Of Dragons, Feasts and Murders
Page 1
ALSO BY ALIETTE DE BODARD
OBSIDIAN AND BLOOD
Servant of the Underworld*
Harbinger of the Storm*
Master of the House of Darts*
DOMINION OF THE FALLEN
The House of Shattered Wings
The House of Binding Thorns
The House of Sundering Flames*
XUYA UNIVERSE
On a Red Station, Drifting
The Citadel of Weeping Pearls*
The Tea Master and the Detective*
SHORT FICTION AND NOVELLAS
Of Wars, and Memories, and Starlight
In the Vanishers’ Palace*
Of Books, and Earth, and Courtship
*available as a JABberwocky ebook
Of Dragons, Feasts and Murders
Copyright © 2020 by Aliette de Bodard
All rights reserved.
Published as an eBook in 2020 by JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc., in association with the Zeno Agency LTD.
ISBN 978-1-625674-84-5
Cover art by Ravven
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
49 W. 45th Street, 12th Floor
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Also by Aliette de Bodard
Copyright
Of Dragons, Feasts and Murders
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Of Dragons, Feasts and Murders
“Tet is a feast that’s a bit like Christmas.” Thuan realized his mistake as soon as he’d spoken. He’d meant to compare Lunar New Year to something familiar, something every Parisian would respect, but he’d underestimated how little his husband cared about social norms. Or religion: for all that he was a Fallen angel, Asmodeus had always been summarily uninterested in anything so inconsequential—and unattainable—as redemption.
Asmodeus—sitting on the four-poster bed in the quarters they’d been assigned in the imperial citadel of the dragon kingdom—raised an eyebrow. “What makes you think House Hawthorn celebrates Christmas?”
“Good food and the company of your loved ones?” Thuan was sitting in one of the carved mahogany chairs, the straight-backed and uncomfortable ones of his childhood. He hadn’t missed these at all.
“The House’s version of Christmas involved rather less love, and more bodies dangling in trees.”
“And your version?”
An expansive shrug that Thuan knew all too well.
“You don’t celebrate, do you.”
Asmodeus’s face was an eloquent statement in and of itself. He sat on the bed, looking distant and sarcastic, an act which Thuan knew masked profound worry. “I’m here with you. I’ve, ah, volunteered for more than my fill of celebration.” An accent on the word that suggested something wholly unpleasant. He reached out, smoothing the lapels of his swallowtail jacket almost absent-mindedly. His grey-green gaze, behind his square horn-rimmed glasses, was matter-of-fact, unemotional, but that didn’t mean a lot, as he was supremely adapt at disguising his own emotions. “You should be happy.” It sounded like nothing so much as a threat.
Trouble was, Thuan wasn’t really sure he was.
Tet was a time for celebration: a changing of the lunar year, a chance to start anew without debts, to turn the course of fate. A time to go home to celebrate with family, and it had been an eternity since Thuan had gone home to the underwater kingdom of the Seine, an eternity since he’d seen Second Aunt—the Empress who ruled over the rông, the shape-shifting Annamite dragons such as Thuan. And what better way to go home than to bring one’s own husband, to show him the imperial citadel bedecked with trees and garlands of algae and yellow flowers and share with him the delights of banquets?
The first problem was, unsurprisingly, that Asmodeus was on edge: he didn’t like being away from home, in a place where he had no means of pressure on anyone. Home was House Hawthorn, which he and Thuan co-ruled: a maze of grandiose buildings, outhouses and gardens in the midst of a ruined and devastated Paris—a fortress both physical and magical that was meant to safeguard all their dependents, from Fallen angels to mortals and dragons, from magicians and alchemists to gardeners and bodyguards. Hawthorn had recently been devastated by an attack from another House, and Thuan and Asmodeus were currently struggling to rebuild it while keeping everyone secure.
