“Come now,” Tigai said to the mercenaries. “You’ve had claim on these the last two nights already. Surely there are plenty to go round.”
“Move along,” the mercenary repeated. “Return tomorrow and you can have your pick of our leavings.”
“By tomorrow I’ll be half a day’s journey to Hagong. I’d saved enough qian for one of the Ihjani’s girls to see me off. All the men of my guild say they’re the best.”
The mercenary made a face between a leer and a grin. “You’ll have to spend your seed in the dirt along the road, tradesman. Or find some lesser whores.”
“The slave girls are only for men with your sashes?”
“Men of Ambiyyat’s company,” the mercenary said. “Fighting men.”
“Very well, then,” he said. “I’ll fight you for your sash.”
Laughter roared from the mercenary’s fellows, and the man who’d spoken gave him a second look, as though Tigai had already struck him across the eyes.
“What did you say, tradesman?”
“You heard me, my friend. I mean to wet my cock tonight. If that means trading blows with you before I get my hands on a girl, so be it.”
He knew at once he’d judged the situation aright. The man’s fellows wore skull-splitting grins, looking back and forth at him as though they couldn’t believe what they knew they’d heard. The mercenary had spoken truly enough; they were fighting men, tall and broad-chested where Jun lords were seldom renowned for their height or girth, and Tigai was no exception. But he’d been trained at arms by an Ujibari clan chief, hopefully enough to hold his own. It might end with his face in the dirt, but these men respected strength, so strength was the tool he had to employ. And the mercenary couldn’t refuse such a challenge, not and share a drink with any fellow of his company for weeks to come.
“You’re a gnat,” the mercenary said. “Fuck off before I swat you.”
Tigai replied by dropping into a fighting stance, setting his weight between both legs and relaxing into a half crouch, allowing his opponent the first attack.
The laughter turned to a buzz that passed through the crowd, their eyes turned from within the Ihjani’s stall and from within the press of the square. Space appeared around them, though anyone would have sworn the press was packed tight a moment before.
The mercenary gave him a look of equal parts confusion and scorn, and offered the same to his comrades. Tigai waited, lowering his eyes to watch all parts of his enemy’s body at once.
Weight shifted to the mercenary’s front leg, and gave away the strike before it came.
The mercenary grunted, lunging to throw a punch across his body with enough force to crack a stone. Tigai ducked, jabbing into the mercenary’s abdomen as a feint while he sent a kick to the side of the knee on the mercenary’s front leg. Simple. Remarin had drilled him on it a hundred times: Disrupt your enemy’s balance and he would fall, no matter the size advantage in your opponent’s favor. Only instead of falling, the mercenary staggered forward, carried by the force of his own swing.
Tigai tried to shift his weight and turn aside, but the mercenary caught hold of his shirt, wrenching them both into the street. Pain stung his forearm where he landed, scraped against the stones and dirt, and his breath burned as it left his lungs. The crowd roared, and the audience seemed to blur as the ground spun beneath him.
He kicked to free himself, landing a solid blow on something he hoped was the mercenary’s torso. Then the world shook and he tasted blood.
The mercenary hit him again. His head ached and his teeth hurt. Instinct hovered over the strands like the fibers on a weaver’s wheel. But no; leaving that way meant questions, and questions meant heightened alerts, knowing a magi had taken an interest in Priva Ambiyyat’s band. The mercenary wouldn’t strike to kill. They lay tangled on the street, and he flailed and kicked between the mercenary’s punches, landing a fist in the other man’s jaw, and another in his eye. The crowd roared, laughing and shouting until rough hands grabbed hold of his shoulders and dragged them apart.
He staggered to his feet, hefted by a Hagali man a full head and shoulders above him. Another who could be the Hagali’s twin held his opponent, and Priva Ambiyyat himself stood between them, a man attired tenfold as grandly as his soldiers, with a scabbarded shamshir blade tucked in the folds of his gold and crimson sash.
“What passes here?” Priva Ambiyyat said. “Almost I think I have taken a wrong street, and ended at the fighting pits, instead of the flesh market.”
