He smiled. “Not any more.” She came closer.
He looked at her amber eyes, the pocked scars on her cheeks.
“Are you sorry you let them use you?” she asked.
“A little.” Tuvaini had seen Eyul’s hair turning steel-grey, had noticed his stiffness going in and out of obeisances, but he hadn’t expected the assassin to get hurt. Eyul still had his uses.
Lapella stood before him now, chasing his regrets away. “But you got what you wanted?”
“I will.” He smiled again and opened his arms. She leaned into him, rose-scented and soft.
“What did you do today?” he asked.
“The same.” Not much of an answer. He had no idea how she spent her days. She insisted a servant’s life was better than living in the women’s halls. Back home, noblewomen moved about more freely. Here, they depended on the double luck of having sons and outliving their husbands, as Empire Mother Nessaket had.
Nessaket had nearly the freedom of a man, and more cunning. He’d seen her today in the royal gardens. Not one to linger over blossoms, she’d used the flower walk to hurry from the east wing to the west. Tuvaini stood by the yellow roses and watched her disappear through the Sunset Arch, her silken train shimmering behind her. His mind filled with images of Nessaket. In every one of them, pride sculpted her features. She stood, or sat, or lay clothed in wisps, but always distant as mountain ice.
I will see her sweat and cry, see that perfect hair tangled, wild, watch those pale limbs strain.
“I see you’re ready for me,” commented Lapella, stroking him through his robe. He’d nearly forgotten about her, but she didn’t mind. She didn’t mind anything. She was his now. Before the pox-sickness came, it was said that only an emperor deserved Lapella, and only an emperor could master her. After it came, her family couldn’t marry her to anyone at all. They were relieved when Tuvaini paid a small sum for her permanent service, and they didn’t ask why. When he came to claim her, her spirit was still strong; her acid tongue had burned him. But he was honest and kind, and that broke her.
Tahal had taught him that one does not rule well by force alone.
Tuvaini pulled her robes from her shoulders and let them fall.
She smiled, happy for any attention he could give her. With Lapella, there was never a complaint or an unexpected demand.
Tuvaini loved certainty, hated uncertainty. Prince Sarmin’s madness vexed him, and this female from the Wastes would only complicate his plans. And yet, Tuvaini had his training to fall back on; of all the men in the palace, only he had sat at the feet of the great Tahal. Only he knew when to submit, when to charm and when to break a person like an egg.
Like Lapella. He laid her across the bed and spread her legs with his knees. “You are very precious to me,” he whispered.
“So you say,” she said with a chuckle. A hint of her old sense of humour, but she went no further with it. Next, she would apologise. And she did. “I’m sorry I’m so ugly for you.”
He could have said that the scars had faded so much that one could still see her old beauty. That her body was as firm and plump as it had ever been. These statements would have been true, but they would not serve him. Instead he said, “I don’t love you for your looks.” That, too, was true.
She made a little sound as he entered her. All conversation had ended. It was all right if he thought of Nessaket instead, as he pinned Lapella’s arms against the cushions. Lapella didn’t mind anything he did. It was a certainty.
Chapter Four
Eyul rode through the narrow streets of the Maze. He kept his camel to a slow pace along the central path, making it tread around the channel where the sewage ran, or rather where it lingered, stagnant and polluting the night. Despite the camel’s protests, he held it from the easier ground to either side.
Long ago, in this place, Eyul first learned to kill, his mentor Halim guiding his hand. In the darkness of the alleyways, whose black mouths yawned to the left and to the right, he had sliced lives from their owners. The Maze made him feel old. In the forty years since he ran here as a boy, nothing had changed: same stench, same murmured night-song, distant laughter, muffled violence, quick feet.
Eyul didn’t fear an attack, but why risk one? Take the path of least resistance. His camel resisted, as camels always do, giving out a loud snort of protest. He kicked it with both heels, hard, and kept the centreline.
His thoughts returned to the palace whilst his eyes remained on the alleyways. Who would employ Carriers as assassins? Who wanted the vizier dead? Eyul goaded his camel on, cursing at the throbbing in his leg where the Carrier’s knife had caught him.
