors, Ila-uanna had never remarried.
Leonine was undaunted. Like the rest of this motley crowd of merchants and minor nobles (yes, and hopeful scribes), he had come with dreams of silver, carnelian and lapis lazuli. But marriage was far from his mind.
He set his lyre gingerly on the ground beside him, and accepted with a smile a platter of food and a cup of beer handed him by one of the house-slaves, a young Ekkadi with the goblet of a kitchen maid tattooed in blue ink on her forehead. The beer was cool and sweet, surprisingly good. It tasted – as did just about everything else in this country – of dates, a bland sweetness that he found odd but not unpleasant. As he drained his cup, assuaging the throat that earned his keep, he became keenly aware that Ila-uanna’s appraising gaze had come to rest upon him. A wasp to a sundew.
He met her kohl-rimmed eyes, as he had so many times this day, and flashed a coy half-smile, a roguish expression he’d perfected in silver mirrors and pond surfaces. Her eyes narrowed curiously, then flicked away. He caught a hint of crow’s feet at their corners; under the veil, she’d smiled.
Theirs had been a courtship of cautious smiles, of glances pointedly turned aside. As the afternoon grew late, Leonine judged that his hunt had finally reached its end, and the full force of his attention returned to his plate.
Like Ila-uanna’s manor, dinner was unassuming but pleasant: warm bread smeared with garlic oil served alongside lamb, and chickpeas that tasted of cumin and sesame. After the poor fare of his long journey, it was a feast.
The noise ebbed. Ila-uanna’s many suitors had apparently flattered the musician sufficiently to meet with her approval, and returned to talking amongst themselves. The widow, no doubt bored with talk of sheep and trade routes, rose gracefully from her pillows and walked towards him, hips swaying. An affectation, and one that boded well. Her stride had not been quite so purposeful earlier. The bull-necked old man who hastily got to his feet to follow her was a less welcome sight. Akosh, the steward, a reaver whose loyalty had long ago been bought with Ekkadi gold; a man he’d been warned about.
“That was well played,” Akosh muttered through a white beard, the tone of his voice implying something a touch more hostile than simple approval.
Ila-uanna laughed. “As if you’d know the first thing about music, you old lion,” she said. Her voice was raw, bringing to mind the way men spoke after an evening spent gathered around the tobacco pipe. The earthiness of it suited her.
“One need not be raised at court to appreciate music,” said Leonine. “Although I had hoped – vainly, perhaps – that my war song would meet with somewhat more effusive approval. Lanapish was perhaps the most impressive victory of Ushti’s campaign.”
Akosh’s eyebrow climbed atop his forehead. “How did word of our provincial…” he spat that word “… scuffles reach the ears of the mighty Merezadesh?”
Ila-uanna groaned, turning her eyes to a red evening sky. Leonine noted with amusement that a hush had fallen over the nearest spectators.
“Akosh…” the widow said, her voice betraying a certain weariness, “is it absolutely necessary that we ruin this perfectly lovely evening with talk of politics?”
Akosh muttered an apology. They’d obviously had this discussion before, he and Ila-uanna.
“No, it’s a fair question,” said Leonine cheerfully, “In fact, I know many things about Karhan. For example, I know you were at Lanapish. They called you the Stone, as I recall, after you alone fought off an entire siege ladder atop the Windward Wall.”
That got your attention.
Akosh’s face contorted comically. He sputtered, grasping after but not finding the words for which he searched. Ila-uanna clapped her hands and laughed.
“Amashuk certainly did not tell me that story! And here I thought you were just a common brigand.”
Akosh coloured. “They did call me that, yes. Although the stories have grown so ridiculous that I can hardly recognize myself. I – and at least four other men the tales have forgotten – held that wall only briefly. Our brothers were quick to reinforce our numbers.”
It was not the first time he was grateful for Ibashtu’s research. None of Leonine’s past patrons had ever gone to such lengths to ensure his work was painless.
“Tell us of the battle, Akosh!” said a man sitting nearby, a minor functionary whose name Leonine would have forgotten, had he learned it in the first place. The warrior protested, but a self-satisfied grin spread across his face. He had all the subtlety of a child… but a child at least four stone heavier than Leonine. Dangerous enough without a scribe’s mind… don’t underestimate him.
Akosh allowed himself to be talked into taking the stage. He collected his thoughts for a moment, and then began to weave his tale of years-old heroism. Leonine picked up his lyre and strummed absently, matching the old warrior’s tone. The strings grew insistently louder as the Artalum horde approached the walls of Lanapish, and when they clashed shield against spear it was to the accompaniment of a minstrel striking a lyre’s base with the heel of his hand.
