I was not supposed to choose you yet. I am in trouble.
“In trouble?” He thought of the times he had earned extra chores, or had privileges taken away. No dessert, no weapons practice, no sneaking off to the bachelor’s band to try imprinting a young stallion.
It is rather more serious than that. Her tone was dry. He may decide to kill me.
“Kill you?” He gaped.
It is our law. But he will probably allow me to live. The end of her tail twitched. He has not killed me yet.
“I will not let him kill you.” He had meant to sound more gallant and less panicked. The thought of his life without Ruh’ayya…
You will not let him kill me. The thought was warm and rich, suffused with laughter and no small amount of love. Cat-love, fierce and possessive, all sharp and pointy. Go on, little manling, say your not-goodbyes to the little dreamshifter and let us leave this place. She settled herself and began to groom.
“Are you not coming in, then?”
She stopped mid-lick to stare at him, tongue hanging out in a comical manner. You would have me cover my sire’s musk with my scent? I have no desire to look upon my own intestines, but thank you for asking. Her eyes gleamed. Every time I decide you are not completely hopeless…
“Yes, O beauteous one.” He bowed to her, grinning. She ignored him as only a cat can, sticking one leg high in the air the better to groom some delicate part. Chuckling, he ducked into the dreamshifter’s tent.
Daru was in the middle of the tent, wrapping bright glass bottles in scraps of cloth and packing them into a wooden crate with trembling hands. His face was white and his breathing seemed fast and shallow.
Ismai frowned. “Are you all right?”
“Is Khurra’an gone?”
“Yes.”
“Then I am all right.” He placed both hands on the lip of the crate and sagged in the middle, every line of him shouting relief.
“What is it with you and Ruh’ayya?” Ismai stepped closer, still frowning. The younger boy’s breathing was all wrong, and he had already come close to losing two friends. “Khurra’an will not hurt you.”
Daru looked at him with those strange, sad eyes. “Will he not? Ask Ruh’ayya.”
He had never attempted to speak with his kithren when he could not see her, but it could not be all that complicated. He closed his eyes and concentrated.
WHY IS EVERYONE SO AFRAID OF KHURRA’AN? HE WOULD NOT REALLY HURT DARU, WOULD HE?
STOP SHOUTING! she snarled in his mind. And stop asking stupid questions. Cub-in-Shadows is wise to be wary of the vash’ai. They see him as weak. Most would kill him, given the chance.
MOST… BUT NOT YOU?
They see him as weak. She sounded smug. I see him. Now, go away until you have learned not to shout. Just like that, she was gone from his mind. He told Daru what the vash’ai had said.
“I told you so.” The younger boy sounded weary.
“Well… Ruh’ayya likes you.”
“Too bad I am to travel with Khurra’an, and not with you.” Daru sighed an old-man sigh. “Do not worry about me. I am used to it. Are you looking for the dreamshifter?”
“No, I came to say goodbye. But I think I will say jai tu wai instead.” The words came easily to him now.
“Ah.” A smile lit Daru’s small face. “Jai-hao, insuke Ismai. Kuokenti shi.” He clasped his hands beneath his chin and curled his back in an odd little bow.
“You speak Sindanese?”
“I speak Sindanese. When you are sick as often as I am, you have a lot of time to study.”
“Ah, little sage, but have you ever studied weapons?”
Daru stared at him as if he had grown fur and feathers. “Weapons? Me? No. I am too… I am too small.” He took a deep breath, and repeated softly, as if to himself. “I am too small.”
“Too small for a sword, maybe. At least for now.” Ismai made a face that was meant to be funny, but the boy just stared at him. “My mother says that if I eat fish, I will grow as big as Tammas. Perhaps you will, as well.”
“You will grow as big as Tammas. Bigger.” Daru stated this as a fact. “I will always be small. And… weak.”
“Oh, but you are not too small for these.” Ismai felt a grin split his face as he dug into the bag and brought forth the leather-wrapped bundle. He handed it to the boy, hardly able to contain his excitement. “Go on, open it.”
“What is this?” Daru turned the bundle over in his hands, staring. It made a dull clinking sound when he shook it.
