The Assassins of Tamurin

by S. D. Tower

  She tilted her head a littie and pressed two fingertips to her mouth. I later learned that the mannerism meant she was thinking.

  “That was perceptive of you,” she said at last. “I’m pleased.” I felt a warm flush of gratification. She was happy with me, and more than that, she had told me I was her daughter. No one had ever told me that.

  “However,” she went on, “I am now going to give you your first lesson in deportment. Do you know the precept in the Noon and Midnight Manual that says, ‘A closed mouth catches no flies?’ ”

  I’d heard the saying, but didn’t know somebody had written it down. “Yes, Despotana.”

  “I have noticed that you’re a chatterbox, Lale, but I know why this is the case. Do you?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “It is this. All your life you have talked as fast as you could, to keep people from detecting your private thoughts. In the Compendium of Important Military Techniques, this is called the strategy of distraction.”

  I opened my mouth and closed it again. I’d never thought about why I talked so much. But what she said made sense.

  “The technique is admirable,” she went on, “but it fails in the face of a clever enemy who refuses to be distracted. Also, it grates upon the ear. So, beginning tomorrow, Lale, I want you to speak less and listen more. I already know you’re quick-witted and resourceful. You don’t have to prattle on, as you did today, to convince me of this.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said humbly. I felt shamed at my behavior yet deeply relieved that she still thought I was worthy of her school.

  “Do you have any questions about this?” she asked.

  One sprang to mind. “Well... please, ma’am, what’s the other thing you won’t forgive? I don’t want to do it by accident.”

  She gave me one of her rare smiles. “I doubt you could commit that fault at your age, but I’ll tell you nonetheless. The second thing, Lale, is disloyalty.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “The Golden Discourses of the Five Elder Sages tell us that disloyalty is among the worst of the Eight Iniquities. Disloyalty overthrows the natural order and causes all things to descend into confusion. Therefore it is to be avoided at all costs.”

  “I won’t be disloyal,” I told her stoutly, “ever.”

  “I’m sure of this, Lale. But let me tell you why loyalty is so important for my daughters. It is because they don’t know their bloodlines; and so they have only me, each other, and the school. For this reason you must always be loyal to the other girls, who are your sisters, and to the school itself, which is your home, and to me, since I have become the mother of you all. Nothing is more important than that loyalty. It gives you a family, Lale, and to be disloyal is to break that family apart. A girl who is disloyal not only has ruined herself but has also tumed on the only family she will ever have.” She paused and then added softly, “It has never happened, but such a girl would be sent away. She would never see her sisters or me or Tamurin again. She would be as alone as she was before she came to me.”

  I felt such fright at this prospect that I could hardly speak. Eventually I managed to whisper, “I’ll never betray you, Despotana.”

  “Of course you won’t,” she said cheerfully. “I only want you to know the rules. Give me your loyalty, daughter, and you give me everything. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Now it is time you went to bed. We’ll be riding again at dawn.”

  I glanced at the single honey cake remaining on the serving board in the table’s center. She saw me and said, “Take it with you, if you like. Dilara has a taste for them.”

  “Thaiik you, ma’am,” I answered. I took the cake, said good night to her, and slipped away to the bedroom, where Dilara and Sulen pounced on me.

  “What did she want? What did you talk about?” they both demanded at once.

  I left out the part about being a chatterbox and said she’d told me about loyalty to the school. Dilara chewed the honey cake and nodded, a fierce look in her eyes. “Mother’s right,” she said. “Nothing’s more important than that. A girl who betrays the others throws away everything. Being sent away is too good for her.”

  On this note we put out all the lamps, except the one on the low table next to Dilara’s side of the bed, shucked our clothes down to our breechclouts, and slid under the coverlets. Sulen took one sleeping couch and Dilara and I ended up in the other one, which was just how I wanted it.

  Sulen was one of those people who can fall asleep instantly, and did so. But Dilara and I whispered and giggled for a while, despite our fatigue, and at length I said, “You were going to tell me why you called the Despotana Mother Midnight.”