When the siege was finally broken, Ila-uanna’s steward sighed contentedly, then fixed Leonine with a grin that stretched the length of his leathery face. Ila-uanna led the applause, and Akosh turned a furiously red face towards his feet.
It was almost endearing.
“I was about to say that we’d make a poet of you yet,” said Ila-uanna with a smile. “But it looks as though you already have a certain talent.”
Several suitors wrestled valiantly with grins they hoped to contain; evidently, they were not oblivious to Ila-uanna’s rumoured patronage of the arts. Leonine wondered absently if she’d ever taken Akosh to bed. From all accounts, her husband had been as dull as he was rich.
Two more cups of date-sweet beer passed Leonine’s lips as the Shimurg flew overhead, low already in its journey over the horizon. The sky was painted in bands of orange and pink when he refused a fourth. The beer was not strong, but caution was important tonight – his work had not yet begun in earnest.
Ila-uanna’s courtyard slowl
y emptied. Merchants made their excuses and set out on the road back to their shops in the nearby villages of Balash and Hutu, resigned to empty beds. One had come all the way from within the yellow-glazed walls of Sinmalik the Golden, and a guest room had been prepared for him. A room had been prepared for Leonine as well, although he neither expected nor intended to spend the night there.
He sat alone, back to a blue-glazed column, and watched as the crowd slowly dissolved.
Not far away, Ila-uanna spoke with the merchant from Sinmalik and another man wearing the robes of a scribe, brown wool with the angular Ekkadi script embossed on the collar. The motto common, one that Leonine recognized immediately: “Anki gave us words, and made us Men.” Akosh stood near his mistress, his eye wandering to such points of interest as the bare wall to his right. Leonine caught his eye and beckoned him over. The warrior all but jumped to attention, obviously grateful for the distraction – any distraction.
“The rising price of goats not of interest to you?” Leonine asked as Akosh sat down beside him.
“Lucrative investments in sorghum, actually,” he replied. “And no. For every leech who comes here with dreams of taking Ila’s wealth by marriage, another comes assuming she learned nothing of money from Amashuk, may he be remembered. But enough. Such talk is liable to make me angry. Tell me, Merezadesh. What brings you so far from your own lands?”
Leonine shrugged. “Sarvash is not as glamorous as the priests make it out to be. It is all jagged rocks, dry heat, and the hide tents of nomads and goatherds. Ashavan itself is a reed shack compared to Hatshut or the twin cities of Numush.”
That was true, as far as it went, although Leonine had only once been to the hilly country of Sarvash, epicentre of the Merezad’s eponymous empire. He’d been a child then, pulled along by the hand during his father’s pilgrimage to the Garden of Ahamash. He saw no reason to mention that he was in fact Ekkadi-born, or as close to it as a man from Sarvagadis would ever be considered.
Sarvagadis. Once, it was Nin-nishi, whose ziggurat was visited at dusk by Nin, the Pale Queen. Now it was a city without a temple. Its white-glazed bricks had drowned somewhere in the shallow salt marsh where the Hapur met the sea.
Akosh looked into the distance. “It is strange, is it not? Such wealth here between the rivers, and so many able men. Ekka should have been the conqueror, as Arta was before her.”
“Perhaps so.”
The two men sat one beside the other, now speaking, now silent. The Serpent’s Eye, which the Ekkadi had once called a Queen, fixed them with a reproachful silver stare from its perch in the now-black sky. When Ila-uanna thanked her guests and retired to her chambers, Akosh clapped Leonine on the shoulder and rose with a grunt.
“Sleep soundly, Merezadesh,” he said, and was gone.
Leonine sat in that courtyard alone, looking up at the night that his people so feared. Then he picked up his lyre and walked to the humble room that had been prepared for him. He sat cross-legged on the bed for a time, strumming absently, until a predictable knock at his door. It opened to admit the same Ekkadi slave that had bustled around the courtyard earlier that night.
“My mistress would like to see you,” she said, her eyes downcast. “She asks that you sing her to sleep.”
Of course she does.
Leonine smiled graciously, and stood up to follow her.
“I would be most pleased to be of service.”
Ila-uanna’s room was more sumptuous than he’d imagined – Amashuk had obviously spared no expense to make her life pleasant. Above a bed strewn with red Bachiyan silks, on which she now sat, hung an Artalum tapestry depicting a proud lion brought low by arrows. Before her was a shukasi game board, its malachite fields cut in half by a river of lapis lazuli. She had started a game against nobody in particular, and appeared to be losing. Fragrant incense burned in a censer hanging from the wall. Leonine recognized the scent, though he could not have named it.
