FIERCE: Sixteen Authors of Fantasy

by Mercedes Lackey

  He kicked his horse over to her side, leaned over, and spoke softly in her ear. “Let’s not speak of Coalition business here. People are about, and they are listening.”

  “But this changes everything! Do you see?”

  “We’ll discuss it at the guesthouse.”

  She nodded, but she could hardly contain her excitement, let alone her fear, at this new discovery. The jackal had healed the plants, and that couldn’t be done without a thorough understanding of the mother tongue. She and Mandir were not dealing with an untrained magic user at all. They were dealing with someone far more dangerous, a mage who’d had Coalition training.

  “Come on,” she said to Mandir, and clucked to her horse.

  Chapter XXX

  Hrappa

  TO TAYA’S ANNOYANCE, MANDIR WOULD not go straight home but insisted upon their stopping at the baths first. In the excitement of the morning’s happenings, she had forgotten about bathing. Though she still smelled of smoke and incense from the party, it didn’t bother her as much as it had earlier this morning. This new development in the case, however unfortunate for the young woman and her family, had provided Taya with a distraction from the awkwardness of last night. But now was the best time to bathe, while the pools were fresh and available. When the farmers came in from the fields, there would be hardly room in the baths to move.

  When they returned to the guesthouse, clean and sweet-smelling, Taya invited Mandir inside.

  “Those banana trees,” she began, just as the door closed. “They were healed by someone with Coalition training.”

  “You’re assuming they were,” said Mandir. “But maybe they were never blighted in the first place.”

  “No, I didn’t make a mistake. Someone healed the blight, and that’s not something a jackal can do. It requires knowledge of the mother tongue. Our jackal is far more powerful than we thought.”

  Mandir said nothing.

  “Do you not see? The jackal must have had Coalition training. Either that or knowledge of the mother tongue has leaked out of the Coalition. One way or another, this is a serious problem. We have to notify the elders. Let’s send them a message. I’ll dictate if you’ll write.” She headed for her shelves, where she kept her tablets and stylus—and then remembered that the tablets had been stolen.

  “Taya.” Mandir seized her arm. “You don’t want to notify the Coalition elders.”

  “We have to tell them.”

  “We haven’t found the jackal yet. All the Coalition will know is that someone healed some blighted trees without authorization or payment—and whom do you suppose suspicion will fall upon?”

  She blinked. “The jackal.”

  “No,” he said. “You and me.”

  “They won’t think that.”

  “Won’t they?” said Mandir. “Who’s to say the Coalition won’t believe that one or both of us did it? They might go easy on you, but they’ll never go easy on me. I’ve had a Year of Penance already.”

  “If we notify them right away, suspicion will be less likely to fall on us.”

  Mandir raised an eyebrow. “How naive you are to think that.”

  Her cheeks flushed. She hated when he called her naive; it reminded her of all the times she’d been ashamed of her farming family and her lack of education before Mohenjo Temple. She yanked her arm out of his grip. “No matter what, we have to write up that vision Isatis gave me. We can do that now and discuss the other thing later. And I’ll need to borrow one of your tablets.”

  Mandir left through the courtyard door and returned with several tablets and a stylus. “You dictate, and I’ll write.”

  Taya took a seat at the table. She’d deal with the problem of the mysteriously healed banana plants later, perhaps when Mandir had thought about it a little more and realized how important it was. She hadn’t expected him to be so skittish about the Coalition authorities. “What are we going to do about the missing mission tablets?”

  Mandir’s brow wrinkled as he sat across from her. “I don’t know. Maybe rewrite everything.”

  Taya made a face.

  “You have a better idea?”

  “Let’s not rewrite it all just yet,” she said. “I’m not sure that I remember all the details. Let’s just hope that when we find the jackal, we’ll find the missing tablets along with her.”

  Mandir smoothed some water over the clay to moisten it, etched the introductory words at the top of the tablet and looked at Taya expectantly. “All right, your vision. Begin.”

  She recounted the vision to him in as much detail as she could remember. This one was less involved than the first, and thus easier. She finished her dictation in twenty minutes, and Mandir needed only one tablet to write it down.

