She picked up a report verifying that there had been a revolt in the slave pens, as Bacar had said. There was more, the writer being employed at the slave pens. The brokers had sent a hysterical delegation to the harbormaster, begging that they be granted ships to carry their current lot of slaves to Carthak. The harbormaster had said he would send the request on to the minister of trade.
Aly smiled, a very different smile from the one she had given Bacar.
9
REPORTS
AND CONSPIRACIES
During the afternoon rest, Aly took reports from anyone who came into the meeting room. Between guests, she read the information that was piled on her desk across the hall. She also consulted with Trick, who had news from the darkings. The one Aly had left in the shop of Dove's bookseller friend, Herbrand Edgecliff, revealed that the bookshop was a nest of raka sympathizers, including Herbrand himself, who never had fewer than three fugitives from Crown law in the shop's basement. Edgecliff and his wife, both pure-blood luarin, belonged to the raka conspiracy, which made Aly happy. Every instance that luarin could work with and help the raka was a brick in the wall between quiet coexistence and massacres. All of the darkings buzzed with word of people's reactions to the duke's arrest and the burning of the slave docks. So much of it was the same that Aly asked Trick to tell her only important things she hadn't heard yet.
There was no word from Tongkang or from Nawat. It was much too soon. Even flying, it would take time for him to reach the island and find the rebels. They wouldn't get reports from him for another day or so. Aly tried not to dwell on it. You told him you had to concentrate on the rebellion—well, concentrate on it, her reasonable self said.
The resting time was nearly gone when a recruit who worked for seamstresses in Middle Town came to the meeting room to speak with Aly. She was a slender young raka woman who wore a baby in a sling on her back as she carried a basketful of dye powders. “The cockerel crows at noon,” she said, giving the code phrase for the tier of agents recruited by Aly's pack.
“Then it's the cockerel's time to be put in the pot.” Aly gave her the counterphrase that meant the recruit could pass information to her safely. She hadn't seen this young woman before. It was possible she didn't even know who Aly was, except that she was in the right room, and she knew the right countersign.
“Late this morning, when the King's Watch came to arrest Duchess Nomru and her family, they were gone,” the seamstress said. “There was no sign of them. The servants and slaves were gone, too, every last one. The Watch took what valuables were left, but the lady's jewels and the family coin were all missing.”
“Is there anything else?” Aly inquired.
The seamstress nodded. “Five arrests, two of 'em luarin accused of selling books on poisons and death magic to raka, one for taxes, one a printer who had funny pictures of the regents hid away to be placed about the city later, and one of the raka nobles, Meipun Kloulechat. No one knows why. The paper for his arrest has the black seal on it.”
Aly knew what that meant: the noble had been arrested on a royal warrant obtained with information from Topabaw. Delivery of such a warrant gave the recipient a chance to kill himself honorably rather than suffer the humiliation of questioning and the execution that usually followed.
Maybe this will teach the raka nobles they might lose everything if they don't become involved, she thought. “Is that all?” she asked her informant.
The woman nodded and shifted the sleeping baby. “That I know of. But the city's crawling with King's Watch, all in a vicious mood, and the regents have ordered a company of the Rittevon Lancers to patrol Middle Town and Market Town. Stay out of their way if you see them. They like getting us to move with their riding crops.”
Aly had noticed the red welt on the woman's arm. “Two doors on the other side of the hall from me, on your way back, is our mages' workroom,” she said. “They'll give you something for that.”
The informant shrugged. “I get worse if I fray the material I sew. May your troubles fly away on the wings of crows.” She touched her fist to her forehead in a raka salute and left the room.
Aly sat back, considering what she had just learned. Nomru's family and household not only had knowledge of his arrest, but they'd managed to flee the city, or to hide within it in full daylight. They were connected in no way to the raka, so someone else had warned them. She suspected it was a noble who'd been present when the princess had called for Nomru to be locked up, which meant that the warning must have come from a luarin.
The city's bells rang out, signaling the end of the quiet time. Aly went to dress Dove for the afternoon.