“Ah, I thank you for coming. I have such trouble sleeping these days,” she said, beckoning him over to the bed. “I was hoping that you might join me for a game of shukasi, or perhaps sing me to sleep.”
She wore a shift of diaphanous cloth, and a headdress of pearls bound together by thin strands of bronze. Of her marriage veil there was no sign. The smile on her painted lips was genuine, the laugh lines around her eyes intrusions of age onto a face that had seen more summers than Leonine’s own.
He sat down on the soft bed beside her, and pointed at the board. “If you wish to play,” he said, “I’ll have to insist that we start anew. My soldiers have already pushed far into your territory.”
She rearranged the pieces, setting them back in their respective camps, and took from a stool at the head of her bed a delicate bottle – dark glass, a rarity even in wealthy Ekka – and two cups. Date wine, Leonine supposed. She poured two cups of thick auburn liquid. Leonine nodded his thanks, and sipped at the wine. He’d been wrong. It was every bit as sweet as date wine, but also tart and more delicate.
“What is this?” Leonine asked, genuinely curious. “I’ve never tasted its like.”
“Wine made from the plum,” she said. “I am told it is a round, violet fruit that grows on the islands that make up Akros. Amashuk introduced me to it… though it is difficult to get. Akrosian goods have been too scarce of late.”
How true, he observed wryly. Akrosian ships only rarely came to Sarvagadis or Adarpa – that was, in fact, precisely why he’d come.
He drained his cup, and grinned at her. “I could be persuaded not to denounce you to the Master of Coin, if you’d be so kind as to pour another.”
“I suppose I’m at your mercy,” she said. Taking up the ewer, Ila-uanna leaned in close to pour another cup. The scent of jasmine and cloves lingered when she drew back.
They played, and talked of inconsequential things. She was born not far away, in Inatum, the daughter of a once well-to-do family that had fallen on difficult times since the conquest of Ekka by the Merezadesh – “your people”, she had called them. He told her that he had grown up poor and humble in Sarvash, and that he learned to play the lyre from a kindly uncle. She spoke wistfully of a marriage she had been forced into and a husband that, over time, she had come to love. He spoke of a life spent single, a traveler with neither the wealth nor the time to attract a wife. As her horsemen struck across the river and attacked his flanks, she told him that she was terribly lonely. And wasn’t he also? He said he was, sometimes.
When she spoke, her rich voice wove strands of pain, joy and regret; a tapestry of a life halfway lived. There was honesty in it. In what he had told her there was little honesty, although perhaps some of the regret was real. He too had lived life halfway.
Leonine’s flank was in disarray. Ila-uanna blocked his reserve with her spearmen, and tried to sneak the cavalry in behind. He retorted by assaulting her gates with his catapult, but he knew he did not have men enough to take the walls. When her oracles – the Sarvashi had balked at that, and renamed the pieces “strategists” – moved up the field unchallenged to grant her soldiers their blessing, Leonine laughed and shook his head, holding his hands up in resignation.
“Well played,” he said. “I had considered letting my gracious host win, but I see now how foolish that thought was.”
She smiled, and placed a warm hand on his forearm, running her fingers along his as she removed it. “I was taught well.”
Improbable though it was, Leonine found that he was enjoying himself. The widow had a certain strength and composure that he found attractive. Ahamash, how long has it been?
Ila-uanna picked up the board, and turned around to place it on the stool from which she’d taken the wine. When she turned back, his face was before hers, his hand pulling at her neck, bringing her lips to his.
She kissed him passionately, and Leonine found his body stirring. There was a hunger in him that he found surprising, and as he ran his fingers along her ear he attributed it to the wine.
She grasped at his belt and undid the bronze buckle, then ran her hands beneath his tunic, over his stomach. They came to rest on his chest, and then slid down again, raking him playfully with lacquer-hardened nails. He slipped the tunic over his head, and ran a hand along the side of her foot, and from there in a snaking line up her leg.
Soon they both were naked, her hands wrapped in his thick hair, his own between her thighs. She was not, he decided, without her charms.
Ila-uanna’s hands ran down his neck, to his chest, then pushed him backward, onto the bed. She kneeled above him, and took off her headdress, shook her hair free.
She lowered herself onto him, and he shuddered at the feel of her. They made love, and it tasted of plums.