Getting slow, old man, getting slow.
A movement in the moonlight shadow, liquid and threatening. “Do you really want to die here, my friend?” Eyul addressed the darkness. He heard the whisper of retreating footsteps. When robbed of surprise, most inhabitants of the Maze were apt to withdraw.
The Carrier had also run. Eyul had not given chase; that wouldn’t have been wise, not with a bleeding leg. Besides, anyone who could get into the Red Room would have had help; they would have been hidden long before he’d limped along their trail. Odd. Most odd. The patterning might not always take the life from a Carrier, but it took his fear of death. Why would a Carrier run?
Eyul followed the snaking path of the Old Way, passing a pyre tended by a lone Blue Shield. The royal guardsman wore a scarf around his mouth and nose to block the acrid smoke. The Carriers inside had fallen to nothing more than blackened bits of bone, yet he continued to stoke the flames. He didn’t look up; he didn’t notice Eyul leaving Nooria by the Low Door, where any man, even the emperor’s assassin, might escape the snare of the city walls without undue attention.
“Who goes? And on what business?” Another soldier, gap-toothed and limping, emerged from the gatehouse. His concern was only for show; he shone his lantern on the camel, not the rider.
“My name is Rinn, and I go to count the sand.” Eyul gave the old reply, a nod to legend and custom. He leaned from the saddle and placed three jade coins in the soldier’s hand. The man’s breath stank, fouler even than the sewers of the Maze.
“Go in peace, Rinn.” The soldier turned to raise the gate-bar.
Eyul’s leg throbbed, and he wondered if the patterning would enter him through the cut. Perhaps Tuvaini had more than one reason for sending him away. Eyul remembered struggling with the Carrier, held close, eye to eye, before he slid the emperor’s Knife over that unclean throat. The hermit will help me. For a price. Eyul shuddered. The hermit always had his price.
It would be twenty days across the sands to the Cliffs of Sight. He had his water and his parasol, his blankets and his tent. And a good bow and his Knife, always those. But he wouldn’t need them yet; outside the city wall, marketers waited to sell fermented juice, roasted goat, leg of dog, pickled eyes, and a thousand other delicacies. Even at this hour, when honest men lay abed, Eyul’s passage stirred the vendors into action. They stepped from tent to stall, sing-songing their wares, lifting the lids on blackened pots.
Eyul twitched his nose, searching through the scents. The oily barks of duggan tree and sand-birch smoked on low fires, flavouring the meats above. His mouth watered. An old man dusted strips of dry-roasted camel-hump with pollen. Eyul caught the scent of desert-rose and his stomach growled. He had long since learned to tolerate the bland foods of the palace, but he had never begun to like them.
The old man looked up as Eyul passed. “Two jade. Best rose-camel. Two jade only.”
Two jade? The man must have heard Eyul’s stomach, too.
“For two jade I would want your tent as well.” Eyul kept his eyes on the road.
“One! One jade, noble traveller. One jade, two strips!” the old man called from behind him now.
Eyul’s camel greeted the offer with a long and undulating belch.
“On my way back, friend. If I become rich in the desert.” He kicked his beast on past the souk, the
common traders’ tents, and the last well.
The moon made white crests of the dunes, marching across a black sea. Eyul marked his way by the Scorpion, the seven stars beneath which his mother had birthed him. In no time at all the clamour of Nooria lay in memory. Even his unruly camel felt the new peace and stopped its complaining. Soon only the sigh of the wind rippled the silence.
So. The hermit will not be pleased to see me again. A man seeks solitude in the vastness of the desert, and what happens? Men travel mile upon mile to plague him with visitations. A boy-prince seeks only love and company, and his family entombs him alone in the teeming palace.
At first Eyul thought he saw a sandcat perched atop a dune; then, as the moonlight revealed more detail, he saw it was a camel, half-hidden behind the crest. He made out a saddle and reached for his quiver as he scoured the sands for a rider. He spotted a white-robed figure, almost lost in the darkness at the base of the dune, motionless, facing him.