Guests descended on Balitang House once again. There were more today, a number of young men and women and their parents. The heirs of three noble families made for Sarai, while their mothers draped themselves between Nuritin and Winnamine.
At first everyone gathered in the big sitting room or at the pool courtyard just outside. Despite the nobles' apparent quiet and lassitude, tension hummed in the air. Every time a young man's voice began to rise, a parent's fan opened with a loud snap of warning, and the errant son went quiet. The girls chattered a little too much, except for Sarai. She remained cool and gracious, as if a man they'd all thought untouchable were not in prison. She had to know as well as anyone that Nomru had helped her mother to resist Imajane's request that Sarai and Elsren move to the palace, but she acted no differently than usual.
Not long after Winnamine's father, Matfrid Fonfala, arrived, the duchess stood. “My friends, I believe the Teak Sitting Room may be somewhat cooler. I am sure our young people would prefer that we were elsewhere. I should think their attendants would be chaperons enough, wouldn't you?”
Idly, as if only the promise of a breeze tempted them, the older members of the gathering followed the duchess. Aly watched as they left. She was fairly certain those people were the core of the luarin conspiracy. In any case, she would soon know for certain, because the darking Feather occupied the Teak Sitting Room.
Aly had expected Dove to follow the older nobles, but she didn't. Instead she talked with Zaimid, who, with a kind man's sharp eye, had noted she sat alone while Sarai's friends jockeyed around her. Once again Aly added a point to the Carthaki healer's score. Zaimid and Dove were soon so deep in a discussion of the emperor's creation of charity hospitals that Aly would have bet that Dove noticed nothing else. She would have lost. When the footman announced Imgehai Qeshi, a priestess of the Black God who served at the city's biggest temple, Dove politely broke off her conversation to introduce her to Zaimid. The priestess wore her habit, but her hood was off, indicating she was not there on spiritual business. After she, Zaimid, and Dove had chatted for a few moments, Dove excused herself and the newcomer to Zaimid and led the priestess away. Aly watched Zaimid's gaze follow them, his brown eyes alert and interested. Then he managed to step out into the pool courtyard in time to be at Sarai's side as she left the sitting room for the garden.
A moment later Trick murmured in Aly's ear, “Feather say Dove and Imgehai have come.” Aly twiddled her thumbs. The priestess stood high in the temple hierarchy. She would be a powerful ally.
It was funny. Old King Oron had banished the Balitangs on suspicion of treason. Everyone had thought it was one of his mad ideas. It seemed he'd been right all along. Still, he had to have been mad to consider their group a threat, thought Aly. Obviously they've been talking about this for a while, and they haven't done anything. That will have to change, she decided. If they're to be of any use at all, they'll have to stop talking and start doing.
Ferdy Tomang's raised voice caught her attention. “. . . can't forget who guards their backs!” A number of his friends begged him to lower his voice.
“Don't worry,” Sarai told them airily. “There are so many secrecy spells around this place you could start a war in here and the Crown mages would never know.”
Aly winced. Apparently it had not occurred to Sarai that secrecy spells were best left secret. If T
opabaw had any spies among her friends, he would know by sunset that the place was more than usually well guarded. She reminded herself to warn Ochobu and Ysul and thanked the gods that Sarai did not know about the plans made on her behalf. And Aly was forced to think her more than a little foolish for speaking as she had. Anyone with any sense of self-preservation in the Isles knew better than to speak so carelessly about the Crown unless that person was very sure of the listener's loyalty.
Ferdy lowered his voice, but only slightly. “It's time we taught them a lesson,” he said, looking at the young noblemen who stood around him. “I say we wait until tonight and ride to Kanodang. Everyone knows that if you spend enough in bribes you can get inside.”
“We can break out Nomru.” Druce Adona's cheeks were flushed.
Another young man added, “Show the regents they are nothing without the luarin nobility.”
“Teach them a lesson,” said another. “And if we have to fight our way out, we will.” He set his hand on his sword hilt.