  As he etched the final words into the clay and picked up the tablet to scan for errors, someone knocked at the door.

  It was Rasik, carrying two trays of food. He shoved one of them at Taya. “Lunch.”

  Taya did not take the tray. Instead, she glanced back guiltily at the breakfast tray a servant had delivered earlier, which she had moved to a shelf and ignored. She inhaled the rich scents of peas and onions and roasted lamb from lunch, and her stomach rumbled.

  Mandir rose from the table. “Sorry,” he told Rasik. “We don’t want you to bring food anymore.”

  Rasik’s mouth opened. “But it’s already prepared.”

  “We meant to say something earlier,” said Mandir. “Please give it to someone else. And don’t send us any more.”

  Rasik bristled. “Is something wrong with it?”

  “Nothing at all,” said Mandir.

  Rasik paused, as if waiting for Mandir to say something more. When he didn’t, Rasik sniffed in exasperation, turned, and left. Mandir closed the door behind him. He picked up the tablet and waved it in the air to help dry the clay. “Where should I put this?”

  Taya took the tablet and went to her saddlebags to pack it away, not that placing it in the saddlebags was any guarantee it wouldn’t be stolen the way the rest of the tablets had been. Inwardly, she lamented the loss of a tasty-looking lunch. “You said you would tell me sometime why Rasik was angry all the time.”

  “Oh. Are you aware he’s the magistrate’s son?” Mandir sauntered to her water pitcher and reached to pour himself a glass. Then he caught himself and put the pitcher down. He seized an empty cup, examined it inside and out, and began to swirl it as he called water from the air.

  “His son? Surely not.” Thirsty now herself, she picked up a cup of her own and began calling water too.

  “Ah, so you didn’t know.”

  She blinked. “Rasik is a brother to Kalbi and Hunabi?” That didn’t seem possible.

  “Half-brother,” said Mandir. “He’s a bastard, like me.”

  “How do you know this?”

  Mandir shrugged. “It’s a ruling-caste thing. Have you wondered yet what caste Rasik is? He’s a servant, and yet he’s educated.”

  Now that she thought about it, she had no idea. If forced to guess, she would opt for artisan caste. But he wasn’t obsequious around his ruling-caste betters. “All right, what is he?”

  “He has no caste—or, rather, he has a half-caste, which amounts to little. Ruling-caste bastards are raised as high-class family servants. That’s what Rasik is. And that’s what I was meant to be, a servant in the royal palace.”

  Mandir as a servant—that was an image she couldn’t visualize. “Meant to be. So what happened?”

  “Tufan happened,” said Mandir. “He rebelled against the family and set up a separate household, which he peopled with his bastards. I wouldn’t say he regarded us as servants, exactly. We were more like...entertainment.”

  Taya wrinkled her brow. “Why the ruling-caste tattoo, if you’re only half-caste?”

  “Tufan again. Bastards aren’t supposed to have it, but Tufan gave it to us to spite his brothers.”

  “He sounds like a zebu’s ass.”

  Mandir snorted. “He is a herd of zebu’s
asses crammed into one man.”

  “You’re an improvement on him,” said Taya, realizing as she said it that she was admitting out loud that Mandir had some good qualities. Well, he did have good qualities; her hatred had subsided enough for her to acknowledge that. Unfortunately he had a lot of bad ones to go along with them.

  “I should hope I am,” said Mandir. “But to improve on Tufan is to hop over a pebble. One needn’t exert oneself much.”

  Taya looked into her cup and frowned. She’d managed to call only an inch of water so far.

  Mandir smiled and poured the small amount of water he had summoned into her cup.

  She felt a little guilty at this gesture, since he had to be thirsty too, but it was poor manners to decline a gift. She lifted the cup and drank. “So Rasik is angry...why, exactly?”

  “He resents the whole situation,” said Mandir, swirling his cup again. “He’s the magistrate’s son, just like Kalbi and Hunabi, but instead of receiving respect and an inheritance, he has to fetch and carry and obey their orders. Shall we go to the market? I’m hungry.”

  “Wait,” said Taya. “If Rasik is so angry, could he be a murder suspect?”

