Wyn’s head jerks up. “Frederick gone home?” he asks. “Is all forgiven?”
What a question.
“I don’t think Mrs. Och is going to change her mind,” I say.
A pause, and then he says, looking at the ceiling, “I wouldn’t have guessed he was your type.”
If I were not quite so wrung out, I might have laughed. “I don’t think I’ve got a type,” I say, and leave it at that. I’m hardly going to tell Wyn about Jun. And anyway, Jun thinks I’m a monster now.
“Look, I don’t even know if Dek’s coming back tonight,” says Wyn. “I’d offer you my bed, but Mei’s in it right now. You could take Dek’s, or we could lay a blanket on the floor. I wish we could put you up in better style.”
“I can’t go to sleep,” I say. “I’ve got to find Ko Dan before Mrs. Och leaves the city.”
“What, tonight? How?”
“I don’t know.”
Another knock at the door, but it isn’t Dek this time either. It is a ragged scamp with a message for me, written in Fraynish, a fast scrawl: Help me please. Come to Old Thien’s. Jun.
I leave Wyn at the little house, refusing his offers to come with me. For all that Jun helped me and said he forgave me, I can’t forget the look of terror on his face in the alley after I dragged him with me into Kahge. The way he said the word monster. It sits like poison in my chest, how frightened of me he was once he’d seen the truth about me with his own eyes. I want so badly to believe that he trusts me, that he would turn to me for help, that there could still be something between us. So I don’t stop to ask myself how likely it really is—not until I burst into Old Thien’s and see Pia, her booted feet up on the table.
She swings her legs down to the floor and gestures with a gloved hand at the seat across from her.
I don’t dare vanish, and so I sit down opposite her. Blast, blast, blast. If she knows about this place…if she knows about Jun…she’s been following me. I should have known she wouldn’t just be sitting around in that hotel. Thank the Nameless I always vanish in Nanmu. At least she can’t know where Mrs. Och’s house is—where Theo is.
“Have you made up your mind?” she asks.
“What?”
“I know you aren’t going to give up the boy, of course. But you could still give yourself up. Then Casimir would go on chasing Mrs. Och around the world, and there’s no guessing who might prevail, but it wouldn’t be your problem anymore. You’d have gold, adventure, freedom of a kind. Better than being broken. I’m hoping you’ve thought it through.”
“I’ve had a fair bit going on since I last saw you,” I say.
“So it would seem,” she says, looking me over. “I wasn’t sure you’d make it back at all last night, the way you were bleeding. And yet here you are, walking in as if you’d never been harmed. Remarkable.”
“I’m not going to work for Casimir,” I say.
The goggles whir but her expression does not change.
“I’m not working for Mrs. Och anymore either, as it happens,” I add. “I was a bit too independent for her liking. I’ve been sacked. So I reckon I’m out of this business altogether.”
She gives a shattering little laugh—it sounds like thin glass hit with a stick.
“You’ll never be out of it. Not now that Casimir has seen what you can do.” She leans across the table toward me. “What happened to you? You disappeared, and you came back bleeding. I thought it was a kind of visual trick, the disappearing. But you went somewhere and something hurt you, isn’t that right?”
“Yes.”
I half want to tell her. She wouldn’t stare at me in disbelief or horror. She would not be frightened, appalled, sickened. But I keep my mouth shut.
“Shey could help you, if you need help,” she says.
I shudder, remembering the sad-faced, hunchbacked witch.
“I shot her a few times.”
“She wouldn’t hold it against you.”
“Like you don’t hold it against me, the way I stuck a knife in you and left you for dead?”
She smiles.
“I am not interested in vengeance, Julia. I am done with the whirlwind.”
The image of Haizea, bleeding-eyed, her teeth bared, rises up in my mind.
“Done with it?”