Idiots, thought Aly as she listened to them rant, working themselves into a state of fury. These men were filled with youth's righteous anger, ready to start killing anyone in their path. Only Zaimid said nothing, but stood there, arms crossed over his chest, with the courtier's expression of polite interest. The young noblewomen's faces were a study in contrasts, from those who showed fear to those filled with the men's enthusiasm.
At first Sarai showed polite interest, her expression like Zaimid's. She nodded when comments were addressed to her, smiled when anyone looked at her. Then, as the men began to discuss meeting places and who else they might recruit, a new look crossed her face, one that was half slyness and half contempt. It was replaced by lowered eyelashes, a subtle step on the back hem of her cream-colored gown so that it pulled tight to emphasize her figure, and a pouting lower lip.
“That's all very well and good,” she murmured. “But I think it's very silly, and useless, and tiresome.”
“But we're standing up for one of our own!” protested Ferdy. “He's a luarin, a noble! They can't treat us this way!”
Sarai pouted even more. “I bet Their Highnesses expect it. I bet they'll have hundreds and hundreds of soldiers inside the walls, waiting for something just like this.”
Good point, Aly thought. But Ulasim and Fesgao will make sure of that before they go. They're too sharp to miss something that obvious.
Sarai continued, “You'll all be arrested, and maybe even put on display at the harbor mouth, and then who will be my escort to the Summersend Ball?”
“Or mine?” added one of the sillier noblewomen.
The realization of the likely consequences slowly dawned in the young men's faces. When Sarai reminded them of arrest and execution, they began to lose their enthusiasm. It took a little more work, but in the end Sarai had cast their feverish excitement to the four winds.
Out of curiosity's sake, Aly looked at Zaimid. The Carthaki watched Sarai and the noblemen, the tiniest of smiles on his lips. He knows what she's doing, Aly told herself. And he's not surprised by the results.
When talk turned to a riding party the day after the lunar eclipse, Aly ended her watch on the nobles and returned to her workroom. There was more to do, and she had better ways to use her time than by listening to airbrains chasing butterflies. She smiled. Airbrains chasing butterflies was a phrase her mother often used.
Aly resumed her walk. “Maybe Mother was more right about such things than I thought,” she murmured.
“What such things?” asked Trick.
“Oh—the way those fools were talking, and how quickly they changed their minds,” Aly replied.
She could not see if the darking nodded, but she did hear its contempt when it said, “Stupid.”
One of the household runners came to Aly's office, bearing a message from Chenaol. Aly's first double agent awaited her in Chenaol's private sitting room—Vitorcine, Isalena Obemaek's maid. Aly went to see her. Vitorcine paced in Chenaol's sitting room, her hands white-knuckled as she clutched a small basket. Once Aly had closed the door, Vitorcine thrust the basket at her. “I made copies of everything,” she whispered as Aly leafed through the papers in the basket. “Topabaw has seen none of it.”
Aly looked into the maid's worried eyes. “You know Topabaw will reward you well for information he can use against the Obemaeks. And yet you put off telling him, at the risk of your own life, to keep your masters from trouble.”
Vitorcine blushed and looked away. “Lord Obemaek has been a father to me. Lady Isalena is a fine mistress. She's never hit me like some of the other ladies do.” She wrung her hands. “I don't want to betray them, but Topabaw . . .”
A twinge of something like guilt for putting Vitorcine in such a spot pinched Aly's heart. She ignored it. She would do anything to protect the Balitangs. If that meant blackmailing the powerful Obemaek family, Aly would do so. “Is there anything else?” Aly wanted to know.
“No. Not information, but—I must report to Topabaw's man tomorrow night,” Vitorcine explained. “What should I say?”
Aly had expected this. “Tell him that there is great unrest over the detention of Duke Nomru, which is true enough,” she said. “The hotheads rant, but they fear Topabaw too much to act. Say also that people are afraid they will be next. Tell him you fear Lord Obemaek suspects you, and that you must be very careful until you think your master has decided you are no danger. That should fill his tiny belly for the moment.”
“And Topabaw will accept that?” Vitorcine asked, her cheeks pale.