When it was over, Leonine and Ila-uanna lay among Bachiyan silks, her head on his chest.
“Tell me your name,” she murmured.
“Leonine. How soon we forget.”
She chuckled, and cuffed him affectionately.
“Surely you don’t expect me to believe that your parents gave you a stage name?”
“Vajih,” he lied. “It means ‘traveler’.”
“Apt, I suppose.” She sighed. “I imagine now you’ll tell me that you must leave in the morning? And that every time you see a shukasi board you will think of me and sigh?”
“I’d like to think I’d be at least a little less trite.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “That’s unworthy of me. I could not keep you here even if I wanted to. Though I am a widow, there are certain protocols that need to be followed. And I’m afraid…” she smiled wryly, “… that a traveling musician would be an insufficiently exciting match for my family.”
“You grew to love your husband, even if he was not your choice. Why turn all your suitors away? You could find happiness again.”
“Happiness?” she asked. “A somewhat less lonely prison, I suppose, and then heirs to dispossess me of the manor my Amashuk built. You and I are not so different, Vajih. Lust can still come easily to a heart that does not love.”
There was silence, until Leonine broke it.
“You invited me to sing for you. Have you ever heard Elekut’s ‘Woman in the Reeds’?”
She shook her head, and he began to sing. His voice was soft and low, a zephyr carried in from the ocean that swept slowly through the marsh, bending reeds. As he sang, he opened himself to that wind, felt it gathering within the core of him. He drew it in slowly, cautiously. It was not a thing to be left unchecked. A teasing at the edge of his consciousness begged him to let go, to pull ever more power into himself.
He concentrated a swirling eddy of force into his lungs and throat, where it stirred like spasms presaging a second climax. As he sang of Rodabeh laying her head to rest, he wove of it a command. Sleep, he implored her. Sleep and let your troubles be forgotten. The power left his throat and infused his song, and as it escaped him it drew vaporous fingers along his heart. He shuddered at its passing, and gasped for breath.
Ila-uanna slept. He knew nothing would wake her this night.
Leonine left the bed and dressed. The treasury he had come to burgle was no doubt locked, but nothing in Ila-uanna’s room had the look of a key, and he could not afford the time or noise of an extended search. No matter.
Within his lyre was a cunningly hidden compartment that added a hand’s breadth to the instrument’s base. Inside were the tools of his trade: a leather pouch, a folded woolen sack, two small bottles of baked clay, and an array of bronze wires, each tipped with a hook or point of a different size. There was one last tool, this one deadly: a bronze knife, short and keen, in a muffled wooden sheath. He strapped the knife and tools to his belt, closed the compartment, and took a deep breath, then padded on feet trained to silence over to the heavy mahogany door that led out of Ila-uanna’s bedroom.
From the other side of the door came the rhythmic rise and fall of a sleeper’s breath. Ila-uanna’s handmaiden, no doubt. Servants so close to the mistress of the house would no doubt be used to waking quickly. He would have to be careful.
Leonine took one of the clay bottles from the pack hanging at his side and pulled out its stopper. Inside was a cloudy oil that he daubed on the door hinge, then spread around with a finger.
The door opened silently onto an antechamber where the mistress of the house sometimes entertained. Warm torchlight penetrated the room from the courtyard, from which it was separated by a beaded curtain. Four comfortable divans stood at regular intervals against the north and south walls, two of them now occupied by sleeping slave-girls. One was the same girl that had brought beer to him in the evening, and brought him to Ila-uanna at night. The other, he had not seen before. In the half-light, she looked pale, a pink-skinned barbarian from the frigid northern lands.
He considered singing them to sleep, but decided against it. Every use of sorcery was a risk. He’d not gotten any sense of talent from the gathered crowd, but such things could be difficult to read accurately, and a mistake could cost his life. There had been a day, once, when Ekkadi could chant spells with no fear of being staked down in an unforgiving desert, to die parched and delusional, scorched red by the Shimurg’s heat. That day had died with Nin’s temples.
Leonine would trust, then, in his other talents. He did not want to be seen prowling around at night, but if worst came to worst, there were a thousand believable reasons for a man to leave the bed of his night’s conquest.
He snuck through the room, careful not to silhouette himself against the curtained portal, a child once more, wriggling through windows and stalking alleyways in search of bread or a too-low purse.
Leonine still had his hands and his life. He’d always been quiet.
