by Fonda Lee
They hesitated, looking at each other, but it would be blatantly impolite not to obey. Ton and Dudo approached, and after another moment of hesitation, Lott and Anden followed. Gont handed each of them a yellow cake—warm and soft, freshly baked, smelling of butter and fruit paste. “For your hard work,” said the Horn.
Ton, Dudo, and Lott looked down at the cakes in their hands with nervous surprise. “Thank you, Gont-jen,” Ton murmured, and the other two echoed him, saluting one-handed as they retreated judiciously. Before Anden could do the same, Gont wrapped an arm around his shoulders with the slow weight of a python’s coils. He spoke in a low rumble, too near Anden’s ear for the others to overhear. “I’m disappointed you didn’t accept our offer.”
The first time he’d met Gont in front of the Hot Hut in Summer Park, Anden had been intimidated, impressed by the man’s powerful and eloquent presence. Now he thought, Gont Asch tried to kill my cousins. He wants to see everyone in the Kaul family dead. He could feel all the jade on the man’s arm, the weight of its dense energy resting across the back of his neck. Anden forced himself to raise his eyes to meet the Horn’s. “I may look Espenian on the outside, Gont-jen,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean I can be bribed like a dog.”
With no surprise or hint of affront in his voice, Gont said, “Today is the Autumn Festival and the gods expect us to show generosity. So I will give you some advice, Anden Emery. Don’t insult the Pillar’s regard for you by offending us in the future. It would be a shame for us to be enemies.” Gont released Anden and returned to the Valor and its towed cargo of cakes.
Anden rejoined his classmates, who were standing on the other side of the street, wiping cake crumbs from their mouths. “What did he say to you?” Lott asked, looking at Anden with even more curious uncertainty than before.
“He wished me a Happy Autumn Festival.” Anden stared down at the warm pastry in his hand but did not feel like eating it. He watched Gont’s car move down the street. “And he wanted to make it clear that if I become a Fist in No Peak, the Mountain will make a point of killing me.”
CHAPTER
25
Lines Drawn
Although the Mountain stopped terrorizing No Peak’s properties in the Armpit, Kaul Hilo was well aware that his clan had otherwise gained little from the agreement. Their rivals had surrendered the parts of the district that were rightfully No Peak’s to begin with and shrewdly kept control of their strongholds south of Patriot Street, which included Janloon’s most profitable betting houses.
He could spare neither the time nor the manpower to further bolster their position in the Armpit, on account of being diverted by trouble in the Docks. The Docks! Of all places. Undisputed No Peak turf, home to long-standing businesses like the Twice Lucky and the Lilac Divine. A crime spree had erupted—thieves were raiding transport trailers carrying imported luxury goods and reselling them on the black market. The culprits, as far as anyone could tell, were common street gangs, but the scale and timing of the outbreak were cause for suspicion. Hilo’s intuition was confirmed when Kehn and his Fingers caught three of the thieves who, under persuasion, admitted that a man whose name they didn’t know—a man with jade—had provided them with trucking schedules and cargo manifests out of Summer Harbor.
“What do we do with them, Hilo-jen?” Kehn asked over the phone.
Hilo pulled the metal phone cord as far as it would go, stepping around the corner and turning his back to the nurse wheeling an empty bed down the hospital corridor. He put a hand over the other ear to block out the clatter of wheels on linoleum. In the background of wherever Kehn was calling from, he heard cursing, sobbing, and incoherent muffled noises. Thieves were the most despised kind of criminal on Kekon. Lifting shipments of watches and handbags normally merited a beating and a branding, but this was different. This had Gont Asch’s fingerprints on it. The Mountain was not above recruiting jadeless criminals to harass No Peak on their behalf.
“Kill two of them, let the most talkative one go,” Hilo said.
He hung up and went in to see Tar. “Good news,” he said. “They’re telling me you’ll be out of here in a couple of days.”
Tar was sitting up in bed. Bullets had lacerated his spleen and perforated his bowel; he’d been through surgeries and transfusions. Some of his jade had been removed before he’d gone into the operating room, and he was only now strong enough to be wearing it again, but his aura was as thin and prickly as his mood. “About time. The doctors here don’t know shit, and the food is terrible.”