My head is spinning, but she sits back, suddenly chatty and relaxed. “I had my chance with it. Casimir understands vengeance, and he can be generous. He indulged me, gave me a part to play in the destruction of the Sidhar Coven. There was a satisfaction in it, I won’t deny. I made my keepers crawl. Some of them I left for dead, and some of them I left with pain and nightmares. But it is an ugly sort of work. The whirlwind has no end.”
Casimir. If I had the chance, if I had the power, what would I do to him? Casimir, who drowned my mother. Casimir, who broke my hand and nose. Casimir, who took Theo. But it was me who took Theo. That was me.
“Those who terrorize the weak so rarely imagine the day when their victim might grow to be strong. I even found the man who came to me when I was small, the one I told you about, who took from me things I didn’t yet know that I had. He loomed so large in my memories of him, and yet when I found him again, he was an ordinary-size man, getting on in years, with bad teeth, ill health, and a wife who despised him. He was puny and cowering. I let the whirlwind rise. I let it tear him limb from limb and scatter the pieces of him far and wide. There is no right or wrong in the eye of that storm, only the power of it, only the certainty of what it will do, that nothing in its path can stop it. But it is a powerful thing to contain within oneself. If it does not tear you apart, at least it leaves you changed. It empties you out as it does its work. I would say that, yes, there is satisfaction in it, even a kind of joy, but less than you would think, and afterward, well…the landscape is changed. Everything that used to matter has been blown apart. There is so much vacant space and nothing to replace the fury.”
I don’t want to sit here chatting with Pia about what a lunatic she is, and yet I find myself riveted all the same.
“Do you regret it?”
“No. But I have had my fill of it. I have had my fill of strife and rage and even hope. This, here”—she folds up the bottom of her glove and flashes the disk of hot metal on her inner wrist at me—“this is the closest I have come to knowing peace. The freedom from choice. You might find it a relief.”
I shake my head, my insides shriveling. “I’d die before I let him take me like that.”
“You know as well as I do…no, not quite as well as I do, but even so, you know that there are a great many things worse than death, and that you will submit to Casimir rather than undergo them.”
The silence stretches between us.
“What do you intend now that you are no longer in Mrs. Och’s employ?” she asks.
“I’ll figure something out.”
“Last chance, Julia. Please consider carefully. Am I to tell Casimir that your answer is no?”
“You can tell him whatever you bleeding like,” I say, getting up.
I am at the door when she says, in a sort of drawl, “Before you came to Tianshi, I’d almost forgotten that you had a brother.”
I freeze.
“The cripple,” she says. “Was it Scourge?”
I turn toward her slowly. Her hand is on her knife, ready for me.
“What have you done to him?”
“Nothing. I expect he’s out having a good time with his girl. Pretty, isn’t she?”
“Stay away from him.” But my voice shakes badly when I say it.
She shrugs. “Your friend Jun, though…he is easier to follow than you are. You have this irritating habit of suddenly disappearing. I gave Count Fournier’s address to Lord Skaal as a gesture of cooperation. He’s been looking for anyone who helped the princess. So if you happen to find that either of them has been harmed, it was not by me. Not directly, in any case.”
I pull the door wide and run.
The house in Dongshui is empty except for Mei sl
eeping in Wyn’s bed. Wyn is gone. No sign of Dek. I stand there in the dark, listening to my own breathing, but I have no idea where they might have gone, no way to find either of them. I leave a scrawled note on the table: Not safe here. Then I wake up a very cross Mei, hustling her into her clothes and out of there. She lets me take her home—a sad little place under the shadow of the north wall—and she closes the door in my face without saying good night.
Count Fournier’s house is dark and unchanged from the outside, but inside it has been torn to pieces. I find the count’s body on the floor behind his desk, full of bloody holes. His expression is one of frozen dismay. I kneel next to him, and even though his dead eyes are staring up at the ceiling, I say his name, as if he might answer: “Count Fournier!”
I understand now why people close the eyes of the dead. It is too horrible to leave them staring at nothing, their death most apparent in the eyes, which are not windows to anything anymore. His eyelids still feel warm and soft under my fingers when I close them. I leave him there, my heart thundering in my ears, and search the rest of the house.
