The Assassins of Tamurin

by S. D. Tower

  She wouldn’t meet my gaze, “They want to know, that’s all. They want you to tell them . . . through me, they want you to tell them what his plans are. They’ll pay you well. You’ll never be in any danger. They’ll make sure you stay safe. It’s nothing, really. Just a word or two, that’s all.”

  An abyss opened at my feet. My word or two would tell them where to be waiting. In the dense crowds, assassins could vanish. They were planning his murder, and they needed me to help them.

  I was appalled. What were they thinking of, to approach me in this clumsy, horribly dangerous way? Didn’t they know anything about conspiracy? And why did they think I could be so easily bought? Was it because I was an actress, no better than a whore with a second profession, happy to fatten my purse if it involved little risk? If I hadn’t been so alarmed. I’d have been very, very angry.

  But no matter how inept they were, they’d have taken precautions. Yerana’s curtain hid the sleeping chamber, but I’d wager my life that at least one of them was in there listening. If I refused Tsusane’s offer, they’d have to kill me. That would explain her fear. So I had to pretend to be as stupid and venal as they thought I was and get out of here as fast as I could.

  But what if she's working for the Chancellor, and the Chancellor suspects Mother, and he's trying to trap me?

  The thought was an icy deluge. If this was so, then with a single wrong word I might condemn myself.

  But what to do? If Tsusane’s offer was real, then enemies lurked behind the painted curtain, waiting to hear my answer, which must be yes if I wanted to leave here safely. But if she spoke with the Chancellor’s mouth, my answer must be no, or it was the Arsenal dungeons for sure.

  So I didn’t say either. Instead I rose very deliberately from my bench, as if pondering what she’d asked. Tsusane watched me, agony in her gaze, and I knew that this wasn’t her idea. Someone had forced her to approach me.

  “I have to think about this,” I said. “Are you sure it isn’t dangerous?” I kept one eye on the curtain, which was three paces away, immediately beside the door to the outside staircase. Had it moved very slightly? A breeze through the shutter slats? Or someone’s breath coming faster as he listened?

  “No, not dangerous.” She attempted a reassuring smile. It was ghastly. “Just promise me. That’s all.”

  “What will happen if I don’t?”

  Her eyes moved very slightly toward the sleeping chamber, which told me everything. She said, hopelessly now, “They’ll hurt me. Oh, please, Lale. Please."

  I sprinted for the door. The man must have been watching through a slit in the curtain, because he came through it like a marsh ox through a reed fence. The drapery tangled him for an instant and I had time to wrench the door open, but he got me by the arm as I hurled myself onto the outside landing.

  He was a big man and he tried to pin my arms against my sides, but he was off balance. I dragged him onto the landing, got my left arm free, and jabbed him, stiff-fingered, under his rib cage. He gasped and let go of me, doubled over, then fell heavily against the rickety landing rail. It gave way with a crack and he pitched out into space, four stories above the courtyard paving. I'd paralyzed his breathing and he couldn’t scream, but he did make a frantic grab for the edge of the landing. He might have saved himself, except that I kicked his hand away from the boards so that he went straight down, silently, onto the stones. Inside, Tsusane had begun to sob, although she hadn’t put her nose out the door. Maybe she thought I was already dead.

  I wasn’t, but two men were standing at the foot of the staircase, and from their expressions they intended me no good. I debated running back inside and jumping from the balcony into the canal, but four stories was a long way down, and if there were boats below me I'd be killed.

  The staircase was almost as dangerous. The men stared up at me, perplexed and alarmed, their dead colleague almost at their feet. They probably thought he’d fallen by accident. They were a few years older than I, heavy jawed and sallow; they might have been brothers. Both were well dressed, one in green and one in yellow, and had neatly trimmed hair. They were no doubt armed, although I couldn’t see a blade.

  The one in yellow said, “Come down, lady mistress. We won’t hurt you.”

  Not very likely. They’d seen that I was trying to get away, so they knew I'd refused to work for them. But I'd bluff as long as I could.