The second, and most important problem was that Thuan’s memories of the imperial citadel had been utterly accurate, and this time he didn’t have the excuse of being trapped in it: he’d walked into it out of his own free will. The court was best described as a seething mass of hornets, and that was the understatement of the millennium. If Asmodeus was on edge, Thuan was much worse—he’d never felt so exposed, his foreigner husband only the lowest item on a long list of liabilities that started with his incapacity to know how his words would be misinterpreted and by which faction.
“I’m sure my aunt is happy,” he said. She’d recently declared herself Empress rather than Princess, finally acknowledging what everyone had known for decades: that she was the ruling power of the dragon kingdom and not merely an accidental heir as her father’s eldest living child.
“Good,” Asmodeus said. He turned to the bedside table—where he’d managed to store an impressive array of enchanted knives—and picked up his book. “That makes at least one of us. Now if you’ll excuse me, I was rather looking forward to how our rather anemic hero found the secret passage in the attic.”
Obviously he was too observant to fail to notice Thuan’s deflection.
Thuan sighed, and went looking for clothes. Their quarters were a wide, airy suite in one of the palaces of the citadel reserved for dignitaries: a single room with cracked tiled floors, and pillars leading up to wooden rafters carved with the serpentine shape of dragons and various prosperity signs. The air was charged with brine, the light heavy, causing everything to undulate slightly, as if they’d been back on land staring through a heatwave. Except, of course, that they were underwater, in that peculiar bubble of the kingdom where they could breathe normally, but where coral and algae grew in gardens, and where little crabs and salamanders scuttled between the cracks of the floor.
A lacquered screen separated the room in two parts, a bedroom with a massive four-poster bed on which Asmodeus was currently lounging with his book, and a reception with a table and two wooden high-backed benches, the table polished teak wood with straight legs, something straight out of the traditionalist fashion. They’d put their clothes in the reception room, in the four stacked chests of clothes, each marked with the name of a season—never mind that they hadn’t brought enough with them to fill more than a fraction of the chests.
The citadel, like the rest of the dragon kingdom and the rest of Paris, had been hard-hit by the war, and everything might have looked grandiose and polished from a distance, but the rot was everywhere: under Thuan’s feet, the floor was full of minute cracks; the table was scored with various gouges, and the wooden ceiling had been hastily glued back together, and was already showing signs of algae and mould.
They had a banquet at the bi-hour of the rooster, and he’d need to make sure he picked the right clothes: Asmodeus could probably get away with any of the swallowtail suits he’d brought, the black brocade jackets with ever-different patterns that the officials and cour
tiers would find exciting or dismiss as insufficiently adhering to the rules. The rest of their delegation could wear House Hawthorn uniform and play the role of retainers. Thuan, unfortunately, would have to remember where the married-off son of the third sister of the empress fitted into the palace hierarchy. Was he entitled to a red dress with yellow dragons; and what about the hairpins and the brooches?
The door opened. Thuan braced himself for an official, but there was no sound—except that, after a while, it swung back; and when he looked up, Asmodeus was gone.
What—?
His mind immediately ran to the worst-case scenarios—kidnapping, murder, which just showed how on edge he was. This was all ridiculous. He got up in one fluid gesture, half-shifting into his dragon shape—a huge and serpentine water spirit with stubby legs, his antlers nudging the carvings of the ceiling. He pushed the door open with an enormous snout—just in time to see Asmodeus vanish around the corner of the courtyard just outside their room, taking a pillared corridor leading to another building complex.
Typical.
Thuan stifled a curse, and flew after him, mentally rehearsing how he’d convince Asmodeus not to go wandering into strange places without at least warning him—he could already imagine the argument they’d have, Asmodeus insisting he didn’t need to be coddled (which was totally true, but Thuan was also thinking of these unfortunate people who’d stand in his path, and the diplomatic incidents that could ensue).
Thuan slid into the corridor, between the red-lacquered pillars: it snaked between the other rooms, and finally opened onto another paved courtyard with a central statue of three emperors, their cracked stone features eaten by algae.