“This man tried to fight me,” his opponent said. The man’s lip had split, his eye already turned a soft purple that promised to bloom before the night was out. Evidently Remarin’s training had counted for more than he’d thought, when instinct took over.
“This is true?” Ambiyyat said. “You have assaulted one of my company?”
“I challenged him for one of your sashes, and the right to bed one of these whores,” Tigai said, ignoring the throbbing pain in his head and the trail of blood running from his nose. “He accepted the challenge when he threw the first punch.”
“Summon the guards,” the Ihjani whore-seller said from behind a line of mercenaries. “This sort of disruption is intolerable, and around my delicate night-flowers, who know nothing of these cruelties.”
Ambiyyat grinned, looking between him and the mercenary he’d fought. “It seems to me you have earned yourself a night in a cell, my friend.”
“I wanted nothing more than the honor of having what you have already had, my lord,” he said. “They say Priva Ambiyyat’s company is generous in victory and honorable in defeat. Do they have the right of it?”
Desperation strained his voice. He could hear it as the words left his lips, as Mei’s face flashed in his memory. But the captain paused, looming between his Hagali bodyguards as though deciding what to have for supper.
“No man says that of my company, not in any port of call I have visited.”
“Perhaps they will start, when you grant me my whore.”
Ambiyyat laughed. “I have never seen a man so desperate for fucking. Yes. Let them go. For your zeal, and the unexpected entertainment. Did you have a particular slave in mind?”
Tigai suppressed the urge to exhale in relief.
“I am a humble man, my lord. Would it do you homage, if I chose whichever girl you had last night?”
This time the crowd laughed along with the captain, and he nodded agreement, clapping Tigai across the shoulder hard enough to rattle his teeth a second time.
Their tea service had been prepared in the Emperor’s kitchens, ferried to Ghingwai on the backs of sea turtles, then left to steep under moonlight for the length of an owl’s song. Or so it bloody felt.
Lin Qishan, still wearing the costume of a mercenary sergeant, insisted they keep decorum, which meant tea before business, no matter how late the hour. She reclined in an oak chair carved with dragons for armrests, looking for all the world as though her tea was the most important thing in the world. She lifted the cup, inhaling the steam, and he resisted the urge to knock it to the floor, to yell at her to read the fucking papers he’d delivered before they’d even entered the teahouse.
The slave girl he’d won the right of bedding had led him straight to Priva Ambiyyat’s tent. Her strands had been unmistakable, and thank the Gods the captain hadn’t shared her yet with his lieutenants. A look at her had made clear why: a beauty from the southern jungles, done up like a Jun court haremite, but with a boyish figure and a penis to match. She’d reacted with confusion when he spent more time with his eyes closed, sensing her connections to the starfield, than staring at her figure. Gods only knew what she’d thought of him excusing himself in haste once he’d made the connection.
“Do you not find your tea agreeable, Master Anji?” Lin Qishan asked.
He glared at her. The servants had poured him a cup, too, of course. He hadn’t looked at it. Lin Qishan seemed wholly intent on their useless charade, as though they were actors pla
ying for the sake of an audience who’d paid to watch their every dalliance. Fine.
He took up the cup and downed its contents in a single gulp, regretting the decision quicker than he could lower it back to the table. Boiling water seared his throat, and he coughed, loud enough to turn heads and spoil the scene.
Lin Qishan only sipped her tea, ignoring his display.
“Very well,” she said after an eternity. “Let us see what business you’ve put before me.”
Priva Ambiyyat’s mercenary contracts. He’d read them through twice to be sure, and grabbed three extra sets of documents, governing the company’s employment history for their prior four campaigns. Ambiyyat’s company had been hired to garrison Ghingwai for the season, paid by the magistracy itself. Before that they’d been fighting striking workers on behalf of a mining company, doing patrols in the jungles of Honjin, been armed escorts for the wool merchants’ guild’s caravans, and fought Ihjani tribesmen for a Jun march lord in the far west. Lin thumbed through them all, seeming to pore over every word.