  “Please,” I quavered, “he slipped. I don’t know what happened. It wasn’t my fault.” I knelt, as though to look over the landing’s edge at my handiwork, and surreptitiously removed my sandals. If you’re trained, you can do a lot more damage with bare feet than with shod ones.

  “It’s all right,” Green assured me. “Just come down. We only want to talk to you. It was an accident. We’ll tell the magistrates so.”

  Yellow knelt by the body, nodded, and stood up. “He’ll be fine, mistress. Just knocked out. Come down, there’s a sweet girl.”

  I’d heard the noise when he struck the ground, and he was never going to be fine again. But they were trying to reassure me, so I took the bait and descended, apparently hesitantly, to the landing above them. All the while I was considering what to do. I was at a disadvantage, because I had to get away without betraying my fighting skills. I could explain one corpse as a lucky accident, but three might raise eyebrows, especially Halis Geray’s.

  “Come down, girlie,” Yellow coaxed. Up in her rooms, Tsusane was still weeping. Three or four heads had popped out of windows above the courtyard to see what was happening. My attackers-to-be noticed this and became more agitated. Neither had realized that I was now barefoot, not that it would have meant anything to them.

  “Promise you won’t do anything to me?” I asked tremulously. A distant part of me was frightened, and also very angry, but otherwise I had become what Master Aa had taught me to be—a fine needle’s point of will and concentration. It made my acting even better than usual. And this time, unlike that night in Istana, I was thinking ahead.

  “Of course not,” said Green. “You must have misunderstood what Tsusane said. Come with us and we’ll explain.”

  They’d explain me into the depths of a lagoon, they would, with iron lashed to my ankles. I could scream for help as I stood here, but that probably wouldn’t put them off. Where were the Chancellor’s minders when I needed them?

  Green lost patience and started up the stairs. I waited until he was just below me, then kicked him in the mouth. The ball of my foot connected solidly. Teeth shattered, blood spurted, and his head snapped back. I’d withheld some of my strength so as not to break his neck, but the blow still threw him off the stairs and practically into his comrade’s arms. They both fell in a heap; I swung myself over the landing rail, hit the pavement running, and raced for the courtyard’s street gate. My foot was stinging, a hazard of that technique; I’d cut it on a tooth.

  I heard Yellow running in pursuit. He must think I’d felled his friend with a lucky kick, or he wouldn’t be so foolhardy. I’d chosen the street because a periang wouldn’t move fast enough to get me out of his reach, but this was little better, because he was catching up. My foot hurt badly now; I’d got grit in the cut, and it was slowing me down. I might have to fight him after all, in front of more witnesses, curse him.

  There might be another way. Ahead was an alley. I flew into it and saw ahead the blue-green glitter of Lantem Market Canal. Close behind me I heard his laboring breath, and wondered vaguely if he had a knife.

  The alley stopped at the water’s edge. I hit the end of the paving and jumped. A periang flashed past beneath me, a msh of wind blew my skirts up, and I plummeted into the canal. I let myself sink. Green water frothed past my face like spUntered emeralds, tumed immediately to dark jade, then indigo. The canal was thick with sediments, the mnoff from the dye works, and pitch black only an arm’s length down.

  To my water-deadened ears came the thump and msh of a body hitting the canal. He’d come in after me. Good.

  I s
truck out for the surface. My skirts trailed around my legs but, being gossamin, absorbed little water and didn’t trouble me. Tuming in the dkection from which the splash had come, I broke into the sunlight, blinking.

  People in boats pointed at me and gesticulated. Yellow had seen me rise to the surface and was only five paces away, swimming strongly. Probably he intended my drowning to look like a failed rescue, ending with the loss of my corpse in the murk of the canal.

  I let him almost catch up with me, then took a huge breath and slid under the surface. He followed, the fool, and tried to get his hands around my throat. I brought my knee into his groin. The water cushioned the blow, but it was hard enough to double him up. We were now sinking slowly into darkness; I twisted, got my legs around his waist, and clamped myself there. He was struggling now, not fighting. My fingers found the numbing place in the hollow of his neck; his back arched as he lost control of his lungs and tried to breathe the canal. His struggles grew feeble, but I was running out of air myself, so I let go of him and swam toward the faint light above.