  “Oh, that,” murmured Dilara. “All right, here’s the story, the way it is in the book. Be quiet and don’t interrupt.”

  I snuggled down beside her and listened. The story was about a girl named Aysel, whose parents ruled a great and rich kingdom. She was stolen away at birth by an evil sorcerer, and he put her with a family that treated her most shamefully. Then there was a golden fish in the story, a fish that could talk, and a long journey with many hardships, and at the end of the journey Aysel came to the house of Mother Midnight in a deep forest on the highest mountain of the world.

  “Why was she called Mother Midnight?” I asked drowsily. “Because she stood at the place where today and tomorrow meet, and looked both ways, and knew everything. Don’t interrupt.”

  She went on to tell how Mother Midnight told Aysel who her family was, and Aysel returned to the kingdom and revealed herself, to her parents’ great joy, and the evil sorcerer was found and put to death.

  “And afterward they all lived as they wished,” Dilara finished, “for as long as they wished it. And that is the end of the story.”

  I pondered. “So you call the Despotana ‘Mother Midnight’ because. ..”

  “Because she gives us a family, just as the Mother Midnight in the story did for Aysel. And also because she knows everything—she’s very learned, just as learned as any scholar. And someday she’ll help us defeat a truly evil sorcerer, the Chancellor in Bethiya.”

  “I wonder who my evil sorcerer was?” I mumbled, my mouth under the coverlet.

  But Dilara didn’t answer. She was very, very slowly easing herself up on one elbow.

  “What are you—”

  “Shh,” she breathed, and I fell silent. I carefully lifted my head and peeked over her shoulder.

  A furry brown basket vole was sneaking along the floor next to the wall, nose twitching. It was interested in our boots, to chew the leather. It was about the length of my hand, not including a short fuzzy tail. They were vermin, but pretty ones, with their soft pelts and black-ringed eyes; some children in Riversong had kept them as pets.

  Dilara’s hand crept out and took a citrine from the fruit bowl. The vole crept on, sniffing. It began to gnaw the sole of my boot and I heard the scrub of chisel teeth on leather.

  Dilara’s arm moved like a whip. The citrine shot across the room, slammed the vole against the wall, and bounced away. The little creature, stunned, lay on its side with its flanks heaving.

  Dilara was out of bed in a flash. She picked the vole up by the neck, so it couldn’t turn and bite her, but it was too dazed to defend itself.

  “Put it out the window,” I said. I was rather awed; I was a good shot with a stone, but Dilara was either very lucky or a lot better than I was. In the other bed, Sulen seemed to be coming awake, but then she snorted, rolled over, and fell silent.

  “It will only come back if I let it go,” said Dilara. She took the vole’s throat between her fingers, and, with a single twist, neatly snapped its neck. “There,” she said, in a matter-of-fact voice. “Now it won’t bother us again.” She crossed to the window and dropped the small corpse through the lattice.

  Then, yawning, she came back to the bed and slid under the coverlet. “I’m tired,” she said, “and we’ll be leaving at dawn. We’d better go to
sleep now, Lale.”

  “All right,” I answered, and closed my eyes. Almost immediately, Dilara’s breathing deepened as she fell into a sound sleep. I spent a few moments feeling sorry for the vole, and then I followed her.

  Six

  Tamurin! In my memory, my first sight of Mother’s realm has never faded. I need only close my eyes to see again, on the far side of a broad valley, the mountain ramparts of the Despotate soaring toward the clouds. I could hardly wait to reach them, for I felt that my new life would not truly begin until I was safe within their rugged embrace.

  Over the thirty-odd days of our journey I had become good friends with Dilara and Sulen, and we chattered incessantly as we rode. Our relationship with Tossi was different, and not merely because she was several years our elder. She was not unfriendly, but she maintained a cool reserve with everyone except Mother and rarely spoke to us—or to anyone, for that matter. Dilara said she’d always been like that, because of something horrible that had happened to her before she came to Mother’s school. I asked Dilara what it was, but she didn’t know; and I certainly wasn’t about to ask Tossi.