Jun is slumped against a wall in the broken room at the back of the house, fumbling with the box of bandages he used on me earlier. Tears slip out the corners of his eyes when he sees me. His right side is dark with blood.
“Let me look,” I say.
“Bullet is here,” he says thickly, pointing to his right shoulder. “I go down, play dead. There are so many—too many.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“He is dead.”
“I know. You need a doctor. Tell me where to go.”
His eyes close, and I feel like the ground is falling away underneath me.
“Jun, pay attention! Where can I find a doctor?”
He heaves a sigh. “First I need sleep.”
“Don’t go to sleep. I’m going to get help!”
He gives me a blurry look and shuts his eyes again.
I’m afraid to vanish, but I’m not strong enough to carry him any other way. I pull him to me—he smells like blood and sweat—and back to the edge of that bodiless place, where the room scatters beneath me, all its angles up close and far away at once. Immediately I feel the tumult of my blood under the mud of Ragg Rock, the reaching and tugging from something just beyond the void. I aim for the window and we land in the inner courtyard, hitting the ground too hard, Jun’s head lolling back in my arms. A sob catches in my throat. I pull back again, out over Tianshi, the swooping tiles of the rooftops gleaming dark below me, around me the canals rippling black and silent through the city, the stars coming out, and the moon gazing down at it all like a blank, unhappy eye. The sky is full of winged shapes, which confuses and frightens me. I take us down into Nanmu, returning to myself next to a small shrine to the spirit of the earth, piled around with fruit and wine and cups of rice. Ragg Rock was right: for all that the beings in Kahge might pull at my blood, the mud is a total barrier, more effective than my flesh, which melts away and reforms itself too easily between the world and its shadow. I look up with my own eyes; those winged shapes are still coasting over the city, huge birds swooping lower. I take a breath and pull back again.
I carry Jun to Mrs. Och’s house in staggering leaps in and out of the world. I hear a hiss behind me, faint but persistent: “Lidari.”
Shey could help you, said Pia. The only tempting part of her offer, now that Mrs. Och is done with me. I kick open the gate, and the spells in the courtyard walls start to screech like an army of cicadas.
“It’s me!” I shout, trying to drag Jun across the courtyard. “I need help!”
Frederick reaches me first, helps me carry Jun inside.
“He’s been shot,” I say.
Jun is barely conscious now, mumbling deliriously. I am so focused on him that I don’t see her coming. Mrs. Och descends on me and sweeps me outside, depositing me at the bottom of the steps in a startled jumble. Bianka comes running out after us.
“Go inside,” Mrs. Och commands her. “And make that racket from the walls stop immediately!”
“You shan’t hurt her,” says Bianka, her voice shaking, stepping between us. “I won’t let you.”
“It’s all right,” I say to Bianka, getting to my feet. “She can’t touch me.” I direct this to Mrs. Och, who stares me down.
“Go help Frederick,” I beg Bianka. “Help Jun. I need to speak to Mrs. Och.”
“Call if you need me,” she says, going back inside but leaving the door open. Mrs. Och and I face each other in the courtyard. The screeching from the walls goes suddenly quiet, and the night lies heavy all around us. I can hear anxious voices from the neighboring courtyards. The sky is dark, but the darker shadows of hundreds of birds still fill the sky.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
“Si Tan is looking for us,” says Mrs. Och. “We have to leave. I told you never to set foot in my house again. Why are you here?”
“Jun’s been shot,” I say. “I didn’t know where else to take him. He saved you that time in the monastery. Count Fournier’s dead, Jun’s got no one now, and he helped us. Will you help him?”
“I am not going to throw him bleeding into the street, if that’s what you are asking,” she says crisply. “But it seems that if I want to be done with you, I must take more extreme measures than simply telling you so.”
“Wait,” I say. “I’ve been to Ragg Rock. Look.”