“Practice it in a mirror until you can say it convincingly,” Aly told her, just as an elder who cared for Vitorcine might say it. “Topabaw has seen this kind of thing before, after all. The city will be talking of the arrest for days. You're no good to him if your master leaves you dead in an alley somewhere. The excuse will wear thin after a time, but I trust that by then we'll have something else he can gnaw on.”
Aly left Vitorcine to collect herself before she rejoined the other servants, and walked down the hall to her office. Stepping inside, she closed the door and whispered, “Trick?”
She felt her necklace stir. “Scared lady,” Trick remarked, sticking a head up next to Aly's ear.
“She has every reason to be scared,” replied Aly as she sat at her table. “Ask Feather what they're talking about.”
Trick instead released itself and trickled down Aly's sarong to pool in her lap. There the darking spread to become a circle with a shiny surface. An image appeared, and with it sounds. It took a few moments for Aly to identify what she looked at, because the angle was extremely odd. She finally realized that Feather must be seated atop a cabinet, looking down at the nobles assembled in the room.
Aly raised an eyebrow, then leaned back and listened to the luarin conspirators. She was still listening when someone rapped hard on her door. “Trick,” she whispered. “Sash.”
Grumbling softly, the darking folded itself up so Aly could tuck it away.
“Enter,” she called.
Atisa stuck in her head, grinning broadly. “Your traps have caught three more spies, Duani,” she said. “Do you want to make them our spies yourself, or should one of us convince them?”
Aly got to her feet. “I shall do it,” she told Atisa. “But you come and watch. I cannot be everywhere, and things are heating up.” She strode down the hall in Atisa's wake, her thoughts flying in a dozen directions. As conspiracies went, she didn't think much of the luarin's, but it gave her something to work with. They might stiffen their spines if they allied themselves with the raka, though getting the two groups to agree would be a trick and a half.
That night, in the conspirators' meeting room, Aly told her companions what she had learned that day. Not once did she look at Dove or mention that Dove had been meeting with the luarin conspirators.
When Aly finished, Chenaol snorted. “That dried-up bunch of twitterpated worrymice!” she said scornfully. “They've been whispering for years,
without anything to show for it.”
“Maybe it's time to give them something to show,” remarked Ulasim.
Quedanga spat on the floor. “Deal with luarin? I'd as soon boil my hands and head.”
Aly looked at the ceiling.
“I don't think it's worth it,” said Fesgao. “They do not have the best security, if our Aly could ferret them out before she'd been here so much as a week.”
“And what will you do with them if we win?” Dove wanted to know. “Kill them? Kill Sarai's friends and their parents? Kill the people she studied dancing and riding with? Kill Winna and her family, and the Balitangs?”
Ysul hand-signed, Better to be allies. Many old raka houses are gone. Not all luarin are bad luarin.
“Because I can tell you, just from reading Saren history,” Dove said quietly, “once the killing between peoples who share a country begins, it is very hard to stop. The lowland whites and the K'mir tribesmen have been killing one another for centuries. The only way to avoid that fate is to decide we must live together, and then do our best to ensure that we do. We can do as Rittevon Lanman and Ludas Jimajen did when they came here, and reap a bloody harvest of our own, or we can call a halt to it.”
“Easier for you than for some of us, Lady Dove,” Chenaol pointed out.
Dove's eyes flashed. “I didn't say easy. I said necessary.”
The door popped open. Ochobu was there, her gray hair straggling out of its pins, sweat rolling down her face. Ulasim, closest to her, guided his mother into his chair while Chenaol poured a cup of mango juice.
Ochobu gulped it down, then said, “News from the Chain. The people of the Birafu estates are now gone, traveling over land or by ship. The crows managed to bring in some merchant galleys along with fishing boats. There is more.” Her face was alight with triumph and malice. “Governor Sulion of Tongkang was found dead on his balcony this morning. He'd been shot with three crow-fletched arrows.”
Aly looked down, quivering. She knew, just as surely as if he'd shouted it in her ear, that Nawat had been the archer.
Trickster's Queen Page 18
