The Devil Incarnate (The Devil of Ponong series #2)

by Braden, Jill

  “No. No. No.”

  She stared up slope at the tiers of apartment buildings, her hands balled into fists. Was there nothing of her past that she could keep? Her daughter, Jezereet, her parents and aunts all gone. Even the terrible things like Petrof and the werewolves had been wiped away. Now this?

  This is why you couldn’t get the visions you wanted from those vapor addicts in the Dragon Pearl. They didn’t know anything you wanted to see. Their memories don’t contain the information you seek.

  Everything she tried to hold rotted in her hands. A world stripped of magic and wonder was as bleak as the rocks of the Ponong Fangs.

  She collapsed on the divan and drew her knees to her chest. RhiHanya’s memories clamored for her attention. She shut her eyes, as if that could make them go away. QuiTai groaned, “Leave me alone.”

  A voice, familiar but unwanted, echoed in her mind. “You are an Oracle, and the Oracle is you.”

  The Oracle had spoken. And she was never wrong.

  Chapter 11: Old Levapur

  Kyam walked through town with his head bowed against the pouring rain. If he was going to be stuck on this island for the foreseeable future, he would at least make good use of his time. Tracking down the Ravidians and stopping their scheme had whetted his appetite for espionage. He was sober – mostly because he couldn’t afford to waste his dwindling supply of coins on drink – bored, and ready to put his mind to work.

  There were few mysteries in Levapur that interested him. He wondered who his neighbors were hiding in their apartment, but he couldn’t bring himself to spy on such good people. The newly arrived soldiers were only a puzzle because he didn’t like Governor Turyat or Chief Justice Cuulon enough to ask them what was happening. They’d make him grovel and then probably wouldn’t tell him anything. Or he could pump Voorus for information. Something so easily solved wasn’t nearly challenging enough, though. He could search the deed documents in the government building to find out who really owned the Red Happiness, but digging through musty files sounded dull. He wanted action.

  He grinned as he remembered one of his last assignments before he’d been exiled. Stealing hull plans for the new Ravidian fleet had been his kind of espionage – lots of action, some narrow escapes, and of course the satisfaction of helping his country. Thwarting the Ravidian scheme on Cay Rhi had been almost as good, but he’d never be lucky enough to find that sort of adventure in Levapur again. The town was too drowsy, its intrigues too domestic.

  But Voorus had handed him a clue to something interesting. Someone had paid Petrof to kill QuiTai. Was that assassination attempt successful? Voorus didn’t think so. If Kyam found out who hired Petrof, then he’d probably also know if QuiTai were still alive. That, he knew, was the real mystery he wanted to solve.

  It occurred to Kyam that if QuiTai were alive, they were probably now enemies. He knew how she felt about the colonial government, and she was smart enough to realize she held a secret that could bring the governor and chief justice ultimate disgrace in the eyes of Thampurian society and anger the Ponongese. Like Voorus, he wondered what she was waiting for. Was she building a rebellion inland? He couldn’t let her do that. He regretted that the colonial government had no real control over Ponong outside Levapur. The Ravidian scheme on Cay Rhi proved that the isolated plantations could fall under enemy control and no one would know for weeks or months. If QuiTai used the escaped slaves to stir up anti-Thampurian sentiments, the colonial militia wouldn’t know until her army marched across the Jupoli Gorge Bridge, and then it would be too late.

  He hoped she’d been sincere when she told him that she’d sacrificed the werewolves to stop further bloodshed. She claimed she could see that future and had done her best to stop it, even though it made some of her own people hate her. As far as he could tell, she’d never outright lied to him. Omitted truths, certainly. Twisted words as if they were hushoin art paper, constantly. And selectively revealed information like a practiced seductress removing her clothes. But she hadn’t lied about wanting to contain the escalation of violence, had she? He hoped; but he couldn’t quite bring himself to believe.