The courtyard was full of people: variegated officials in jade five-panel tunics with rank patches and winged hats, courtiers with the same tunics but without the hats, and people of the lowest ranks.
Where—
But he didn’t need to look really far to find Asmodeus, because his husband was kneeling by the side of a corpse.
* * *
For a moment Thuan stood frozen in horrified fascination, mentally rehearsing all the excuses he could summon, all the diplomatic precedents of extraterritorial jurisdiction in the archives of the court—that time Ambassador Ghislaine had been lured out of the citadel, no, that wouldn’t do, because she’d left out of her own free will—something else then, before the arrival of Fallen, maybe the Minister of Rites being slapped by an envoy of the Bièvre? He distantly noticed that the corpse was lying at the foot of a short flight of stairs leading into a palace. It was that of an official of uncertain gender, their topknot pinned by silver hairpins—not a high-ranking one, then, but someone who did have a rank. He couldn’t see wounds, but the embroidered tunic was soaked with blood, a smell that covered the usual background one of incense, algae and mildew that pervaded the ruined citadel. The contents of their sleeves had spilled on the floor: strings of cash, folded papers, and their personal seal, so deeply soaked with blood the jade had turned dark.
And then he noticed that Asmodeus’s face was creased in fascination, and that the Fallen magic trembling over the body was a spell of reconstitution—something to tell him how the person had died. So he hadn’t killed them.
Good.
An irate-looking third-rank official pushed their way through the crowd and said, “Excuse me! This isn’t business for foreigners.”
Asmodeus barely looked up. “You all seemed to be talking a lot and not doing much. The smell of blood was so overwhelming I could feel it from my quarters.”
Which explained why he’d left the room, though Thuan doubted very much it had been with the intention of complaining about it, but rather with an aroused curiosity on a possible nearby source of entertainment.
A tug, on the spines of his serpentine body. He whipped round, his body curling into a full circle, his antlers ready to but into the invader—but it was merely his cousin Hong Chi. “A word,” she said. She was wearing full court dress: a brocade red robe with phoenixes in flight in the midst of thickets of good-luck flowers, and her topknot was impeccably held by golden hairpins, her face lightly painted over with ceruse and her lips the red of carmine.
Thuan threw a glance at the scene, where the official had been joined by two others, brandishing rites and propriety. A very familiar expression of growing annoyance was freezing Asmodeus’s face.
“Oh, he’ll be fine,” Hong Chi said, a tad impatiently. “He’ll eat them for breakfast and you know it.”
“Which he’s kind of not supposed to do,” Thuan said, but he still followed her back into the courtyard in front of their quarters. It was a smaller affair: a simple paved space with a few coral reefs in ornamental shapes, a breathing space between nested palaces that were so close to each other they’d become a single building.
“What’s going on?”
Hong Chi grimaced. “Do you know Kim Diep?”
“You know I haven’t been at court for two years,” Thuan said. “Is that the corpse’s name?”
“She’s a concubine of the third rank. She administrates the gardens of Peaceful Contemplation.”
So not the corpse, then. “I’m not too sure—”
“She killed them. The corpse,” Hong Chi said.
“So let me get this straight. You don’t know who the corpse is, but you know who killed them?”
An annoyed snort from Hong Chi. She wasn’t wearing her full dragon shape: the antlers were visible above her topknot, faintly translucent. A patch of rot in the hollow of her collarbones had been expertly disguised with ceruse. “You do know I’m in charge of the secret police these days.”
Thuan weighed the cost of admitting his ignorance, and decided he didn’t care. Hong Chi had a host of other names and titles now, but to Thuan she’d always remain the little dragon girl who’d raced him to the top of the Bell and Drum Towers in the city. “I’m out of touch.”
“Good,” Hong Chi said. “Because being in touch is dangerous business.”
“You’re not making sense.”
