‘His followers fear him,’ Kevin whispered to Lujan in a stolen moment of confidence.
The Acoma Force Commander returned a barely perceptible nod. ‘With good reason,’ he murmured back. ‘Tasaio is a superb killer, and he keeps his skills sharp by using them.’
His gaze on the figure in the orange-and-black chair, Kevin felt a chill skim his flesh. If the Game of the Council was ruthless, there sat the most merciless player of them all.
Mara returned to her quarters for lunch and a consultation with her advisers. Arakasi had tied his arm in a sling and commandeered her writing desk. By the clutter of notes and quills, he had been busy, and remained so as Mara asked her servants to bring up trays of light food. Kevin watched the Spy Master pen three more missives in the interim, the parchments held braced under his splinted forearm, while he wrote in level, left-handed script.
‘You’re right-handed,’ the Midkemian accused; he had a swordsman’s eye, and noting which hand a man used was part of an ingrained reflex. ‘I would have sworn it.’
Arakasi did not look up. ‘Today I cannot be,’ he said with spare irony.
When Kevin looked to see if the penmanship suffered, he was further awed to find that the handwriting varied like artistry. One of the notes looked as though it had been scribed by a strong male hand; another seemed feminine and delicate; and yet another, as if the author could neither read nor spell with skill, but struggled by with scanty education.
‘Do you ever get confused about who you are today?’ Kevin asked, for he had yet to find an impersonation that the Spy Master would not try.
Arakasi deemed the question beneath notice and went on with enviable dexterity to fold and seal his letters one-handed. By now Mara had slipped out of her overrobe. She did not ask Arakasi to move, but sat instead on the sleeping mat he had vacated.
‘Who is going to deliver those?’ she asked tartly.
The Spy Master acknowledged her annoyance by offering a bow made graceless by the encumbrance of the sling. ‘Kenji volunteered once already,’ he said gently. ‘These are the replies to a good morning’s work.’ As Mara’s look warmed toward outrage, Arakasi raised his brows in reproof. ‘You forbade me to go out, and I have not done so.’
‘So I see,’ Mara said. ‘I should have assumed you could feign sleep as well as you shape your disguises.’
‘The effects of the wine were quite genuine,’ Arakasi objected, faintly hurt. He looked at the papers scattered around his knees. ‘You do wish to know what I’ve learned?’
‘Tasaio,’ Mara cut in. ‘He’s here.’
‘More than that.’ Arakasi’s air of lightness disappeared. ‘Most of the struggles so far have been tactical sparring. Tonight that will change. Entire sections of the palace are being set up as staging areas for large numbers of warriors and assassins. Some prior battles were fought simply to gain quarters from which to launch assaults.’
Mara looked silently to Lujan, who said, ‘Mistress, our soldiers are still two days away by forced march. We must rely upon the forces we have here to defend you.’
These words left a difficult silence, through which the arrival of the servant with the lunch trays seemed a clattering, alien intrusion. Mara sighed. ‘Arakasi?’
The Spy Master grasped her meaning by instinct. ‘Intelligence will not be necessary. Tasaio is preoccupied with gaining support for his own claim to the Warlord’s throne. He expects you will throw Acoma support to whichever of his opponents is strongest. Even if he overestimates your courage, and you try to bury your enmity under a show of neutrality, he will still move to obliterate you. Your death would satisfy his family’s blood vow to the Red God, and additionally throw your allies into disarray. Your popularity is on the rise. To cut you down would bring notice, perhaps give the Minwanabi enough edge to claim the white and gold over whoever emerges intact from the infighting of the Omechan Clan.’
By now Mara had recovered her wits. ‘I have a plan. Who else is likely to be attacked tonight?’
Arakasi did not need to consult any notes. ‘Hoppara of the Xacatecas and Iliando of the Bontura seem high on the list.’
‘Iliando of the Bontura? But he’s one of Lord Tecuma’s best friends and an Ionani stalwart.’ Mara noticed the servant hanging uncertainly by the food trays. She motioned for the man to resume his duties. ‘Why would an Ionani Lord be singled out as a target?’
‘As a warning to the Tonmargu and other Ionani Clan Lords not to oppose Tasaio or the Omechans,’ Arakasi supplied.