“Open it and see.”
Ismai watched Daru as he slowly unrolled the leather. He had cleaned churra pits for a week in exchange for this gift, and was repaid a thousandfold at the look that crossed the boy’s face.
The leather rolled open to reveal six knives, each with a handle of bone carved in the shape of a different animal and a blade as long as a man’s hand. Daru reached out to touch the nearest, the one shaped like a hawk.
“They are beautiful,” he breathed, but in the next breath said, “They are too fine. I cannot accept this gift.” His hands belied his words, twitching as if they itched to caress the smooth carvings, to test the edge of the gleaming blue steel. The knives were sharp enough. A slice along Ismai’s own thumb attested to that.
“They are yours.” Ismai held up his hands to stave off further protest. “I say they are yours. Daru… they belonged to your mother.”
The boy stopped breathing, and his eyes went wide as the night sky.
“They have been sitting in one of my mother’s rooms for a long time, so I asked. They belonged to your mother. Now they are yours.”
The small boy launched himself in a tumble of arms and legs, hitting Ismai in the midsection and hugging him so hard his ribs creaked. “Ow!” He laughed. “Daru! Ow! Let me breathe. You like them, then?”
Daru spoke against his chest, voice small and muffled. “I have never held anything of hers before.” He stepped back, embarrassed. Ismai looked away so that the boy could wipe the tears from his face. “Never. Thank you, Ismai. Thank you so much.”
Ismai cleared his throat. At this rate, it would take a year and a day to dry all the tears from his tunic.
“You are welcome, little cousin. I hope they make you think of us, when you are far away in Atualon learning all there is to know.” He ruffled the boy’s hair. “You will come home safe, and tell me all the adventures you have had and all the things you have learned.”
“Home.” Daru was smiling now. He glanced around the tent, and made a face. “I had better finish packing, or we will never be able to leave. If we never leave, we will never be able to come home again.”
“True enough.” Ismai laughed. His spirits had lifted as if a new sun had risen in his heart, and it seemed to him in that moment that all would be well with the world. He would be Zeeravashani, and Sulema would heal and be her bright self again, and their paths would lead them all back home sooner rather than later. It would be as if they had never left… only better.
Daru rolled the knives up and clutched the bundle to his breast, smiling beatifically. “Until your path brings you back again, cousin. Be well.”
“Be well,” agreed Ismai. “Jai tu wai.”
He turned and strode out into the bright morning, whistling as he went.
FOURTEEN
Tsun-ju Jian, the pearl diver’s son, became Daechen Jian in the four hundred and ninety-ninth year of Illumination, during the reign of Daeshen Tiachu. The emperor’s historians maintain that under his golden fist the rivers flowed with milk and honey. Jian would later recollect that the rivers—and the streets, and the walls—ran not with milk and honey, but with blood.
The emperor bade his people rejoice and so they had, flocking to the city in twos and tens and by the hundreds, a shrieking mad-eyed mass of humanity pooling about Khanbul, staking out territories, posturing, breeding and eating and making a mess of the place until the tenth day of the Feast of Flowering Moons. On the eleventh day, the hung-
over, penniless, and exhausted population abandoned Khanbul. They threw salt and worried looks over their shoulders as they hurried away, and with good reason. On the twelfth day, the emperor would hunt. Any citizen-slave too sick, or old, or drunk to flee—and there were always a few—would disappear on that day, never to return.
Or so the stories claimed. The son of a Bizhanese pearl diver had never really believed. Daechen Jian soon would.
“It was a fine, fat harvest this year.” Xienpei informed them over bowls of golden rice and salted fish. “The Yellow Palace will be filled to bursting.” One of the lashai ladled tea into a tiny porcelain cup and offered it to her, bowing low. She accepted the cup without acknowledging the servant’s existence, the last two fingers of each hand tipped delicately away from her face as she breathed in the heady fumes.
“When will we be moving to the Yellow Palace?” Perri accepted his tea and glanced up at the servant with a smile, and then flushed and looked away. “Now that our… now that the commoners have all left, there is nothing for us to do here but rattle around in the walls and fight.” The boy was slight for his age, and his round yellow eyes were even stranger than Jian’s. Jian had stepped in when he found Perri cornered by a pair of pig-farm boys from Hou, and the smaller boy had dogged his heels ever since.