An exhaled breath from Hong Chi—a ghostly snout superimposing itself on the redness of her lips. “It’s been bad years, as you well know. Crops dying in the fields, the angel essence epidemic, weird animals showing up in the imperial gardens that no one can identify or catch…”
Thuan was starting to see where this was going, and he didn’t like it. “Instability,” he said, because he didn’t want to say the other words aloud.
Hong Chi had never been one for mincing words. “There are whispers that the dynasty has lost the Mandate of Heaven.”
Which was bad, because that was usually a prelude to rebellion. “Surely Second Aunt is trying to turn things around.”
A snort. “Of course. Fixing dikes and famine is a long-term process. And getting rid of corrupt officials is a long and arduous process: if she throws them all out at once, she’s going to lose the supporters of her throne. At least the angel essence epidemic has stopped—” she eyed Thuan, daring him to contradict her.
Thuan met her gaze levelly. House Hawthorn had been involved in that particular drug traffic, but that had been prior to his accession to power—and without Asmodeus’s knowledge. They and the other Houses were now united into stopping the flow of essence into the dragon kingdom. “That shouldn’t be a problem anymore, no.” But he could see her point: all of this was going to require time to fix, and it increasingly looked they were running out of it. “I still don’t see where Kim Diep fits in.”
“Kim Diep is at the forefront of people agitating against the Empress,” Hong Chi said. “She’s unhappy, bearing a lot of grudges, and no one would be happier than her to see the entire thing coming down.”
It still didn’t make sense. “So you have evidence, and you haven’t arrested her yet?”
“I have evidence of a loose tongue,” Hong Chi said. “That isn’t a crime, not these days.” A mirthless laugh. “We’re modern now.”
“But you’re sure the murder
er is her,” Thuan said.
“Because of this. I took it from the body before people got a good look at it.” Hong Chi’s hand dived into her sleeve, and came up with what looked like cash—but on closer inspection turned out to be a single copper coin engraved with a stylised word surrounded by the eight trigrams.
Battle.
Thuan flipped it over, and saw letters bunched together so tightly they weren’t recognisable anymore.
“Ten thousand victories, a single harmony,” Hong Chi said, somberly. “The Harmony of Heaven. They’re a secret society with too many ambitious officials.”
“Ah.” And one of them, doubtless, who want to be crowned empress or emperor of a new dynasty.
“I know what you’re going to say. Membership of a secret society is a crime, but I don’t have proof of Kim Diep being a member,” Hong Chi said. “I have very suggestive evidence they want to move against Second Aunt on or shortly after Tet, and equally suggestive things that they have an agent in the citadel in an important position. And Kim Diep is very likely that agent. But nothing amounting to enough evidence to make an arrest. Or, more importantly, to thwart them.”
“All right,” Thuan said, trying to sound casual and not altogether succeeding, because changes of dynasty meant nothing good for the current one. “What do you want from me?”
Hong Chi smiled. “As you said—you’re out of touch. And you’re both visitors to the court.”
“Which is my home,” Thuan said, more sharply than he’d meant.
Hong Chi held out a hand, squeezing on his antlers. “It is. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that way. It’s just you’re not part of any faction, or likely to be used by one, and your husband is…” She had that familiar face of people trying to describe Asmodeus in positive terms.
“A loose cannon,” Thuan said. He smiled. “I’m in love with him, not blind.”
“No one will mind if you jostle the bounds of propriety. Or if you get involved in affairs that aren’t your business.”
Whereas she, even as head of the secret police, would be curtailed in what she could and could not do—and in what enemies she could afford to make, for the sake of her own survival. A dance Thuan was all too familiar with. “You want me to find out why the corpse died, what Kim Diep is up to, and possibly what the society is up to if these turn out to be two different things. I didn’t come here for that,” he said. In fact, he’d come here in the hopes he could finally enjoy the citadel, instead of having to barricade himself in the library to avoid court intrigues.