“I’ll have someone bring you something you like. What do you want? You want some takeout noodles? Something spicy?”
“Anything. I feel a lot better. That green doctor you sent did a good job.”
“Prized family resource,” Hilo said. Green Bone physicians, technically beholden to no clan but skilled at Channeling therapeutically, were rare and in high demand. Hilo had had Dr. Truw, the staff physician at Kaul Du Academy, pay a few visits to Tar. Technically, that wasn’t allowed by the hospital, but no one was going to argue.
“I’m going to marry your little sister,” Hilo told him. “Lan agreed, so it’s official in the clan. I’ll take good care of her, I promise.”
Tar said, “You know I’d follow you anywhere, whether you married Wen or not, right? Just get me out of this hospital already.”
“I know,” Hilo said. “Relax while you can. I’ll be needing you plenty, as soon as you’re out.” It was plain that Tar was bitter about being wounded and away from the action, but Hilo didn’t feel like assuaging his Fist’s ego, or talking business. “You have a good suit?” he asked. “You’ll need to look good for the wedding.”
Hilo was, at least, pleased and relieved that after the attempt on his life, Wen had quickly acquiesced to living on the Kaul estate. “I’ll move into the main house,” he’d reassured her, though the thought of rooming down the hall from his grandfather made him grimace. “You’ll be in the Horn’s house. You can do whatever you like to it. New carpet, new paint, whatever. Spend what you like, the money doesn’t matter.”
“Yes,” she said, her lips pale and firm, her face weary from nights spent at the hospital by Tar’s bedside. She glanced around her small but tidy and well-decorated apartment with detachment, as if she was ready to leave at once. “You’re right. Now I know how badly our enemies want you dead. My pride isn’t worth the risk of them using me to hurt you.”
Having gotten his way, he felt grateful and affectionate. He gathered Wen into his arms and kissed her face many times. “There’s nothing for you to be ashamed of,” he said. “We’re engaged now. I asked Lan. He gave us his blessing. Kaul Maik Wen—don’t you like the sound of that? We can plan a wedding, a big one. Pick a date. I was thinking soon—springtime, what do you think?”
Wen wrapped her arms around his rib cage and held on to him so tightly that the new jade studs dug into the still tender flesh of his chest and he laughed at the discomfort. She said, with little expression, “Lan is a good peacetime Pillar, but he’s not a commander of Fists. There’s no one else with enough jade and respect in the clan to be a strong wartime Horn in your place. The Mountain knows that without you, Lan will have no choice but to give in to them. That’s why they’re clever to want to kill you first, and why they’ll try again.”
Hilo frowned. This wasn’t the discussion he’d hoped to elicit after sharing the news that they were to be married. “Let the fuckers try.” He cupped Wen’s chin to look into her eyes. “Are you worried about being a young widow, like my ma? Is that why you’re not excited about the wedding? I’m excited. I thought you’d be excited.”
“Should I be? Womanishly thrilled about dress shopping and banquet planning, while others plan the murder of my fiancé and my brothers?”
“You don’t have to talk down to me like that,” Hilo said, irritated. “I’ll always have enemies, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be happy. You have to trust me, Wen. If anything happens to me, or to Ke
hn and Tar, you’ll be taken care of, I promise you that. I’ll make sure everything I leave is in your name. You won’t even be tied to the clan like my ma was, if you don’t want to be.”
Wen was silent for a moment. “Now that I’m going to be part of the family, there’s no reason why I shouldn’t work in the clan. Kehn and Tar are your First and Second Fists. You could use me too, put me somewhere in No Peak where I’ll be of help in the war when it comes.”
Hilo shook his head. “This war’s not for you to worry about.”
“Because I’m a woman?”
“Because you’re a stone-eye,” he said. “This is between Green Bones.”
Wen let her arms fall to her sides and stepped back, opening space between them. “I come from a Green Bone family. You said yourself I have the heart and mind of a jade warrior.”