  I also got acquainted with Sertaj. He was the junior man of the escort, though he seemed very grown-up to me, with his armor and weapons and his muscle-corded arms and sweeping mustache. He was the fourth son of a landowning family in a village near Tamurin’s capital of Chiran, and his skill with horses and archery had secured him a place in the Despotana’s personal escort. This escort was called the Green Heron Guard, because of the insignia that appeared on its battle standard. It was a hundred and twenty men strong, but when the Despotana set out for the south, she had taken only its best thirty troopers, a sign of her friendly relations with her neighboring Despots.

  For a day and a half we rode across the valley, the mountains looming ever nearer. I was now a very long way from Riversong, for I had seen my native Indar fall far behind as we rode into the Despotate of Brind, and then left Brind behind for Guidarat. I'd seen thatched roofs change to shingle or tile, timbered houses and bams replace those of plastered mud brick, and bullocks and dray horses at work in the fields instead of marsh oxen. I had now eaten beef, carrots, leeks, and wheaten bread for the first time, and I now knew that the north had four seasons, rather than the three I was used to. I'd grown up with the south’s rainy spring, dry summer, and the cool of its harvest; but here they didn’t have harvest, but autumn and winter instead.

  Northemers also wore more clothes than people in the south. Women put sleeved bodices over their tunics, and men wore not only loose trousers and shirts but also overtunics. In cooler weather they added long jackets or mantles and, on wet days, rain cloaks. Some better-off adults wore knee-length hose and shoes or boots instead of sandals.

  Most people dressed simply, but at the courts of the Despots, and among the rich landed families and the big merchants, things were different. I knew about luxury now, for the Despots of Indar, Brind, and Guidarat had made us their guests, and wealthy people along the way had been eager to have a Despotana under their roofs for a night. Such people wore clothes of fine linen or shimmering gossamin, in hues of cobalt blue, crimson, yellow, silver, midnight black, and sunlit gold. Woven or dyed into the fabrics were intricate designs of flames, mnning water, clouds, bees, swallows, and long-finned fish. As for jewels, the price of any of the women’s necklaces would have fed Riversong for a year.

  But I was too young to realize who paid for this glittering sumptuousness. I did not think about the bent and aching backs of the Erallu and Durdana field hands, on whose labors our hosts grew rich but who had almost nothing for themselves. I did not wonder why the towns and cities through which we passed were so ramshackle and decayed, while the palaces of the Despots and their families glowed with opulence. Nor did I wonder why so many farming villages lay abandoned or sunk in poverty, though they lay within sight of the splendid manors of the local magnates. In short, I did not see how the riches of the land and the people were being sucked into those few greedy mouths, as a man would suck barley beer through a hollow reed and leave the jar empty of all but sodden husks.

  Late one afternoon we came to the edge of Guidarat and the southern border of Tamurin. If I had been a moon stork, the bird that flies higher than any other, I could have seen the Despotate laid out before me, like a plump, beckoning finger that stretched two hundred miles northward into the sea. On the finger’s eastern side was the Gulf of the Pearl, the great bay into which the Pearl River flowed after its thousand-mile journey from far inland. To the west lay the Great Green, the world’s ocean, in whose waters rose the archipelagoes of Khalaka and the Yellow Smoke Islands, home of spices, pirates, and burning mountains.

  The border was marked by the narrow but swift Banner River. A stone bridge once carried the road across it, but the arches had fallen long ago into the rushing torrent. Sertaj told me that the bridge had been broken on purpose, during the Era of the Warring Emperors, to help defend against an invading warlord from Guidarat. The banks of the Banner being so steep at that point, we had to go upstream a mile to reach a ford. I’d expected a welcoming party and was a little surprised that no one had come to the border to meet the Despotana. I didn’t know then how much she preferred invisibility to display.

  At the ford I finally put to Dilara the question that had been puzzling me for some time. In a low voice I asked, “Why isn’t Mother afraid that somebody might rebel while she was away? It happens in the stories, you know, the wicked general betrays his lord and kills him at the homecoming banquet.”