  ~ ~ ~

  Captain Voorus rubbed his eyes. Reading by jellylantern light strained his sight. His chair scraped against the floor of his apartment as he dragged it closer to the window. He wished Thampurian buildings were more like the Ponongese ones, with wide verandas wrapping around each floor. He would have liked to sit outside while he read. Monsoon clouds covered the sky, but they glowed in the midday sun. Unless the wind picked up, the cover overhead would shelter him from the fine rain.

  He flipped through the pages of the volume of colonial law he’d borrowed. There was nothing in it about inheritance law that he could find except mystic sentences that said things such as Refer to Thampurian law, section... followed by a string of numbers and letters. When he’d asked the law clerk about those notations, he’d been told that meant he’d have to read it from a book of Thampur’s laws. But there was only one set of books like that on the island, and the clerk swore Chief Justice Cuulon would have them gutted if they dared touch them, so he’d done the next best thing. He’d asked his mother to buy the books and send them to him. She didn’t have much money, but sometimes she could go to her rich friend and beg for gifts.

  Once he had the Thampurian law books, he’d see if there was any hope of reclaiming his inheritance from his father; not that it would do him a damn bit of good as long as he was in exile. Unlike the privileged Kyam Zul, he didn’t even know why he’d been sent to Ponong or what it would take to earn his way back, but he suspected that an inheritance would help. If there was one thing he’d learned on Ponong, it was that government officials could be bought.

  While he waited for the law books to arrive, he decided to use the one he had to learn how to decode the confusing texts. The words looked like Thampurian, but they seemed to have different meanings. He’d already been over to the government building five times to ask the law clerks what a sentence meant. They’d made it clear they didn’t want to talk to him anymore.

  He thought if he looked up a law he knew, it could be a valuable key to deciphering what the laws meant in everyday terms. Voorus searched for a simple entry, such as the law against Ponongese baring their fangs to a Thampurian, but he’d flipped through the books several times and he still hadn’t found it. It had to be written down somewhere. Since he’d come to Ponong, they’d hung at least five Ponongese a year for that crime. Everyone knew that was the law. Even the chief justice said so; he signed the death warrants, after all. But Voorus couldn’t find the damned law in any of the books.

  ~ ~ ~

  QuiTai and LiHoun squatted on RhiLan’s veranda as they shared a kur. Her gaze flitted to Kyam’s dark apartment and then away, but not quickly enough.

  “Thank you for delivering my newspapers and letters. They were a welcome diversion,” QuiTai said.

  “Any news of note from the continent?”

  “Troubling developments, uncle. Foreigners denounced as the source of all troubles, rising patriotism, plays censored or closed for offending official thought, new restrictions, paranoia. It doesn’t look good. Each country is withdrawing into its borders. But those are their problems, and we have plenty to concern us here.”

  “Our rice bowls are full,” he agreed.

  While she organized her thoughts, she watched a stand of palm trees on Levapur’s first hill bend under the onshore breeze. LiHoun waited. Inside the apartment, RhiHanya hovered near the typhoon shutters, probably hoping that they’d lapse into Ponongese or Thampurian. Thankfully, the rest of the family was at the market in Old Levapur.

  While she’d never been a deeply religious person, the loss of the Oracle made QuiTai uneasy. It had been such a nice dream that someone with great power watched over her, loved and protected her. Now she’d woken and felt like a child in the middle of the night who heard strange sounds. Maybe she could force herself to believe again. There was comfort in faith, li
ke a jellylantern glowing in the darkness. But now that she knew the truth, she didn’t think she could ever accept the falsehood again. She wondered if her mother and grandmother had known they were Oracles. Had they deliberately led her to believe in something they knew to be false?

  I’ve always had to rely on myself. If I’m honest, I never trusted the Goddess to do anything for me. I always did it myself. So what did I lose when I lost faith? Nothing real. In a way, maybe this is better. I know I can trust myself. False deities? They’ve never done a damn thing for me. And I guess I always knew that.

  But what about my vision of glass covered in blood? That didn’t come out of any conduit’s memory. It helped me when I fought Petrof.

  For a moment, she had hope, but her logical mind turned it back.