“That doesn’t make you one.” Hilo was disturbed by the direction this conversation had taken. “You know I don’t believe the bullshit about jade bringing people closer to the gods, or stone-eyes being bad luck, none of that. But if you’re not a Green Bone, then there’s a different life for you. Not better or worse, but not a Green Bone’s life. You can do anything else you want, but not this.”
“Other clans have made use of their stone-eyes. Stone-eyes can move freely through the city. We can handle jade without giving off an aura. You told me that Tem Ben the Carver is a stone-eye from the Mountain and does their bidding still.”
A sense of terror and rage rose and coated the inside of Hilo’s nose and mouth. “You’re not anything like Tem Ben,” he said in a low voice. “Tem Ben is a puppet; I’m going to follow every one of his strings back to the Mountain and cut them off. He’s a dead man. You will never be like him.” He seized Wen by the arms, so quickly that she didn’t even have time to flinch. He was aware at all times of how slow and soft she was, how vulnerable, how easily he could hurt or break her—and the thought of her in peril from his enemies, other Green Bones, filled him with a fear he did not have for his own life. “The Mountain will do anything. They’ll recruit common thieves, they’ll send a stone-eye to smuggle inside No Peak territory—I suppose next they’ll send children against us. I won’t do that. I won’t send a stone-eye into a Green Bone war. I won’t ever use you like that. Nothing will change my mind on this. Understand?” He shook her.
“Yes,” she said meekly.
He softened and enfolded her again with a sigh. “I think maybe you’re bored at your job.” Wen worked as a secretary at a legal office. “You’re too smart for that kind of work. After we’re married, you can quit and do what you want. You want to go back to school? You could do that. Or you want to start your own business, doing interior design type of stuff? You’re good at that for sure. We can think about it.”
“Yes,” Wen said. “We can think about it more. Later.”
Surely a talk with the Weather Man’s office would provide Wen with a number of good options. The clan had Lantern Men with connections in almost any field one could think of. He was not about to approach Doru, though. He would wait until Lan had the old pervert ousted, then he’d speak to someone like Hami Tumashon.
He needed to speak to Shae again as well. He hadn’t seen or spoken to her in weeks. As someone who was open and expressive with his emotions, Hilo had long harbored the vaguely resentful suspicion that he loved his family more than they loved him back, and with no one was this feeling more pronounced than with his sister. How could Shae be so cold? It bothered Hilo more than he let on. Had she come back to Kekon merely to make the rest of them feel sorry for her? To punish them with rejection? Clearly, she was suffering self-esteem issues, what with the way she continued to inflict jade deprivation on herself as some abnormal form of penance. He thought that perhaps he’d been too hard on her, said hurtful things at one time (as if she hadn’t done the same), and that was one reason she’d run off to Espenia. But he was ready to forget all that. They were both adults now. They were Kauls; they had responsibilities. The three of them had to stand together if they were going to keep No Peak strong. Sometimes he felt as if he was the only one who could see that clearly. If he talked to Shae again, and if Lan would stop handling their sister with kid gloves and back him up, he thought he might convince her of his sincerity and get her to ease off her aloof and intransigent position.
Not that he had seen much of Lan lately either. Their conversations on the phone were frequent, but brief and tactical—what was happening, what needed to be done. Hilo instructed his Fists to kill any other gangsters caught thieving in the Docks. Elsewhere, he shored up his clan’s defenses. He promoted Iyn, Obu, and a few other senior Fingers to Fists and reassigned territories to more effectively protect No Peak’s most valuable areas and holdings. He went around the city, personally visiting and reassuring all the Lantern Men. “Keep your moon blades sharp,” he told his warriors. Mountain jade was theirs for the taking if they came across the opportunity. His spies compiled as accurate a report as they could of Gont’s organization: how many Fists and Fingers he commanded, where they could be found, which ones carried the most jade and were most formidable.
Studying the list, it was apparent to Hilo that while strength of numbers was roughly comparable between the two clans, No Peak was at a disadvantage. The core swath of the clan’s territories bordered enemy-controlled districts to both the north and south. The Mountain had eliminated two smaller rivals in the past couple of years, and their Green Bones were on average more experienced fighters. Hilo needed more warriors. Next spring, an especially large cohort of new Green Bones, including his cousin Anden, would graduate from Kaul Du Academy, but until then, Hilo mused unhappily, he would have to make do.