Kevin said, ‘A polite note would be sufficient, I should think.’
Lujan broke in with dry humour. ‘Killing Lord Iliando is a Tsurani polite note.’
Mara gave the interruption short shrift; she asked Arakasi, ‘Could your contacts get word to the Lords you judge to be highest on Minwanabi’s list? I need to ask them for time in council this afternoon.’
Arakasi reached for his pen. He dipped the nib, slipped a sheet of fresh parchment under his splint, and said, ‘You will loan me Kenji and two warriors for the task?’ Without looking up between lines, he added, ‘They need only go to the city and leave the notes with a certain sandal maker in the river stalls. From there the deliveries will be accomplished by other hands.’
Mara closed her eyes as though she suffered from a headache. ‘You can have the use of half my company, if you need them.’ To Kevin she added, ‘See what Jican has ready for us to eat. We must be back in council shortly.’
While the Midkemian moved off to investigate the trays, Lujan left to review the state of his garrison. ‘Have the men rest,’ he instructed his Patrol Leaders. ‘Tonight we shall fight.’
When Kevin returned with a plate and juice, he found Mara still motionless on the mat. Her brows were gathered into a frown, her gaze distantly intense. ‘Are you all right?’
Mara focused on him as he laid the meal by her knees. ‘I’m just tired.’ She looked at the food without interest. ‘And worried.’
Kevin heaved an exaggerated sigh. ‘Gods, I’m glad to hear you say that.’
Mara smiled at his japery. ‘Why?’
‘Because I’m scared senseless.’ Kevin stuck a two-tine Tsurani fork through a slab of cold jigabird as if he skewered an enemy. ‘It’s good to know you’re human under all that hard-boiled Tsurani stoicism. When I set out to do something foolhardy, the last thing I feel is complacent.’
From the next room came the rasp of warriors sharpening laminated-hide swords.
‘That sound makes me want to commit suicide,’ Kevin added. He looked at Arakasi, who worked over his notes with economical lack of nerves. ‘Don’t you ever want to throw something?’
The Spy Master looked up, utterly bland. ‘A knife,’ he said with ice-cold lack of inflection. ‘Through Tasaio of the Minwanabi’s black heart.’ He was unarmed, bandaged, a man in tired clothes writing letters in a crowded apartment. But at that moment, through chills, Kevin could not have said which was the more dangerous: Tasaio of the Minwanabi or the man who served Mara as Spy Master.
Warriors stood at the ready. The rooms of the Acoma apartment had become an armed camp, with fourteen additional soldiers in the purple and yellow of the Xacatecas joined to the ranks. Lord Hoppara had seen sense almost immediately when Mara approached him in council. Having too few warriors to fortify his larger quarters, and with Minwanabi already set against him, he saw no point in standing behind an appearance of neutrality that by morning might see him coldly dead. Some of the Xacatecas garrison had fought in Dustari, and Force Commander Lujan was known to them. Warriors sought old companions, or made new, as they waited through the first hours of evening.
Behind furniture barricades in the central room of the apartment, amid a ring of warriors and the last few cushions and sleeping mats, Mara fretted. ‘They should have been back by now.’
Hoppara swirled a finger in his wineglass to stir up the spices and fruit that had been added in accordance with his taste. ‘Lord Iliando has always been a man to look
upon logic with suspicion.’
Mara resisted an urge to seek Kevin’s comfort as the gloom of twilight deepened, and the first thuds and cries of distant combat echoed through the corridors outside. Against her better wishes, she had granted Arakasi’s request to take Kenji and a patrol of five in a final attempt to convince Iliando of the Bontura to see reason. As the muffled clatter of swordplay resounded through the palace, Mara worried that her men had delayed their return until too late.
Then came the signal she longed for, a coded knock at the door. Lujan’s men swiftly slid barriers aside and lowered the heavy bar. The portal opened, and Kenji hurried in, a Force Commander in violet and white plumes at his shoulder.
‘Thank the gods,’ Mara murmured, as more warriors entered, the heavyset Lord Iliando of the Bontura in their midst. Last came warriors in Acoma green, and after them, at a flat run, Arakasi. He slipped in just as the door was closing, his helm with its Patrol Leader’s badge shadowing a face pale as parchment.