The women did not wake. Leonine peered carefully around the edge of the archway, onto the familiar courtyard, lit now by the fitful flicker of torches. As he’d expected – as Ibashtu had told him – two guards were posted here, suits of lamellar with spears, a man inside each. They were, thankfully, not alert to the possibility of robbery. Instead of patrolling the grounds, they talked quietly, but with an undisguised heat – imprecations against their employers, most likely.
He gathered the beaded strings hanging from the archway, and pulled them slowly aside, careful not to let the strands jingle. There was no wind this night, and he did not want to test the guards’ talents. His heart began to pound, his breath shallow. Fear was delicious, in a way, like sex and sorcery.
Keeping one hand to his knife just in case, Leonine stepped through the curtain and guided its strings back, slowly and silently, mouth dry. He was terribly exposed, at the mercy of luck and fate, though he was loath to trust in the former and did not believe in the latter. One glance, a guard turning his head to spit, perhaps, could prove the border between life and death.
The curtain finally hanging closed once more, Leonine leapt from the antechamber’s entrance, taking refuge behind one of the pillars in the colonnade that ringed Ila-uanna’s courtyard. His heart still pounded, hand tight on the hilt of his knife. There had been no shouts, no darting spearheads – only the constant, spitting mutter of men complaining about their lot in life.
He crept from pillar to pillar, ghost-quiet, working his way around the guards’ backs and towards the archway that led to the kitchens. He would find what he sought there, if Ibashtu’s information was correct.
And when is it not?
Leonine slipped through a mercifully curtain-free archway into the kitchens. He could just barely hear the drone of servants talking somewhere ahead of him, but the area appeared to be empty. Nothing remained of the day’s feast but the glow of the last dying embers in a clay oven, and the pungent scent of spice.
A door in the far wall creaked open, and the fly-buzz of a muffled conversation suddenly grew louder. Leonine leapt into the shadows behind a clay oven, hand at his knife.
“– see the way she looked at him? Shameful!” said a man’s voice in something near a stage whisper. The interloper was no doub
t trying to be subtle, but to the musician’s keen ear he might as well have been screaming imprecations from a pulpit.
“Ha! As if you’re surprised. A handsome young artist like him?” a second voice, this one making no attempt at silence. “I’m amazed she didn’t drown us all in her wetness.”
An explosive gasp, then a nervous titter of laughter. Shrouded by darkness, Leonine smirked.
“Are you insane, Mawalak?” the first voice whispered with some urgency. “What if her handmaid had come to fetch a snack? Or if Akosh overheard you?”
“That old bore? He’s a suaga snake. A loud hiss, and no venom. When’s the last time he lifted a spear to train, let alone fight?”
Leonine almost wished that Akosh was there. His reaction would surely be entertaining.
“You’re wrong.” The footsteps were now at their loudest. “You weren’t with us when that pickpocket tried to take Anuatu’s wallet. Akosh had him on the ground before I even knew what was happening, and missing a few teeth besides.”
The noise of sandals slapping against the clay-tiled floor receded. They had passed his hiding place.
“Akosh did that?” asked the one named Mawalak, his voice carrying from outside the archway. Apparently tired of discussing Ila-uanna’s morals, he changed subject. “Ah, Muafa! Do you have my winnings yet?”
Leonine did not hear the response, for he was already moving. He put his ear briefly to the door the two servants had come through – the door he'd been told led to their quarters – and, satisfied that no noise came from the other end, opened it and crept through.
Somewhere in the compound, Ibashtu had told him, was a guarded storage room in which Ila-uanna kept those spoils of her husband’s mercantile endeavors that she was not interested in displaying openly. Among them was an Akrosian vase, an item of some significant rarity. It was more than simply clay, glazed and baked; it had been used in sacrificial rites that would have made the forbidden priests of Nin blanch. Or so Ibashtu believed. More importantly, so did the buyer.
The servants’ halls were quiet, but for the rhythmic wheeze of snoring that rose and fell from all sides. Leonine did not relax his guard. Not all of the servants would be asleep. At least a few likely attended to nightly duties, and it would not do to stumble upon one unprepared. A shout could undo his efforts, and he was in too deep now to pretend he was headed to the baths to relieve himself.
He peered around a corner, and decided that he’d found what he was looking for. An armoured guard stood in front of a door at the end of the hallway, an axe at his belt. One did not guard a servant's quarters. This, no doubt, was the storeroom.
The hallway was long, and empty of anything an enterprising thief might hide behind. Barring a sudden dereliction of duty, the guard would have to be eliminated. That was fine. It was hardly unheard of for a servant to steal from his employer, and if a valiant guard was taken by surprise and knifed by someone he knew… tragic, but not unbelievable.