  My visions were usually vague, and only after something happened that sort of aligned with the vision did I pronounce it as fulfilled. Maybe the dirt Thampurian saw one of the Ravidians slice his hand on glass when the container of sea wasps broke, and I tapped into that memory but didn’t remember that I had. After all, I was under the influence of the vapor too. Then when I saw the shattered jellylantern, I believed it would save me because that fit the vision I believed in. Interpretation is art, not science. Faith is not logic. I know which one I trust more.

  She pushed her braid over her shoulder and lifted her chin. LiHoun seemed to notice her focus return to him.

  “Colonel Zul asked me to pass on a message,” he said.

  QuiTai was instantly alert. “He knows you work for me?”

  “He guessed that I work for the Devil.”

  Of course he would. “He’s far too clever, that one.”

  LiHoun grinned as he inhaled kur smoke. The bright orange embers nearly touched his pointed finger nails before he took it from his lips. “Not clever enough sometimes.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He said someone hired Petrof to kill you.”

  “He knew Petrof was trying to kill me, but the last time we spoke, he didn’t know it was on another’s orders. I wonder how he learned about that.” She waved away the offered kur. Her blood burned, and she had too much vitality for the cage that confined her already. “Was that message for me or the Devil?”

  “For you, but for the Devil if I couldn’t warn you.”

  So Kyam hadn’t figured out that she was now the Devil. Not yet. She had no doubt that he’d eventually figure it out. He couldn’t make the mental leaps she did, but he had enough determination to methodically take every step until he reached the same conclusions.

  She idly scratched her arm. Contact with black lotus wouldn’t addict her, thanks to the Ponongese’s natural immunity, but it certainly made a pipe more alluring. “I’m trying to decide if it’s an advantage that Colonel Zul figured out that you work for the Devil.”

  “I think he’s more interested in knowing if I work for you.”

  “His interests aren’t my concern. But maybe he’s heard other information we could use. After all, he can get into places we can’t.”

  “You don’t care about his interests?”

  She didn’t like LiHoun’s sly smile. “Should I?”

  He shrugged.

  “Uncle LiHoun?”

  “He saw that I was observing the new soldiers. Unless there are more down in the fortress that I haven’t seen, there are thirty of them.”

  “Thampur has doubled their troop strength in Levapur.” That bothered her. Someone expected trouble.

  “Colonel Zul was also watching them.”

  She gritted her teeth. “That man is constantly crossing my path.”

  “You find him irritating?”

  “Very.”

  LiHoun seemed to find that amusing. “That’s something, at least.”

  Exasperated, she glared at him. “What are you hinting at?”

  “We’re storing the rice in the werewolf’s old lair.”

  “This is the second time you’ve changed the subject, uncle.”

  “I thought you wanted to talk business. We can discuss the Thampurian if you prefer.”

  It seemed LiHoun was in a mood to tease her. She wasn’t used to that. Why did he think she had any interest in Kyam Zul? She’d told him about being taken to the fortress and her escape, their timely rescue by Captain Hadre, and most of what happened on the Golden Barracuda and Cay Rhi, but she hadn’t so much as hinted that she’d seduced Kyam. It wasn’t an important part of the story. Besides, it was none of the old man’s business. But if she avoided talking about Kyam, LiHoun might think she wanted to avoid the subject.

  She looked directly into LiHoun’s eyes. “Okay. Let’s talk about him. I’m curious. How did he figure out that you work for the Devil?”

  LiHoun almost seemed abashed. “I was counting soldiers for you. Captain Voorus hauled me across the street to carry Colonel Zul’s shopping, seeing as the soldiers had cleared the streets around the town square of all Ponongese.”

  QuiTai tapped her bottom lip with her forefinger. “These soldiers, they knew you weren’t Ponongese? They let you stay when they chased away the Ponongese? You dress almost like us. From a distance someone could easily mistake you as a native, and as you well know, once a Thampurian soldier makes a mistake, they’d rather kill the witness than admit they were wrong.”