  “As far as I’m concerned, everyone in this town is a murder suspect.”

  “No, listen to this. If Kalbi and Hunabi both die, what happens to Rasik? Does he then become his father’s heir?”

  “Possibly,” said Mandir. “If the magistrate designates him so.”

  “The magistrate is ill,” said Taya. “He’ll be dead inside of the season. So if Rasik wants to supplant his brothers, he has to act quickly. Could he have killed one and be plotting to kill the other?”

  “Maybe.”

  She cocked her head. “You don’t think it likely?”

  Mandir shrugged. “I don’t think Rasik is a murderer. His anger is on the surface and honest. If he were plotting something, I think he’d be more circumspect.”

  “Maybe he’s not very smart.”

  “That’s not the impression I get,” said Mandir. “Shall we go to the artisan district and buy something to eat?”

  Taya nodded. “After that, we need to sit down and go over the case again. A lot has changed since last night.”

  “Agreed,” said Mandir.

  Chapter XXXI

  Hrappa

  BACK AT THE GUESTHOUSE, WELL fed after a late lunch in the artisan district, Taya slid into her chair.

  Mandir took up a stylus and a fresh tablet and sat across from her. “Let’s figure this out,” he said. “What do we have so far?”

  Taya leaned forward and propped her chin in her hands. She hoped this exercise of Mandir’s turned up something, because if it didn’t, she had no idea how to proceed from here. “Four murders, one drugging, one theft, and too many suspects. Also not enough suspects. None of them look like the woman I saw in my vision.”

  “Since the fourth murder and the drugging didn’t involve the use of illegal magic, let’s assume we’re dealing with two separate people,” said Mandir. “We’ll call them the jackal and the poisoner.” He wrote JACKAL and POISONER at the top of the tablet and drew lines in the clay to create a column for each.

  Taya eyed the perfectly straight lines of his columns. The man was meticulous to a fault. “You think the poisoner was the one who killed Jaina?”

  “For now I’m making that assumption,” said Mandir, “because it happened after the poisoner stole our mission tablets. But I could be wrong. What do we know about the jackal so far?”

  “She’s a young woman,” said Taya. “And judging by her clothes, probably farmer caste. I think the other farmers, at least some of them, know who she is but aren’t telling us.”

  “You know farmers are the least likely to be blessed with the Gift. Speaking from a numbers perspective, our jackal is more likely to be artisan or ruling caste.”

  “Still, it happens,” said Taya. “Farmers can be born with the Gift. I’m proof of that.”

  Under the JACKAL column, Mandir wrote YOUNG WOMAN, then beneath that, FARMER CASTE (?). “All right, the poisoner. What do we know about him? Or her.”

  “The poisoner was at the magistrate’s party, so he’s probably artisan or ruling caste. He must have money since he possessed Echo.”

  “You’re assuming it’s a man, but I’ve heard poison is a woman’s weapon.”

  Taya sat back in her chair and rubbed her temples. “It could be either. Whoever it is, he doesn’t want us to find the jackal. He will kill to stop that from happening. And he took our kimat, which means he intends to harm us. Or possibly he means to harm the jackal.”

  Under the POISONER column, Mandir wrote WEALTHY and then AT MAGISTRATE’S PARTY. “Anything else?”

  Taya looked with displeasure at the paltry list. After seven days of investigation, this was all they had? “I can’t think of anything. And this isn’t much to go on.”

  “We’ve got a lot of information; we just haven’t put it together yet.” Mandir frowned at the tablet. “I’m not seeing anything useful here. Let’s try another approach.” He took a fresh tablet and wrote, at the top, PERSONS OF INTEREST. Beneath that, he drew four columns and labeled them KALBI, BODHAN, ZASH, and RASIK. “All right, Kalbi. Could he be either the jackal or the poisoner?”

  “Not the jackal,” said Taya. “Because he’s neither a woman nor a farmer. He could be the poisoner.”

  “He had opportunity to poison us at the party,” said Mandir. “But did he have motive?”