  I broke surface in a rush, breathing hard, and trod water as I looked around. Yellow didn’t reappear. Thirty paces away, the scullsman who had brought me to the villa watched me open-mouthed. I waved violently at him. A couple of skaffies came up, both loaded with crates of geese that honked and flapped in excitement. The woman in one cried, “Where is he? Where is he?”

  “I tried to help him,” I gasped. “I tried, but he just slipped away.”

  “Oh, the poor man,” she wailed. “And you risking your own pretty self. Come aboard here, mistress, let me help—” My scullsman was approaching with the periang. “It’s all right,” I said to the woman, supporting myself on the wale of her craft. “There’s my boat.” I glanced along the canal toward the wine shop, but there was no sign of my minder. He and his colleague didn’t know it, but they had just ended their careers in the Chancellor’s service, and serve them right.

  The periang glided up to me. The scullsman helped me aboard and I said, “Take me to Jade Lagoon.”

  I was still dripping when we reached the palace mooring basin; I was also shoeless, my right foot still bled, and I was filthy from the canal. A less impressive specimen you could not have met, and I had to speak firmly to the guard captain before he agreed to summon a very alarmed Kirkin, who took me to the Chancellery. It happened that both Terem and Halis Geray were there, and after some difficulty with the underlings I got in to see them.

  “Lale, what’s happened?” Terem asked. The Chancellor watched me without expression. I could hear the faint whistle of his breath going in and out, in and out.

  I hesitated, just for a moment, or I would prefer to think I did. For I’d liked Tsusane, and she was the first friend I’d made in the city. But now my words would be her death, for it was clear that there was a plot against the Sun Lord, and she was in it. I tried to make myself feel better with the thought that a genuine friend wouldn’t have put me in such terrible danger, which was true; but I didn’t think she’d done it willingly.

  “My lord, I think someone means you harm during the Ripe Grain Festival,” I said, and then I told them everything, except the part about my killing two people. I said the man upstairs had fallen, that I’d made a lucky kick with the second, and that the third one must have been a poor swimmer, while I was a good one.

  When I finished, Terem’s face was cold and white. I’d never seen him look like that. He said, “Lale, you might have been killed.”

  This had been very unlikely, but I realized I was a little too calm for a girl who had just escaped murder. So, with a tremble in my voice and a fiightened look on my face, I answered, “I know. I’m just starting to realize it.”

  He hurriedly poured me a cup of unwatered wine and held my hand while I drank some. His touch was pleasantly reassuring, for he was right—I might just possibly have been killed. It was three against one, after all.

  I set the cup down and murmured, “Thank you, my lord.” Still looking distressed, he kept my hand in his. “This girl Tsusane—she told you no details. Why do you think there’s a plot to assassinate me?”

  “Sir,” I said with some asperity, “if they were planning something joyful, they wouldn’t have attacked me to conceal it.”

  The Chancellor asked, “Did you recognize any of the three men?”

  “No, lord. I have no idea who they were.”

  “But I do,” Halis Geray said, which made me very glad indeed that I’d reacted as I had to Tsusane’s proposal. He and Terem scrutinized me for several moments, and I began to wonder a little nervously what the Chancellor was thinking. At length he said, “You keep your head in a crisis, don’t you?”

  I bowed slightly. “I do my best. Lord Chancellor.”

  “Also you’re very resourceful. Unusually so.”

  That was an avenue best left unexplored. “Sir, I think I’m very lucky. By rights they should have killed me twice over. But they were so, well, inept.”

  “Inept is the word for it,” Geray said dryly, and tumed to Terem. “I think we’ve let them run long enough. They’ve tried to reach inside these walls through her, and that we shouldn’t permit. Also, we didn’t know about the musician girl until now, and that bothers me.”

  Terem nodded. “Bring them in,” he said.