Theoretically, the clean-bladed duel at the Factory between Lan and Gam Oben had preserved the peace, but in truth, it had merely given both sides an opportunity to regroup and consider their next moves. Even though the clans were not officially at war, Hilo was certain it would not be long before the current skirmishing and harassing escalated into outright bloodshed. Hilo also had no doubt that the Mountain would not be discouraged after only one failed attempt on his life. He was rarely at home anymore and thus had to remain constantly on guard. Sometimes after a long night, he parked in a shady spot he felt was safe, and stretched out in the back seat of the Duchesse and napped while Kehn sat watch.
Being the Horn had become entirely too much work and stress.
CHAPTER
26
War Maneuvers
Every seat in the long boardroom of the Ship Street office was taken. A dozen Lantern Men of No Peak—the presidents and executives of some of the country’s largest companies—had come to hear directly from the Pillar and to question him about defensive measures and security for their operations. While disputes over territory and business were not uncommon, the prospect of outright war between the two largest clans in the country was unprecedented, and it had the crowd of businessmen in a state of considerable consternation.
“Will projects that have already been granted the clan’s patronage be allowed to continue on schedule and as planned?” asked a real estate developer Lan recognized as one of the Lantern Men he’d met on Boat Day.
Doru bobbed his elongated head. “Currently, all initiatives that have been approved and funded by the clan will continue to be supported.”
“Will greater security measures be taken to protect our business properties?” asked a Lantern Man who had several retail locations in the Armpit.
Lan said, “The Horn has been taking steps to ensure that clan territory is defended. Priority will be given to districts where the threat is greatest.”
“What about the possibility of the Mountain disrupting commerce? They control much of the trucking sector. Might they not attempt to lock us out and make it difficult for us to deliver goods?” asked a man with a furniture import business.
“And what of sectors that will be hurt by the drop in tourism?” interrupted a hotel owner. “Does the clan plan to do
anything to support the hospitality industry?”
Lan stood up; the murmurs running around the table ceased. “I cannot guarantee there will not be any impact on your businesses,” he said. “We are being threatened by another clan and have to be prepared for difficult times. What I can promise is that we will defend ourselves—every part of the clan, every sector, every business.”
This seemed to make an impression on those gathered. The Pillar noticed their gazes lingering on all the new jade he was wearing, the irrefutable proof that he’d recently been victorious, that he could back up words with force. Lan cast an assessing look down the table. “I’m afraid we can’t address every question at this time. If you have additional specific concerns, make an appointment to discuss them with the Weather Man and myself. Enjoy your afternoon, gentlemen.”
“May the gods shine favor on No Peak,” some of the Lantern Men murmured, saluting as they exited. When they were all gone, Lan turned to Doru.
“I would like you to go to Ygutan,” he said.
Doru adeptly masked any surprise he felt. “Is that necessary, Lan-se? Surely, it’s important that I remain in Janloon at this time to help you deal with the Lantern Men.”
“We can put off additional meetings with the Lantern Men for a few weeks. I want you to find out what you can about the Mountain’s shine-producing operations in Ygutan. Where are their facilities, who are their suppliers and distributors, how much business they’re already doing. Pull every string we have in that country and do it quietly. We need to know where our enemy is investing. It might be information that we can use against them in the future if we need to.”
Doru pursed his thin lips. Perhaps he sensed an ulterior motive; ever since the duel at the Factory, Lan had been guarded around the Weather Man, and Doru surely understood that he was out of favor, but Lan did not want him to suspect anything beyond that. Allowing some of his true anger to show, the Pillar said harshly, “I need someone I trust to do this, Doru-jen. I wouldn’t send anyone less capable or discreet. We’ve had our differences lately, but we can’t afford to have any doubts come between us right now. Will you do as I say from now on or not? If not, I’ll accept your resignation as Weather Man. You can keep the house; I wouldn’t make you move.”