“It’s all there,” he said, straining through his scorched throat. “You must give me whatever token will suffice, to stop Master—”
She hissed before he could say the name. Oh for the koryu’s sake.
“… to stop our mutual acquaintance, then,” he finished.
“Yes,” Lin Qishan said. “In due course. First I will need you to murder the owner of these documents, then do the same for each of the other five mercenary captains in Ghingwai.”
He nearly coughed again. She insisted on the pretense of a masquerade, then spoke openly of murdering a half-dozen men? And not just any men, the very captains employed to defend the city?
“Of course,” he said. “Naturally you want them dead. Shall I deliver the Emperor’s wives to you as well? Then the heads of Zan House, the Jiyuns, and perhaps their firstborn daughters to keep you entertained while you wait?”
“No,” she said, as though he were perfectly serious. “Only these six, to send a message. Then you wait for the reply.”
“No. I won’t do anything of the kind. Not without assurances that Mei and—”
Once again she hissed to cut him short.
“You’ll have your assurances,” Lin said. “Our mutual acquaintance will not act without my word. Do this. Do it tonight.”
“What? I can’t—”
She slammed the table. “You can. You will.”
Patrons from across the house were eyeing them, and Lin seemed not to care.
He leaned forward, lowering his voice to just above a whisper. “You mean for me to walk into their camps, strike them down, and hook an anchor to the next tents? Half the city will be in an uproar, screaming about a magi gone mad.”
“Yes, yes they will.”
She was half-witted herself. No other explanation fit. Her and Master Indra and his apprentice and all of them. Even with Dao, Remarin, and Mei in their keeping. They were asking him to start a war, to declare that the Great and Noble Houses intended to interfere in politics again. He wasn’t even associated with the monks or their temples, and Lin Qishan was asking for the sort of incitement that would send half the Empire into a panic.
“Why don’t you do it yourself? Go throw glass at them until you stir the hornets into a frenzy.”
“I wouldn’t survive. You will. And it is imperative you do, so take no chances with the soldiers.”
“You’re asking me to weigh three lives against what, how many? A thousand? How many will die in the panic alone?”
She said nothing to that, giving him a cold look in place of argument. Mei’s face flashed again in his memory, and the terrible image of the hand in Master Indra’s sack. All his better judgment screamed to run, to write off his brother, Remarin, and Mei as casualties of whatever insanity prevailed among his captors. Instead he could feel the decision being made, and hated himself for knowing what it would be.
29
ARAK’JUR
A Fetid Swamp
Lhakani Land
Light touched him, and he swallowed it. Thick wood loomed overhead, draped with moss and vines, blacking out the sun. Water and mud coursed through him, mixed with peat and tar. Upright animals came and went, and birds perched on branches above the carcasses of beasts that stayed too long. Yet though he welcomed death, he was a wellspring of life. Mushroom caps bloomed from the morass of dead flesh and trees. Flies and larvae crawled on branches, nesting on any surface that could hold their tiny bodies. Ensnared animals hosted infections as they died, and sprouted rot when they fell still. He was the swamp, cradle of decay, and his was the gift of death before rebirth.
REMEMBER US, the Great Spirit thought into the void. DEATH STIRS, AND THE GODDESS HAS NEED OF OUR GIFT. REMEMBER US, WHEN THE DAYS OF SHADOW COME AGAIN.
I will, he thought back, and the void slipped away, replaced by the emptiness of life.
His muscles ached. Ipek’a had guarded the way into the swamp, a pack of ten with two alpha females, one aged matron and a daughter soon primed to challenge for the place. He hadn’t bothered with subterfuge, attacking the pack at sunrise after he’d stalked them to the edge of the bog. Claws and beaks had raked him for his hubris, but the beasts had fallen to his rage. A temporary relief, fighting with the spirits’ gifts against a flurry of feather and claw. It had distracted from the pain, the dullness that had been his companion in the days since he’d turned south.
Corenna had abandoned him.