Leonine crept along the wall, picking up speed. He knew it was only a matter of time before the guard noticed him and raised a cry, and he wanted to be as near him as possible before that happened.
The guard’s head turned, eyes widening. To Leonine it was a moment stretched out across eternity, an hour spun of a single heartbeat. A gnarled hand dropped to the handle of a bronze-bladed axe, and a mouth opened to raise a cry that would bring Leonine’s aspirations, and his life, to a halt.
Leonine would not allow that.
He opened himself fully, throwing caution to the wind, and felt power leap into the space he had created, roiling and churning like a storm at sea. Leonine sucked in a breath, and there was sorcery in it: a theft unlike any other. The guard’s mouth opened but no sound escaped. Horror twisted his features. As Leonine broke into a run, bare feet slapping silently against the tiled floor, the guard fumbled with his axe, hands no longer sure or swift, mouth working soundlessly.
He was too slow.
As the axe finally cleared its belt loop, Leonine’s knife shot out, cutting deep into the guard’s right forearm. He hissed in pain, silently, and made to strike Leonine with his left hand, but the thief was quick – his own left was already there, stuffing the punch, while his knife found a throat and extinguished a life.
The guard crumpled against the wall. His axe fell from nerveless fingers and bounced soundlessly from the floor, chipping a tile.
Leonine exhaled, and noise seeped back into the world. He heard the sputter of torches. Servants snored contentedly in the distance, unaware of the murder that had taken place outside their doors.
He reached for the heavy door and winced. A moment ago he’d been caught up in fear, desperation, and through it all the shivering pleasures of sorcery. Now that the moment had passed, he became aware of a wailing agony in his head. He shivered, suddenly light-headed and more than a little nauseous.
Leonine breathed deeply, leaning against a heavy wooden door rich with engravings. He locked eyes with a mahogany soldier, the only guard that remained between him and riches. The world’s spinning slowed, and he tried the door only to find it locked.
He squatted down in a spreading pool of blood, and berated himself. Idiot, focus. There’s a dead man at your feet and a locked door in front. Work fast.
He rifled through the guard’s tunic, and found nothing. No key hung at his belt. The pendant around his neck was pretty enough, but it would not open a door.
Leonine eyed the lock – a typical Ekkadi design, barred from inside by a sliding wooden slat that would not budge before each of its weighted wooden tumblers were raised to a particular height. The dead man at his feet might not have had one of the distinctive comb-like keys, but it was a poor thief indeed whose search was stymied for lack of one. Leonine reached into the pouch at his waist and withdrew the hooked picks.
His head was still spinning – albeit more slowly now – when he found the farthest tumbler’s height and began to work on the next. Sorcery, he reflected, was like the great Shalumes – it was life, and it was wealth, but wise men knew that the control they exerted over it was a delusion. The Shalumes was known to break its feeble bonds, to shatter clay earthworks and wooden dams and to wash away fields, villages and cities entire in its terrible wake. The Merezadesh barely needed their Huntsmen; a single moment of inattention could turn a sorcerer into a burnt-out husk.
Such, Leonine reasoned as he solved the final tumbler, was the price of power.
Leonine pulled the door open, and slid a thin clay block into the doorjamb. He dragged the guard into the storeroom behind him, cursing. The cut arm had bled profusely. A dark pool was obvious even by weak torchlight, and his work was not yet done.
Leonine cut the straps of his victim's armour. The padded woolen shirt he wore below the coat of bronze scales would serve as a towel. Leonine took a deep breath and slipped out of the storeroom, mopping hastily at the blood until the shirt grew sodden in his hands. The floor would pass muster, at least by night. He was not overly concerned with what morning would bring.
Leonine stepped back into the storeroom and, finally able to look around, found himself grinning. By the entrance sat bolts of saffron-yellow Hatshut linen. He wiped his hands on the fabric, ruining it. To his right stood a large ewer inlaid with mosaic tile, and beside that were numerous glass bottles filled, he imagined, with plum wine. A pair of stelae depicting long-dead Artalum flanked a latched – but unlocked – chest. Curious, Leonine lifted the top and peered inside, whistling in disbelief at the variety of coins inside. Some were round and imprinted with the feather of Shimurg; others were square and inscribed with letters he could not read; others still were pyramidal hunks of silver. Amashuk’s reputation, he decided, short-changed the man. He had expected the wealth of a skilled merchant, and had found that of a lord.
I haven’t come here for coin.
He abstained – though it pained him – from filling his pockets, and lowered the lid. Coins jingled too loudly, and the thing for which
he had come was worth more to the right buyer than all the coin he could carry.