Naruteo scowled. He was taller than any boy there save Jian, and muscled like an ox. Naruteo had grown up in Huan, close to Khanbul, and considered the rest of them to be far beneath him.
“We will leave when the emperor wishes us to leave, and not a sandspan earlier.” Peasant, his eyes added.
Xienpei laughed, displaying every gem-studded tooth in her head. “The emperor does not know you exist, little Daechen. Nor does he care. You are less than ants in the shadow of a dragon.”
“When will we leave, then?” Jian asked. “If it please you, Yendaeshi.”
Xienpei favored him with a nod. “When we have separated the dirt from the wheat, and then the wheat from the chaff, those who remain will be allowed to move on to the Yellow Palace.”
“Not all here are Daechen.” Naruteo did smile, then, and his flat eyes reminded Jian of a snake’s. “And not all Daechen are worthy. Most of you will not make it.”
Some of the other boys shifted and muttered, exchanging worried glances. Jian caught Naruteo’s gaze and held it, but addressed his words to their yendaeshi.
“What happens to those who are not chosen? Will they be allowed to return home?” The room stilled at that, and most eyes turned toward Xienpei, some worried, others hopeful.
Xienpei reached out one long, lacquered fingernail and touched the pearls at Jian’s neck. “Your mother is tsun-ju, is she not? A pearl diver?”
Jian nodded, wary.
“Does every oyster she finds contain a pearl?”
“It would be nice if every oyster had a pearl in it, but most do not. Some have sand, or pebbles.”
“Or nothing.”
He nodded.
“What of the pearls? Are they all as fine as these?” She tapped his necklace again.
“No, Yendaeshi.”
“Ah, so those lesser pearls, what happens to them? Does your mother return them to the sea?”
Jian shifted, uncomfortable as the other boys began to stare at him. Perri was white as a gull, and Naruteo smirked into his tea.
“No,” he answered at last. “She sells them at market.”
Xienpei nodded and sat back. “So. Some will be used to make jewelry, and some will be sewn into clothing, or used to decorate masks. Or given to a small boy to play with.”
Jian stared at her, the tea he had drunk curdling in his belly like sour milk.
“Others will be ground into powder and used in medicines, will they not, Daechen Jian?”
“Yes, Yendaeshi.” He wanted to vomit.
“Every pearl your mother finds belongs to the emperor. Every pearl serves a purpose, even if that purpose is to become something less than what it thinks it is. So.” She set her cup down with a clack for emphasis, and the lashai hurried over to fill it.
Xienpei turned her head and looked deliberately at the gray servant, and then back to Jian. Her smile was kind, but her eyes cruel as a hawk’s.
“Even if that purpose is to be ground into dust.”
* * *
That night Jian dreamed that giant hands strung him on a fine thread with hundreds of other pearls, as his mother began to pluck them loose and, one by one, drop them into a mortar. She was humming under her breath as she worked, and as her hands worked their way closer and closer Jian found himself unable to move, or call out, or do anything at all to save himself.
* * *
Then came the day of winnowing.
It began well before dawn. Jian was roused by one of the ubiquitous pale servants and ushered from his room still yawning and rubbing his eyes and wishing for some hot tea and a toothbrush. The hallway was packed with other boys, shuffling and jostling one another, some of them demanding to know what was happening to them. He was reminded, uncomfortably, of goats in a meat pen.
They were herded through the halls, down the stairs, and outdoors, trotting along barefoot and packed shoulder-to-shoulder, chest-to-back, a sea of yellow silk, bobbing dark heads and frightened eyes. The yendaeshi emerged from the lower rooms, carrying long poles with hooked blades at either end, some with merry faces and some looking grim. Jian saw Xienpei poke a boy back into place with the end of her staff, laughing, and was not reassured.
Finally they were marched and prodded and jogged into a large square and allowed to stand in place, steaming in the cool morning air. Jian juggled from foot to foot, grimacing at the cold hard ground and rubbing his arms as he looked around. He recognized this place. During the Feast of Flowering Moons, it had served as a marketplace for meat animals and child slaves.