I pull up my tunic so she can see the long strip of mud in my side—and then I have the surely rare experience of seeing her stunned and speechless. She reaches out a trembling hand and runs her index finger along the clay scar.
“What did Gangzi’s letters say?” I ask her.
She stares at me for a long moment, and then she says, “He is writing to every warlord, every minor official, every town leader and police chief and influential family across the empire. He is enlisting them all in a search for the Ankh-nu. It could be anywhere.”
“Then we’ve as good a chance of finding it as they have,” I say.
She smiles mockingly, and I force the question around the lump rising in my throat: “You think I might be Lidari. Don’t you?”
“I do not know what you are.”
“Well, neither do I!”
“What do you want from me, Julia?”
“One more chance,” I say. “Not for my sake—for Theo and Bianka. I don’t expect you to pay me. When it’s done, you’ll never hear from me again unless you ask for me, and if ever you ask for me, I’ll come. Let me find Ko Dan and bring him to you.”
“How?”
“I don’t know yet. But I will. Maybe he can help us find the Ankh-nu.”
She touches the mud scar again, presses on it. I step away from her, pulling my tunic back down.
“We cannot stay here,” she says, and gestures at the sky, the low-swooping birds.
“Just wait a few hours,” I plead. “I’ll bring you Ko Dan.”
“You are confident, Julia.”
No, only desperate. I wait while she looks into me, like she’s struggling to see straight through to the center of me. Whatever might be there, I can’t say. Then she says, “You have until morning, but I will wait no longer than that.”
“I’ll find him,” I say with a certainty I am far from feeling. “But…if I don’t?”
“Yes?”
“You’d never do what Si Tan wants, would you? I need to know. I need to be sure that you’ll never hurt Theo.”
“If it came to a choice between his life and a thousand lives or more, what would you do? Would you still want to save him, at any cost to the world?”
“It hasn’t come to that,” I say. Because I don’t want to say that, yes, I would choose Theo. I would choose Theo no matter what.
“I have lived a long time,” she says. “Casimir would say that the details do not matter. A life here, a life there. What can it mean, in the great oblivion of time, in this small corner of space, all of it just a brief flare in the emptiness? Casimir
tries to make his gestures great ones, his goals, his thoughts, all of them large, so that his life might matter, signify something in the great void of time and space. In my opinion, any attempt at largeness is futile. It is easy enough to believe that none of it matters, that life and love are meaningless, that there is nothing worth caring about. But here we are all the same. If I can bring relief to those who suffer, if I can offer help to those who think they are beyond it, if I can act on the side of right in this tiny play, then I shall do so, for I must act, whether for good or for ill. Call it an attention to detail. We are here, and we must make our choices. What Gennady did was wrong—creating a living vessel for his fragment of the Book. But now Theo is alive, he is a child, and if I can give him a chance at life, I shall do so.” She passes a hand over her face suddenly, as if she is moved, and I am shocked to see it. But her voice is clear and cool when she continues, changing direction slightly. “Regrets pile up as the years pass. You know it yourself, as young as you are. Live for centuries and the regrets and sorrows and losses can become too much to bear. I will do what is right. I will protect Theo as long as it is right to do so.”
“So where is the tipping point? When is it no longer right to protect him, according to you?”
“Find me Ko Dan by morning,” she says, “and you will not need to wonder.”
The birds are swooping lower and lower over the city. One of them comes diving straight into the courtyard, right over our heads, so that we both duck instinctively and cover our heads with our arms. It is as big as a swan, and black. It swoops right around the courtyard and drops a scroll of paper on the ground between us before shooting up over the wall and away again.
We dive for the paper at the same time. I get it first, scrambling away from her and unrolling it while she advances on me, her face pure murder, her hand out, demanding it.
“It’s blank,” I say. I let her take it from me. Her eyes move across the page as if she is reading, and my heart plunges.
“It’s blank,” I say again. “Do you see something? Are you reading it?”
She raises her eyes to me, and the paper crumbles to nothing in her hands.
Julia Defiant Page 29