  “They accosted me, but the leader inspected my ears and hands and peered at my eyes. As soon as he declared me Li, they walked away.”

  “So they’re specifically targeting Ponongese for these humiliations.” It was further proof that her forming theory was right. Now was the time to be careful about jumping to conclusions, though. While she normally enjoyed the speed of her thoughts and ability to act quickly on them, this time she hesitated. She needed more information. It was time for her to come out of seclusion and gather facts.

  “Their uniforms are high quality, grandmother, and lighter weight than the material the colonial militia wears. Someone wanted them to be comfortable in this heat. And that same someone made sure there wasn’t a single identifying mark on their clothes. I misspoke when I said that the man who inspected me was their leader. I have no idea what rank he held, or any of the others. They called him Mister. Not major, not colonel, not captain. Mister. And he referred to them the same way. No family name.”

  QuiTai’s forehead furrowed. “But they were Thampurians? Could you have mistaken another race? The Li, the Ponongese, and Thampurians look quite a bit alike from a distance, despite our obvious differences.”

  LiHoun didn’t seem convinced. “I think we know of all the Thampurian colonies and continental races. They sounded like Captain Voorus, not posh accents like Kyam Zul. Not that they spoke much, but I heard enough to convince me they’re Thampurian.”

  “I don’t like this. It’s as if...” She shook her head. This was no time to jump to a conclusion, but the facts seemed to support the scenario that unfolded before her. She had to get it right though, so she would force herself to approach it methodically.

  Why would someone from Thampur meddle with Levapur’s insignificant economy? It wasn’t as if Ponong were a valuable colony. Jellylanterns were a good, solid business, like rice, but most of the profit came from the jellylantern factories in Thampur. Ponong just supplied the bioluminescent jellies.

  Could the soldiers be in Levapur because of the harbor? It was the biggest and most protected harbor in the archipelago, a good place to stop for fresh water and food before sailing through the Ponong Fangs, but a large junk could conceivably carry enough provisions to sail the long way around the island chain. A smaller junk with a reckless captain could bypass the harbor, sail through the Fangs, and pray he reached the Li Islands before his water barrels emptied. But why would they have to? The Thampurians already controlled the harbor. The only thing they had to worry about was some other country wresting it from their grasp. That struck her as a remote possibility, unless the unsettling rumors in her friend’s letters and the continental newspapers were true.
/>
  Frustrated, she growled. That couldn’t be it.

  So why would someone from Thampur waste money stirring up trouble on Ponong?

  If this were an invasion by a foreign power, she could understand them taking over the other Thampurian colony, the Li Islands. It was far more profitable. Much as Ponong was the only place green light medusozoa could live, the Li Islands were the only known source of juam nut oil, which powered everything from the lamps vapor addicts used to cook black lotus to the engines that powered the funiculars that climbed Ponong’s steep slopes to the plantations.

  And those secret engines aboard the Golden Barracuda.

  She shook her head again. The soldiers were in Ponong, not the Li Islands. It couldn’t be someone from Thampur behind the trouble, because it made no logical business sense to stir up trouble in your own colony. Besides, why would anyone pay soldiers to ruin such a small economy? She might not like the Thampurians, but she appreciated their business acumen. So it couldn’t be someone from Thampur. The person who brought the new soldiers to Thampur had to be here on the island, and it had to be part of some personal vendetta. It still wasn’t logical, and it was certainly an expensive way to wreck havoc, but if there was one thing she’d learned about Thampurians in Levapur, it was that they’d go to any length, or expense, over petty, stupid little power struggles. But who was fighting whom?

  And there she was again, acting as if her ideas were facts. Kyam Zul had scolded her about that often enough. Of course, she’d been right every time. This time, though, she was going to wait for evidence.

  She clasped her head in her hands. “Illogical behavior makes my brain weep.” She drew a deep breath through her nose. There was no profit in that train of thought. Time to focus on current problems. “So. Voorus unfortunately put you under Colonel Zul’s employ, and Colonel Zul caught you observing the soldiers...” She gestured for LiHoun to continue his story.