Someone tugged at his sleeve. He looked down to see Perri, dancing from foot to foot and shivering. “I do not like this.”
“Hsst.” Jian warned. “Neither do I.”
The yendaeshi had been all friendly smiles and kind words before this day, though Jian had suspected them of a darker motive. On this morning each was resplendent in a silken robe of deepest gold, with a stooping black hawk upon the breast and the snowy white bull of the emperor embroidered across the back. The hooked staves they carried were put to good use, striking out here at a face, there at a leg, until the boys were huddled together like livestock in truth, and no few of them bled or wept in fear.
“Stay close,” Jian whispered.
Naruteo stood a bit in front of them and off to one side, dressed in silks that made Jian feel shabby in comparison. He turned to stare at Jian and Perri, and drew one finger slowly across his throat. Then he dismissed them utterly, squaring his shoulders and turning to face what was to come.
Never before that day had Jian felt so vulnerable, as if he were but one of a thousand fish in a bait ball waiting to be picked off by the sharks. He glanced at Perri, shivering in wide-eyed fear beside him, and for the first time in his life caught the peculiar burned-sweat scent of fear.
That decided him. His heart might be racing, but he did not have to meet his fate cowering like a rabbit in a snare. He would bring honor to his mother’s name, though he felt like a rabbit wearing the wooden mask of a sea-bear.
“Hsst,” he whispered to Perri, and gave him a sharp nudge with his elbow. “Courage.”
Perri stared right through him, mouth trembling. Courage, he mouthed back. He dropped his skinny arms to his side and clenched his fists.
Then the seven gates of Yosh opened, and there was no more time for courage.
Doors slid open all around them, silent as mouths, and disgorged an army of lashai. Each gray-clad, white-faced servant bore a tray of steaming cups, and the sharp tang of bitter tea washed toward them. Jian felt his stomach clench, and his gorge rise. Whatever was in those cups, he did not want to drink it.
Xienpei looked over her shoulder at him as if she had heard the tho
ught. Her eyes were lit with amusement and her red lips curled in a cruel smile. She covered her mouth with a dainty hand and winked at him before turning back to witness the spectacle.
The lashai drifted closer, so smoothly they seemed to float on a current of air, bearing the enormous trays as if they weighed nothing. They reached the edge of the crowd of wide-eyed boys, and held up their trays, and waited.
The bald man who had been laughing with Xienpei spoke. His voice was surprisingly deep, and powerful enough that it bounced off the walls surrounding them. “Each of you take one cup,” he said, “only one. And drink.”
No one moved.
“Now.”
The lashai pressed closer, and one boy reached out toward the trays. His hand hovered for a moment before snatching a cup. Then he brought it to his mouth, hand shaking so hard Jian could see it from such a distance, and drank.
Nothing happened.
The boy made a face, shook his head a little, and returned the cup with a grimace. The boys to his left and right began reaching out for their cups and downing the contents as well. Some of them made a face or gagged at the taste, but that seemed to be the worst of it.
“Maybe it is some sort of ceremony?” Perri whispered under his breath. Jian remembered Xienpei’s smile, and shook his head fractionally.
“I think not.”
The first rank of boys was peeled aside by the yendaeshi with their hooked poles, so that the second rank could drink, and the third, and the fourth. By the time the lashai reached the middle ranks, where Jian stood ready, the first boys had begun to look pale. Jian took the cup with his fingertips, trying to tell himself that it was dragonmint tea, nothing more. As he brought the cup to his lips and the scent hit him full in the face his whole body disagreed and he hesitated. He tried to make eye contact with the lashai, but those brown eyes were half-lidded and empty—there was nothing there at all. Those eyes frightened him more than whatever was in the tea.
Xienpei stood behind him, her lips at his ear. He had not seen her move.
“Drink,” she said. Her breath was hot and smelled of mint, and Jian could see the flash of metal as she brought the wicked curved blade of her staff to rest against his cheek. “Drink. If you spit out so much as a drop, I will gut you like a fish.”
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