Eyul stopped his camel at a hundred paces and nocked an arrow to his bow. He took reassurance in the creak as the recurved horn bent to his pull. Power in his hands.
“What business have you in the White Sea?” he called out.
A woman’s voice answered him. “I wait for you, Eyul of Nooria, son of Klemet, Fifty-third Knife-Sworn.”
A pause. “Come closer, then.”
The wind billowed her robes as she stepped across the sand. Her hood fluttered, then fell free, allowing dark curls to twist in the air. She came within twenty paces. Skin like roasted butter-nuts, eyes darker still: from the Islands.
She held his gaze.
He pointed his bow to her right, but kept it drawn. “You have used my name, but have not offered your own; that is a rudeness in the desert.”
She bent her knee slightly, but the curve of her mouth did not suggest humility. “Apologies. Amalya. Of the Tower.”
A wizard. He returned his aim to her throat. “Amalya. Go back to your Tower. Tell your masters that my business is not theirs to supervise.”
“You will deny the Tower?” She was brave to smile so in the face of his arrow, and braver still to step forwards, holding out one hand. A hand that held a Star of Cerana, sparkling in the moonlight. “Will you deny the one who gave me this?”
Eyul relaxed the grip on his bow, feeling the ache in his arm for the first time. Who had given her that Star? Beyon? His mother? Tuvaini? He felt old once more.
“You are as brave and obedient as I have been told,” she said. “I am glad to have such a companion on my journey to the hermit’s lair.”
He took a moment to secure his bow, his surprise hidden in the practised movement. He spurred his camel towards the dune. “And what can I expect from my own companion?”
Amalya raised her face to the moon, eyes closed, her feet finding their own way. “Well, I can cook.”
The scents of the marketplace lingered on Eyul’s robes. He took a deep breath. “This is good,” he said, “but surely you haven’t been sent to fix my meals.”
She laughed at that, a velvet noise, and tucked the Star in a pocket.
Eyul turned his eyes to the sands, looking for more surprises.
“We are safe here, gri she said, as if reading his mind.
A cold wave swept over him. “And if I ask who sent you?”
“I would not answer.” She opened her eyes as if waking. “I am not here to hurt you, Eyul.”
Before he had time to linger on those words, she spoke again, in a conversational tone. “My camel’s not very cooperative. I fear I may have to walk across the desert.”
“I’ll help you.” Eyul pulled the half-staff from his saddle-pack. “I speak fluent camel.”
The debate, punctuated by staff-blows to the beast’s flanks, proved short and productive. The camel agreed to bear Amalya as directed and keep its complaints to the traditional spitting and passing of wind.
Eyul took the lead. He had crossed to the Cliffs of Sight before, but that had been ten years ago, and no trail lasts long in the desert. He found his bearings by the stars; in the hot season the Scorpion’s tail pointed the way.
They rode in silence. Eyul liked it quiet, but the wizard took the comfort from desert’s calm. Each mile added to Eyul’s unease until he longed to speak, and he had never been one to make talk for its own sake.
Eyul followed the line of the dunes where he could, but as the night wore thin their course took them from crest to crest, labouring up from the dips with the sand slipping around the camels’ pads, sapping energy.
“Dawn,” Eyul said, the first word to pass between them since their journey started.
The eastern mountains glowed gold and orange: the full heat of day would be upon them soon. Eyul slid from his camel with a groan. Months in the palace had left him soft, and his wound smarted. He watched Amalya climb down and took quiet satisfaction in the stiffness she tried to hide.
“Show me how they cook in the Islands,” he said.
Amalya smiled and turned to unbind the roll of her belongings. Wizard or no, Eyul could see she had a magic to her. Her robes fell against her as she moved, showing her to be long in the leg and generous in hip and breast.
Maybe not such an old man after all. Eyul’s lips twitched at his own foolishness.
Amalya brought out pans, small jars filled with spices, strips of dried meat, a bag of grain, and slices of dried apricots on a string. Eyul placed his own contribution on the sand in front of her: five cakes of camel dung, dried and pressed.