He could feel it in the room when he concentrated, a brooding menace just at the edge of his consciousness. He followed that feeling until he found a vase glazed orange and black. To the untrained eye, it was unassuming. To his, it was anything but. It whispered of power bought with blood, of death and bronze and the stern regard of foreign gods.
He took the sack from his pouch and unfolded it. Carefully, he slipped the vase inside. He needed just one more thing tonight: a sacrifice.
The familiar drone of sleep greeted Leonine as he left the storeroom. He reclaimed his clay doorstop, and pulled the door quietly to a close behind him. Nobody had noted that a guard had deserted his post; no cry had been raised.
Leonine retraced his steps, returning to the kitchen, and then through it to the courtyard. The servants who had come this way were nowhere to be seen, although the guards had not disappeared.
Leonine crept around them, keeping his back as before to the colonnade. It seemed less perilous this time, although he knew the danger of overconfidence. The most difficult part of the night’s plan was still before him, and a man carrying stolen goods had little room for error. He needed to reach his wagon in the stables, but he could not do so now. One of the guards stared in that direction.
He decided to trust to patience. He flattened himself against a pillar, as far from the nearest guttering torch as he could manage, and waited. If he turned his head to the right, he could look into the courtyard and out of it, at the night that sheltered him from discovery. The Shimurg’s feathers were falling points of light. Some flew swiftly, some fluttered slowly. The first to be shed would already have fallen to earth. The last of them hung halfway to the vault of the black sky, a sign that dawn was still several hours away. His people feared the night, but Leonine found it strange and beautiful to look at – the highest reaches of heaven as black as ink, the lowest dotted with silver lights.
He was not sure how long he stood there, listening to the sounds of the courtyard and staring at the sky, when the silence was broken by a familiar voice.
“Muafa! Now do you have my winnings? Was Adnat obliging?”
Leonine glanced quickly around the column; the guards had turned to the irritating man he’d heard identified as Mawalak in the kitchens. One – Muafa, he supposed – mumbled a perfunctory greeting. Leonine took advantage of the distraction to dash across the yard and into the massive stable.
The stable normally housed the horses and wagons of Ila-uanna's caravan, which would even now be on its way to Hatshut and the east. In their place stood Leonine’s own wagon – Ibashtu’s, really – a garishly painted monstrosity, its greens, reds and golds mercifully muted by the night. She had insisted that he take it, claiming that its gaudy colours would proclaim his musical talents to Ekka… and that it had other uses besides.
Curled up in a bale of hay lay a stable hand, a spindly teenage boy afflicted with spots. Some of Ila-uanna’s horses had remained behind. They slept now, although Shema, one of his own, stirred to wakefulness and whickered softly as he neared.
Leonine quieted the beast and worked his way to the wagon. He opened the red and yellow sliding door, taking care to do so slowly. It had an annoying tendency to catch, and once stuck required some muscle and more than a little noise to open. Inside was a sleeping compartment scattered with pillows; opposite them, bags of grain and sealed clay tankards of beer. Leonine rummaged about, cursing. Even now, after almost a week’s travel, Leonine had trouble finding the switch that unlocked the wagon's cunningly hidden false floor.
Finally, Leonine found the latch, and lowered the vase into a gaping smuggler's compartment.
The evidence of his wrongdoing now hidden away, Leonine was able to concentrate on the task that remained to him – somebody had to disappear.
The stable hand, he decided, would not do. He was too young, too gawky. Even with the element of surprise, it was difficult to believe that he could overcome a guard, much less orchestrate the theft of a vase of little apparent value. No, he needed someone who could conceivably have contacts in a city like nearby Inatum, where men would be willing to spend any number of minas to wrap their hands around Akrosian art. It was not the strongest ruse, perhaps, but he needed only to leave the manor before its strands were pulled apart.
The stables were well placed for what he needed, tucked into the northern corner of Ila-uanna’s courtyard, beside the baths. That was part of the plan. Leonine had but to wait until someone woke up and staggered over to pass water, which could hardly take long considering how much beer had been consumed earlier.
Mawalak was still conversing with the guards when Leonine passed by once more, although the subject of their conversation had changed. The second guard – Adnat, Leonine supposed – was speaking too quietly to be heard across the courtyard, but Akosh’s name, at least, was recognizable.
“I’d never have believed it!” Mawalak all but shouted. He was a small man, Leonine decided, for such a gratingly loud voice. The thief carefully passed through another of the damnable beaded curtains, watching the guards intently all the while. As he entered the bathhouse, he saw Adnat nod and return to his story.