  Afterward, people called it the Hot Sky Plot. At its center was a man named Laykan. It so happened that his family had, for almost a century, managed the govemment salt monopoly at the coastal city of Gao. However, Laykan had skimmed most of the profits during the past twenty years, and when the Inspectorate discovered this, the monopoly was taken away and Laykan had to pay a ruinous fine. Angry over this perceived injustice and his family’s resulting impoverishment, he began to think treasonous thoughts. He moved to Kurjain and began to look for people with grievances of their own, and in such a large city he soon found them. Among his recent recruits was Tsusane’s younger brother, a rancorous youth who had failed the Universal Examination twice, blamed the govemment examiners, and wanted revenge. Through him, Laykan discovered Tsusane’s connection to me, and the assassination plot flowered.

  Unfortunately, poor Tsusane was blind to her brother’s defective character and believed the lie—which he himself concocted—that he’d be killed if she didn’t persuade me to join the conspiracy. As if that weren’t enough, they’d threatened her life as well.

  Laykan was a much better embezzler than a conspirator, and his incompetence had doomed the plot from the beginning. He was so maladroit that Halis Geray had known about his machinations since early summer, but the Chancellor had merely watched the conspirators to see how far the contagion would spread. It was fortunate for me that he didn’t discover Tsusane’s involvement until I revealed it; otherwise I might have been under deep suspicion as well.

  Tsusane tried to flee the city, but they caught her just a few miles upriver. The rest, a round dozen excluding the two I’d already done for, never got out of Kuijain. The speed of the arrests shook me, and I realized that I’d been entirely too indifferent to the danger the Chancellor represented; he was not an enemy to be trifled with. My minders were promptly changed, too, though Terem never let on to me that I’d had any.

  My connection to the affair inevitably got out, and to my gratification it tumed me into a popular heroine. I became the brave young woman who risked her life to wam her noble sovereign of treachery, just like Jian in Maylane Unyielding. I pointed this out to Master Luasin, and he immediately ran four special performances of the play in the Rainbow, with me as Jian—over Harekin’s furious protests—and we packed the theater each time. Rumors began to fly as well that Terem was my lover, but even though his mouming year wasn’t quite finished, nobody thought the worse of us for it. We were being somewhat improper, but he was well liked and I was brave, beautiful, and loyal, so the people of Kuijain were happy to forgive us.

  I didn’t give evidence during the treason trials, since most of the conspirators confessed in
the hope of obtaining mercy. This speeded everything up, and all the trials were over by the middle of Ripe Grain. By that point the mood in the city was vengeful, Terem being so admired, and the magistrates were not inclined to mercy despite the confessions. They condemned all the convicted to execution by slicing, the hideous and prolonged death reserved in those days for traitors. The sentences went to Terem for confirmation and he, in the name of compassion, commuted most of them to hanging. Only Laykan and two others suffered the full penalty.

  Tsusane was among those to hang. I hadn’t seen her since that dreadful aftemoon, and didn’t really want to. She could have gotten me killed, and her disregard for my health still annoyed me. But I didn’t think she should die, since she was in the plot under duress. I put this to Terem on the day before the executions.

  “I understand why you’re sympathetic,” he said. “She was your friend. But she should have reported the threats to the magistrates. You know what the law is, and so did she. To be aware of a conspiracy against the sovereign, and not reveal it, is a capital offense.”

  “I know she deserves to die,” I answered. “All I’m saying is that mercy wouldn’t be amiss. She’s hardly a threat to you now.”

  “I’ve shown enough as it is. Halis wanted to arrest the plotters’ families as well, just in case we’d missed some people, and I wouldn’t let him. Anyway, you might have died because of her. I can’t forgive that.”

  “But that’s the point,” I said. “If I can still want her pardoned after what she did to me, why shouldn’t you consider it?” I touched his hand. “Please, Terem.”

  It was a kind of test. He’d already thanked me profusely for my courage and loyalty and given me a very fine emerald necklace to show his appreciation. But would he free Tsusane for me, when his inclinations were so much toward executing her? If he would, I could be much more confident that we had a future together. In the uproar of the past half month I'd hardly thought about the Elder Company’s impending departure, but now that things were settling down I had to attend to my task again.