  Dilara snorted. “Nobody would dare.”

  “Why not?”

  “They just wouldn’t, that’s all. Everybody’s loyal to her. The people and the soldiers and the merchants, everybody. You’ll see when we get there.”

  “Oh,” I said, and left it at that. Loyalty was still a new idea to me, but I found it comforting that such a thing could exist, having known so little of it in Riversong.

  The air grew colder after we crossed the river, and colder still as we climbed toward Crossbone Pass, the mountain gateway to the settled part of Tamurin. No one was on the road but us, and the only people we saw were a few herdsmen pasturing their curly-horned sheep on the upland meadows. A peaceful place Tamurin might be, but they kept well away from us. The only other signs of humanity were occasional stone watchtowers, with signal beacons at their summits. But none of the beacons flared to life as we approached; the towers were abandoned and derelict.

  We camped for the night at the top of the pass, which was a narrow cleft overshadowed by monstrous cliffs, and the next day began the descent. As the air warmed I found myself in a country of steep-sided green valleys, and through each valley ran a stream or small river, watering fields already lush with young wheat and millet. Little shrines to place gods were everywhere, and there were bigger shrines for the Beneficent Ones and the Lord of the Dead. I saw a really beautiful one to the Moon Lady that had silver crescents painted all over a dome of dark blue tiles.

  In Tamurin also were the manors of big landowners, and people toiling in the fields around them. But there were no abandoned farms, and even the small villages looked prosperous. During the two days it took to reach Chiran, we passed through several such places, and to my surprise the inhabitants didn’t make themselves scarce. Instead they came running out to cheer the Despotana, and often they threw flowers.

  And so at last I came to the valley of Tamurin’s capital, Chiran. The city stood about a mile from the sea, and rambled across three broad ridges that reached out, like spread fingers, from the valley’s flank. From a distance it was a jumble of high-peaked roofs clad in red tiles and gray cypress shingles, but as we drew nearer I could make out carved wooden eaves, painted gable ends, and high verandas with columns colored red and blue. Scattered everywhere were striped awnings; a trio of wooden fire-watch towers, slender as pines, rose high above the roofs. And surrounding everything was a stout wall of russet brick, dotted with stone towers, zigzagging uphill
and down like a great red serpent.

  A river, the Plum, flowed seaward past the city, and there was a bustling port at the foot of Chiran’s river walls, where the river emptied into an estuary. Thronging the water’s fish-scale glitter were boats and ships: plump fishing lorchas, their nets hung to dry in the rigging; waterspoons with slatted sails outspread like ladies’ fans; slender periangs resembling long-necked black geese, their boatmen balanced in the stem against the long sculling oars. There were also a few big freighters, the ones that sailors call “pelicans” because they carry so much cargo. These had several masts and high, pointed stems, and they loomed over the smaller craft like marsh oxen over a flock of paddling ducks.

  I was accustomed to riding into towns and cities by now, and considered myself an old hand at travel. Even so, my entry into Chiran was a confused swirl of scents and sounds and images, for word of the Despotana’s retum had leaped ahead of us, and as we rode through Ten Fragrances Gate the narrow streets had already filled with people. Most were Durdana but with a salting of Erallu and some races I’d never seen: one was black-haired like the Erallu, but much darker of skin and larger of frame, while anodier might have passed for Durdana except for the pale gold hair worn in an elaborate coif. A third was thin-lipped, flat-nosed, with russet skin; others, from their features or coloring, were of mixed blood.

  But whatever the race or blend of races, everybody had seized the excuse to celebrate. Long multicolored banners waved jauntily above the crowds, noisemakers banged and clattered, thick sweet incense smoke wafted from temples and shrines, drums thumped and boomed, dogs barked, flutes shrilled, and people called blessings on the Despotana in the names of all the Beneficent Divinities.

  Dilara called to me over the uproar, “See? They love us!” She was laughing with delight, and, as for me, I was ecstatic. They were cheering the Despotana, and since I was one of her daughters, I felt that the cheers were partly for me, too. I'd never been so happy in my life.