  “Flood and fire, I don’t know. His motive could be related to the court cases somehow. He did have a motive to kill his brother Hunabi. But that was the jackal’s crime, not the poisoner’s. Unless we’ve got it all wrong.” The words on the tablet blurred before her eyes. Maybe none of their assumptions were right. Maybe they had nothing at all.

  Mandir picked up his stylus and flicked a stray bit of clay off the table. “How about Bodhan?”

  “He can’t be the jackal either. None of the people you’ve listed on that tablet can be the jackal. They’re all men.”

  “Could Bodhan be the poisoner?”

  “I suppose. He’s wealthy and he was at the party. But we have the same problem with him as we did Kalbi. No clear motive.”

  “I can think of a motive,” said Mandir. “Bodhan’s been cheating farmers by loaning them money at exorbitant rates and then forcing them to produce cotton for him at below-market prices. Two of the victims appear to be associated with this practice in some way: Hunabi, who apparently took sexual advantage of the people involved, and Narat, who is Bodhan’s own daughter. Could the jackal be enacting some sort of vigilante justice against Bodhan?”

  Taya considered. That made some sense, but already she could see problems. “If the jackal’s motive is to punish Bodhan, or stop him from exploiting these families, why kill his daughter? It would be more effective, even more just, to kill Bodhan himself. Plus there’s the third victim, Zash’s sister, Amalia, who doesn’t fit the pattern at all.”

  A line appeared in the middle of Mandir’s forehead. “She’s marginally related. Zash owes Bodhan money as well.”

  “Let’s assume for the sake of argument that you’re right about the jackal in that she’s trying to stop Bodhan or at least carry out some sort of vengeance upon him. If that’s the case, why would Bodhan want to interfere with our investigation by stealing our tablets and killing the witness? He should want us to find the jackal.”

  “Unless our finding the jackal will lead us to information he doesn’t want discovered.”

  “We already know what he’s doing to the farmers,” said Taya. “And while it’s unethical, I don’t think it’s illegal.”

  “Maybe he’s doing more that we don’t know about.”

  Taya shrugged. She didn’t have a strong feeling about Bodhan being the poisoner, but Mandir’s logic made a modicum of sense. “All right. He’s our best suspect for the poisoner so far. Let’s move on to the others. What about Zash?”

  Mandir sniff
ed. “There are a lot of things that bother me about Zash, beginning with the fact that he apparently chained his sister to the bed in that weird house in the middle of the banana plantation.”

  “His mad sister,” she amended.

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Mandir. “It also bothers me that Amalia’s murder doesn’t fit the pattern of the other two murders.”

  “So what do you think happened? Zash murdered his mad sister because she was inconvenient? And covered up his crime by making the scene look like the jackal did it?”

  “Exactly that,” said Mandir.

  “Even if he did kill his sister, it doesn’t make him either the jackal or the poisoner.”

  “The jackal, no. But the poisoner...well, consider this. If Zash killed his sister, he has a very good reason for wanting us not to find the jackal. Because if we find the jackal and question her, we may learn that she didn’t commit that third murder.”

  Taya gritted her teeth. That was the most sensible bit of reasoning she’d heard all afternoon, and she didn’t want to believe it, because she liked Zash. Yet she couldn’t ignore the possibility that Mandir could be right. “He fits the profile. He’s wealthy, and he was at the party last night.”

  “And he kissed you after you’d been drugged.”

  Which she didn’t remember, at least not in detail, but apparently Mandir did. There was something very wrong about all that. Why would Zash kiss her? Had she led him on at the party? She had no memory of doing so, although who knew, given the Echo amnesia. She did find him attractive.

  What if the poisoner had never intended for her to sleep with Mandir that night? What if he’d intended something else entirely? Her stomach knotted. Raising her eyes to Mandir’s, she said, “Here’s a possibility. Maybe Zash drugged both of us, but his intention wasn’t for us to sleep with each other. It was for me to sleep with him.”

  Mandir’s body became very tense. The stylus dropped onto the table with a thud. “Flood and fire. He wanted you to take him back to your guesthouse. Then when you were asleep and under the influence of the Echo amnesia, he would steal your tablets and your kimat and leave.”