The baths were empty, the central pool drained, probably by way of the same underground tunnel that carried waste from the manor into the plains beyond it. The smaller pool to his left, its privacy ensured by a surrounding curtain of ferns, was likely Ila-uanna’s own.
Leonine squatted behind the private pool, keeping a wall of greenery between himself and the bathhouse entrance. He withdrew a thin cord from a pocket sewn to the inside of his tunic. A garrote was not the gentlest way to die, but neither was it the worst. Small mercies.
He did not wait long. Within a few minutes, he heard the rattle of beads brushing against each other, and then footsteps. Mawalak. Mawalak would do.
The servant walked towards the commode, directly opposite the entrance. When he’d pulled the door shut behind him, Leonine stood up and walked over to it. There was a certain risk in crossing the floor this way, exposed by ample torchlight to whoever else decided this was a good time to relieve himself. There was an even greater risk of bungling the job and having Mawalak shout in that strong voice.
Life is full of risks.
He waited there, pressed against the wall, while Mawalak grunted through his last shit. He’d strangled men before; they lost control of their bowels as they died. It would be much more pleasant, he decided, to deal with one that did him the courtesy of emptying his colon beforehand.
The door creaked open and Mawalak emerged, unaware that the Weeper had spoken his name. As he shut it behind him, Leonine struck, scorpion-quick. Before the servant could so much as gasp in shock, he was on the ground, a garrote around his neck, a knee in his back. Leonine held on, knuckles white as he strained to keep the cord tight. Mawalak was strong, certainly stronger than he. Servants often were, and fear made men powerful.
But not powerful enough. Mawalak died on the glazed tile floor of that bathhouse, fighting desperately for breath.
Leonine pulled the corpse behind the ferns that guarded Ila-uanna’s privacy, and left him there for a moment.
So this is my life. Strangling servants in bathhouses.
There was nothing new in the courtyard. Muafa and Adnat had stopped speaking, as though observing a moment of silence to mark the two murders that had happened on their watch. Their backs were to him, which was good. Leonine walked back to Mawalak, and lifted the slain servant onto his shoulder. He was not a tall man, but he was well built, and heavier than Leonine had expected.
Leonine trudged to the bath entrance, trying as best he could to walk lightly beneath his heavy burden, but his feet felt too heavy, too clumsy, and the beaded curtain would be much too difficult to navigate.
He sighed. He’d hoped to avoid using more sorcery. The sleep song had been slow, measured, unlikely to draw attention. The desperate spell he’d cast
in the hallway, the one that had left him shaken and nauseous, was not. Any sorcerer within half a day’s ride had probably felt it, although the silence in Ila-uanna’s manor had confirmed his suspicion that there were none here. Or if there were, they did not care, which was every bit as good.
Another risk. This time, at least, he would not be rushed.
He laid Mawalak on the ground and opened up only partially, admitting a trickle, not a torrent. He shuddered as the power slowly filled him. It had a lover’s touch, a teasing caress that made his hairs stand on end. He was regretful when it was complete, when it came time to close himself away. Surely, there was no harm in a little more? One more caress, however brief. He made to open –
No!
Leonine recoiled from the temptation. He had enough. He had more than enough.
He drew in a breath, and dragged Mawalak soundlessly across the tiles and through the curtain. He pulled him along behind the colonnade, behind the guards’ backs, lungs burning with the effort of holding in the all-important breath that plucked sound from the air and made him its keeper.
Leonine was almost inside the stable when he finally let that breath go, panting and gasping for air. The first noise he heard as he pulled Mawalak into the stable was Shema’s snuffling.
It took some effort to carry Mawalak over to his wagon, and then to stow him under his wagon’s false floor, a second sacrifice to the Akrosian urn that now lay beside him, secured with rope. He briefly considered silencing the area again, to ensure the stable boy did not wake, but decided against it. The boy had not so much as flinched the last time. Leonine would trust in the depth of his sleep.
The job done, he left the stable, intent on a well-earned sleep among soft pillows and Bachiyan silks. As he crept back along the colonnade, the guards seemed finally to realize that something was amiss.
“Mawalak has been in there a while,” he heard Muafa say.
Adnat snorted. “You probably should make sure he’s alive.”
Leonine froze, his back against a pillar
“Fuck him. With any luck, he fell through the commode.”
Long after Leonine returned to Ila-uanna’s bed, a horn sounded and woke them both.
Mawalak, it turned out, had murdered a guard.