Mara left the inner circle of protection to meet him. ‘You should not have been running,’ she accused her Spy Master, aware that his poor colour was solely due to pain.
Arakasi bowed. ‘Mistress, it was necessity.’ The splinted arm under his officer’s cloak was flawlessly hidden; no one would think that the warrior before her was not fully able to defend himself. As Mara began to voice recriminations, the Spy Master quickly cut in. ‘Lord Iliando was obdurate until, at the last, we gave him a detailed picture of his own forces, their deployment, and four ways he was vulnerable to attack.’ He dropped his voice to a whisper. ‘It was his own weakness that convinced him, not our belief that he is the obvious object lesson for Clan Ionani and Lord Tonmargu.’
Arakasi glanced to the doorway, where warriors replaced the bar and barricades, and the Lord of the Bontura and his Force Commander stood in conference with Lujan and Hoppara to formulate a combined defence. ‘We were none too soon,’ the Spy Master allowed. His gaze flicked back to Mara. ‘Lord Bontura’s apartment was already under assault when I left, and the chests I shoved under the door will not detain his attackers very long. When they find the rooms empty, they will be coming here.’ At Mara’s slight frown he added, ‘I escaped out the back, through the gardens.’
She dared not ask how he had climbed walls in his condition; only his breathlessness told how hard he had run to overtake Lord Iliando’s escort. Now firmly the Ruling Lady, Mara addressed her Spy Master. ‘Get out of that armour,’ she commanded. ‘Find a servant’s robe, and hide in the cupboards with the scullions. That’s an order,’ she snapped out as Arakasi drew breath in protest. ‘When this is over, if I am alive, I will have need of your services more than ever.’
The Spy Master bowed. But before he disappeared in the direction of the kitchen he used his Patrol Leader’s badge to collar a pair of warriors in Bontura and Acoma colours. ‘Get your master and mistress back into the fortified room, and convince them to stay there. Attack will be upon us any moment.’
Minutes later, the solid ring of axes bit into the outer window frames. Warriors in the rooms on the garden side sprang to the ready, while in the room that faced the corridors a thundering crash hammered at the barricaded front portal. Lujan shouted, ‘A battering ram!’
Acoma soldiers leaped and threw their weight against the furniture used as shoring, but their efforts availed nothing. The second blow struck. Wood exploded into splinters as furnishings and bar and doors gave way, and the ram burst into the room. The invaders who manned its weight fell forward to allow ranks of swordsmen behind to spring over their backs.
The attackers who poured through the breached door wore black. Dark cloth also veiled their faces. As the leader waved his killers onward, Lujan glimpsed the dyed palm chat identified a hired assassin of the Hamoi tong. Then battle closed between his own combined troops and the enemy. Sword met sword with an unnatural, belling clang. As Mara’s Force Commander parried and thrust to defend, he realized: some of these tong carried metal swords, a rarity in the Empire. Valued beyond measure, such weapons were never risked in combat, despite their deadly ability to cut through laminated Tsurani armour.
A Bontura warrior went down, pierced through his breastplate. Lujan switched tactics, using his bracer to deflect the stabbing sword point. He called out a warning to his warriors, and two assassins fell before they were six feet into the room. Ordinary blades could not withstand repeated impacts. Metal carved chips from the edges and shattered good resin with cracks. Six Acoma guards went down, and Lujan’s men fell back in a race to stop the enemy from gaining the door that connected the outer room to the inner complex. The battle became a two-sided struggle between the doorposts as the remaining Acoma guards, with Bontura and Xacatecas allies, jammed together to defend the rulers who huddled behind a wall of jumbled furniture.
At his Lady’s side stood Kevin, his eyes on the outside windows in the farthest, innermost chamber. The frames bounced and shivered, and plaster cracked from the sills, as the axe blows continued from outside. Warriors hammered reinforcements into place: planks ripped at need from screen tracks, shelving, and carry boxes. The shoring would delay the invasion only by minutes, and the frontal attackers were gaining. Within minutes of the first assault, the tong members were joined by an influx of black-armoured warriors who carried no house badges or colours.