Had she come to him and reasoned against continuing on their journey, he would have called it wisdom and found the first safe haven for her to shelter against the storm. But instead she’d gone. Was it fear of letting him down? Never cowardice. Never abdication of her duties. A thousand explanations ran through his thoughts, each more empty than the last. But the fact remained: She was gone, he was alone, and the mantle of Ka’Inari’s visions fell on him like a shadow.
The bog stank, but he rose to his feet amid the thick mud and peat. A squelching sound accompanied his footfalls, each step yearning to keep him there until the tar had hold of him. Moru’Alura’Tyat, the spirits had named it. The place where death sleeps. A carrion bird crowed through the fog, and insects buzzed a welcome as he trudged through the slime. He went out the way he’d come, a turn northward in case the morass extended farther south than the entrance to its sacred heart. Corenna had to have come here, once, to learn the secret of the black tendrils, the secret the swamp spirits had granted him when they’d judged him worthy. She’d never spoken of it. A reminder there were parts of her he hadn’t known, parts that could abandon him with the Uktani mere hours behind. Spirits send she had veered far enough to escape their scouts. But if she had been taken, it hadn’t stopped their pursuit. He’d spent hours inside the swamp; days, perhaps, if the spirits had willed it. He might well find the Uktani waiting, when he left the murk behind. It was vulgar to hope for it, for the release of violence, but still the feeling came, slowly burning hotter as he trekked toward solid ground.
The fog thinned before he reached the corpses of the ipek’a pack, but the tar and peat was still thick around his feet. Impossible to move stealthily, or easily conceal one’s passage, when the ground tried to swallow his steps and left open maws behind when it failed to keep him. He moved in the open, leaving a trail to show where he had gone. A trail that had been followed.
He saw their silhouettes drawn against the thinning fog before he saw them in the flesh, but no mistaking the count, or the nature of what he saw. Two figures had climbed into canopies of dead branches, the desiccated husks of fauna that passed for trees near the heart of the swamp. Four more waited in the open, beside the corpses he’d left behind.
Not Uktani. Or if they were, they’d taken to wearing different markings. He stepped forward, until the fog lifted enough for sunlight to illuminate them. They’d smeared themselves with mud and peat, until their skins were almost black, and shorn their heads clean of hair. They waited for him, though it was clear from th
eir stances he’d been seen, and they made no attempt at surprise.
“Who are you?” a man called when he drew near enough to hear it. A short, thin man who stood at the center. The words had been spoken in a thick-accented dialect, but close enough to one he knew from travel and trade with the southern tribes.
“I am Arak’Jur, guardian of the Sinari,” he said in the same tongue. There was danger here; he’d entered a sacred place without the host tribe’s blessing, and invoked their wrath, if they chose to give it. Corenna’s departure had left him beyond caring. If they chose to try to take him, they would find him no easy prey.
“You tread close to a sacred place, Arak’Jur, guardian of the Sinari,” the man said. “Is it a thing for northerners to violate such sanctity?”
“I have come to treat with the spirits who dwell here. It is not my intent to treat with men.”
“This is not a place for you, or any man,” a woman among them said. “Your presence offends us, and you will not draw any nearer the heart of the swamp.”
Violence loomed behind her words, and a tinge of shame passed through him that he almost welcomed it. A vulgar spark against the blackness of Corenna’s absence.
“I’ve been there already,” he said. “I’ve spoken with the spirits.”
“You lie!” the same woman said, and the man raised a hand between them, as though he meant to block her way.
“The ipek’a pack,” the man said. “You fought them?”
Wisps of fog rolled between them over open ground, finally solid, though the stink of peat hung in the air. He wasn’t close enough to read the man’s expression, but there was disbelief in his words, and a glimmer of something else—hope, perhaps, or awe.
“I did,” he said. “And I passed through the corruption sealing the entrance to Moru’Alura’Tyat. I spoke with the spirits there, and earned their gift. And now I mean to go, and leave your people in peace.”
“He lies,” the woman said. “He is a man. The swamp spirits would never—”
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