Amalya gathered the dung between two fire-stones and blew on it, softly, as a musician might blow upon a singing stick. Flames licked at the fuel.
She was flame-sworn, Eyul realised, like Govnan the high mage. He had met Govnan once, by chance, in the dark halls beneath the throne room. Govnan had lit a flame in his bare hand and asked to see Eyul’s Knife. Neither had queried the other’s purpose in the secret ways; it hadn’t seemed polite. That same sense of etiquette kept him from asking too many questions of Amalya, but he knew that within them all mages carried an elemental, air, water, earth or fire.
Amalya wrinkled her nose as she brought her pot to sit across the stones. “In the Islands we don’t cook on dung,” she said. A gentle humour softened her words.
Eyul reached for a handful of sand and let it trickle through his fingers. “We could burn the dune instead, if you’ve the magic for it?”
Amalya did not rise to his bait. She poured water from her skin into the pot, careful, spilling none. “I’ll save my magic for the sauce.” She sprinkled cornflour from a small bag. “Some things are best left to simmer.”
Eyul smiled. He yawned and leaned back against his pack. The sky shone with a faint shade of pearl, and as he watched it brighten he wondered who had sent Amalya, and why. Get across the desert first. Then we will see. He closed his eyes and breathed in the smell of her cooking…
He must have drifted off, because he opened his eyes to low sunshine and a bowl of stew. He accepted the dish, and Amalya crouched in the sand to eat her own meal.
“This is very good,” he said, rolling the mint and pepper together on his tongue. He remembered the foods he’d passed up outside the city wall; this tasted better than rose-camel.
“Island cooking,” she said with a smile.
“I should move to the Islands.” He took another bite.
Amalya blew on a small morsel of meat on her spoon. “I couldn’t tell you what it’s like there now.”
He nodded, understanding. “How long have you served?”
“Oh…” She tilted her head, fingers drumming a beat on the wooden bowl. “Fifteen years, just about. They told me I would protect the Boy Emperor. He and I are the same age, you know. I had romantic notions-Not that kind,” she said when Eyul smiled. “But the idea of children ruling and defending the empire-it appealed to me. It made it easier to leave.”
“They took you.”
She nodded. “They came for the tribute-children when I was eleven.”
Eyul scraped the last of the stew from his bowl. He remembered the terror of being taken by the guard, rough hands on his shirt collar, tears on his face. How old had he been? Seven? Eight? “You must have been frightened.”
“Not for long. Govnan saw me-he wasn’t the high mage then; it was before his great journey through the desert, before Kobar chose him as the Second. Govnan pulled me out of the line and claimed me for the Tower.”
“And now you carry the Star of Cerana. You’ve come a long way. To think that Lord High Vizier Tuvaini himself would design a mission for you-”
Amalya put her bowl down in the sand and chuckled. “Nice try, KnifeSworn. But I won’t tell you who gave me the Star, or who didn’t.”
“But you will give me your leftover stew?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Only if you tell me how you became an assassin.”
She meant it as banter, but the words cut, unexpectedly. How many years since he had thought of it? The cold stone floor, the stink of urine, his own voice, pleading… the pain. That broken boy reached out to him through the decades. No. “I… I can’t.”
Amalya handed him her bowl without speaking, no doubt regretting her question.
Eyul took a few bites in the silence and she watched him, kindness in her eyes. It made him uncomfortable. “Why don’t you get some rest?” he asked. “I’ll clean the bowls.”
“All right,” she said. Was that relief in her voice? “I’ll see you at sundown.”
“Sundown,” he agreed.
After she crawled into her tent, Eyul scrubbed the bowls clean with sand. His eyes felt dry and tired; his head ached. The memories were as fresh to him as his ride across these dunes, but the emotion felt ancient, rooted in him. The farther he travelled from the past, the more he lived in it, each day an inexorable step, closing the circle, bringing him back to what he’d left behind.
His work done, Eyul crawled into his tent. He dreamed of blood in a courtyard and a young emperor with dead eyes.
Chapter Five
The Emperor's knife Page 4