Kevin weighed the odds and decided. The barricade of furnishings would not withstand assault from three sides. To Mara he said, ‘Lady, quickly, move over into that corner.’
The Lord of the Bontura watched wide-eyed as she arose and changed her position. ‘You would listen to a barbarian slave?’
Hoppara had better grace. ‘The man speaks sense, Lord Iliando. If we stay, we’ll soon be surrounded.’ The Lord of the Xacatecas moved to join Mara, then glared long and levelly at Iliando until the fighting edged nearer and the first of the windows gave way. In the instant before more assailants flooded the rear room, the stout older ruler relented.
The two Lords drew blades and positioned themselves before Mara. Kevin stayed close, but a clear step ahead, enough to move should the need arise.
The battle in the outer room intensified; there was no way to guess how many attackers entered through the breached front door. The clack and uncanny clang of metal sword meeting laminate came fast and furious, mingled with horrible cries. Defenders from the inner room rushed in two directions, some to stay the frontal onslaught and others to stave off the influx of assailants who shoved to gain access through the torn window; while at the second window the axe blows suddenly ceased.
Kevin cocked his head. Through the bang and crash of the mêlée he heard a faint scrape, through the wall at his back. ‘Gods! Someone’s found a way into the sleeping chamber!’
He hesitated, then rushed to the screen that gave access to the hall. One lamp burned, washing the corridor in a wavering interplay of shadow and light. Kevin advanced. His bare feet sensed vibrations through the wooden floor: warriors falling, and the blows of another axe. He hugged the wall by the bedchamber door, waiting, his hand on the meat knife concealed inside his robe.
A man in black armour charged through. Kevin swung around. He drove a knee into the man’s groin, then stabbed the meat knife through the hollow of the neck beneath the chin strap. Blood ran hot over his hands as he thrust the shuddering, dying body backwards into another man who followed. Both warriors fell with a crash.
There were more, coming in a wave. Kevin cried, ‘Lujan! Back here!’
Aware that help might never come, the Midkemian crouched, dagger raised to meet the black-armoured man who jumped over the fallen pair. Lamplight flickered over a levelled sword, too long for a short blade to thrust past, and thrusting too hard to parry. Kevin backstepped into the room. The black warrior lunged.
Kevin jumped, and all but tumbled over backwards. The sword grazed the cloth over his stomach. Off balance, sure the next strike would kill him, the Midkemian flailed to stab the wrist above the man’s swor
d guard.
But the knife grazed flesh and bounced off the enemy’s bracer. Kevin gasped a curse, tensing to take the killing blow. Then the Lord of the Xacatecas shoved out of the corner and drove his sword into the man’s back. The black warrior stiffened. His locked legs skidded across the floorboards and his eyes rolled back as he collapsed.
Another black-clothed assassin charged from the depths of the hall.
‘My Lord! Look out!’ Kevin cried.
Hoppara spun, his guard up barely in time. The enemy blade did not spit him, but grated edge to edge in a grinding contest of strength. Metal carved the rim of the young Lord’s chest armour, gouging a groove in the plate. Hoppara grimaced in pain. He turned his wrist in a disengage, twisted, and returned a ringing blow to the side of his assailant’s head. The unarmoured tong assassin staggered dizzily back.
From the opened hallway dashed more dark-clad enemies. The Lord of the Bontura threw his stout weight into the fray. And Mara was alone, exposed in the corner. Kevin ducked the swing of swords and crashed into a black-armoured elbow. His hand on the meat knife was slick with blood. His grip slipped as he stabbed. The enemy fell writhing between him and his Lady.
Then a pair of axes bit through wooden bracing, and the shutters behind Kevin burst inward. Plaster puffed from the wall as the heavy panels struck and rebounded, to be bashed back again by dyed fists. More tong assassins in black clothing swarmed through. Unencumbered by armour, they leaped to the sill, swords drawn from scabbards in one fluid motion. Kevin grasped the lead man’s wrist. The sword descended. He ducked sideways and jerked mightily. The assassin catapulted through the window. Both men overbalanced. In the rolling tumble as they struck the floor, Kevin’s short knife held the advantage. He stabbed before the enemy could turn his longer weapon.
The Complete Empire Trilogy Page 100
