Immortal at the Edge of the World (22 page)

Mangalore wasn’t so bad, smell-wise, because it wasn’t tremendously overpopulated like many of the cities became before the plague came along and took care of a lot of that, at least in Europe. We got our bearings, learned which officials to bribe and which to avoid, and everything else we needed to know if we were interested in doing business in the city. We were not, but we wanted to appear as if we were, so that was what we did.

We also notified Moshe by letter that we were in town and asked for details on when we could expect to meet with Abraham bin Yasser. Moshe pretended we were never going to be meeting with his boss for enough successive correspondences that Hsu had to be held down to prevent him from finding Moshe and putting his head on a stick. Finally, we got back the information we needed. And that was good news.

Less than good news was where the meeting was to take place.

One of the things we learned when doing our reconnaissance was that—as was true quite often back then, and also now—the real power in the city was in the hands of a single family, and by that I mean mafia. It was not, of course,
the
mafia, but an ancient permutation of the same essential dynamic. We never met anyone representing this family, by design. But we knew the family name was Talus, and we knew where the head of the family Talus could be found, and it was the same place where we were to be meeting with Abraham and Moshe.

Showing, for a change, some degree of restraint and common sense, Hsu suggested we negotiate for a different meeting place, but I didn’t see how that was possible at such a late date. Instead we opted to bring a small show of force and hoped Abraham knew what he was doing. Nothing we had uncovered about the Talus family intersected with anything involving the spice trade—or at least not Abraham’s corner of it—so there was no telling what the point of the location choice was.

*
 
*
 
*

When we arrived at the palace compound we were met at the gate by a man who introduced himself as Bosphor Talus. He was tubby, had a deep shade of coffee for skin, and displayed a multitude of tattoos and piercings. And I wasn’t sure he was actually a man. I couldn’t tell
what
he was, however.

“Greetings, plentiful salutations, and welcome,” he said. “Beyond these walls there is only peace, so we ask that you leave your weapons here.”

The walls he was talking about were gigantic for something attached to a private home. They looked more like the sort of thing one would find encircling the palaces of Kashmir. Possibly they were meant to convey exactly that.

“Friend,” I said, “we have no quarrel with the Talus, nor anyone else in these walls, but your battlements are alarming.”

“They are meant to protect you!” Bosphor said. “As are the men who will hold your weapons.” There had been two sentries standing beside Bosphor, but now they were joined by five more. All of
them
were armed and wearing battle armor. We could have taken them—we had more people, more weapons, and a few goblins—but for all we could tell there were another hundred inside waiting to come out and play.

“I suppose, then, we ought to hand over our weapons,” Hsu said gamely, demonstrating his generosity of spirit by handing over the sword at his hip. It was maybe a tenth of the total number of sharp objects on his person, so the generosity was understandable. It was a little less of a pleasant experience for the rest of us, except maybe the other two goblins we had in our band.

Xuangang was the only one not inconvenienced, since he didn’t have any weapons in the first place. He had books with him, which they let him keep. I might argue that books are also weapons, but only in a philosophical sense, not as a practical way of fending off a broadsword. Xuangang was playing the role of Lo, household servant to Xuangang, who was being played by Hsu. The name I was using was Blasius, and I was claiming to be a learned merchant from the Crimea. These were the roles the three of us played whenever we were in public outside Fa Xi Han’s court, and we had been doing it long enough that hardly anybody knew it was inaccurate. As it was, Xuangang—the real one—didn’t know me by any other identity. We were fortunate Hsu hadn’t inadvertently called me Li-Yuan around him, since that was a name Xuangang would likely recognize.

We handed over our swords. But given we had hired a decent number of men to accompany us with swords, and given those swords represented the extent of their service to us, taking away those swords peacefully didn’t make a lot of sense. So I selected two captains to enter the building with us and left the rest at the gate. Bosphor gamely agreed to let them remain armed if they stayed there and guarded all the sharp things we left them with.

This was all a bad idea, and if it weren’t for the fact we were doing this to take a business meeting we’d been anticipating for more than half a decade, we would have walked away from it long before crossing into the Talus inner compound. Even Xuangang thought so, and he had no instinct for these sorts of things whatsoever.

“Should we not reconsider this meeting?” he asked Hsu quietly, in a language only we were familiar with, in case anyone was listening. We had learned over the years what languages we all had in common, and what languages nobody around us had ever heard, and this was one of the better ones. It was, I believe, an early German progenitor.

“It will be fine,” Hsu insisted. He was lying, but it was too late to turn around.

Bosphor Talus led us to a large common room with a vast central table, at the head of which was an older version of Bosphor Talus. This was, I quickly realized, Gorrgon Talus, the great patriarch of the Talus family, and someone I had never hoped to meet. To his right sat two Jews. I took the younger to be Moshe, and the older Abraham. The only other people in the room were guards.

It was frankly amazing to me that Abraham sat alone in this room with nobody but Moshe to protect him. He surely knew exactly who Gorrgon Talus was. If they were that trusting of one another this was not likely to be a very good meeting for us.

The elder Talus was quite heavyset, but this did not impede his ability to leap to his feet with a surprising nimbleness, and rush over to greet each of us one by one with a handshake. Four of the seven of us were not even important to this meeting, but we didn’t want to interrupt him.

“SO very GLAD you could make it here, ALL of you!” he said. To Hsu, “And you are without a doubt the GREAT Xuangang!” He clapped my friend on the shoulder and gestured for all of us to take a seat. Soon, we were opposite Abraham and Moshe, and Gorrgon was at the head again. It felt like a treaty negotiation instead of a business meeting.

“Honored guests,” Gorrgon said as he sat, “the Talus are MOST pleased to host you under our roof. We would like to thank honored friend Moshe for making such a thing possible.”

Moshe nodded and smiled. Abraham nodded as well. He did not seem all that engaged. Other than acknowledging his own name, Moshe didn’t look alert either. I wondered if there had been drinking prior to our arrival and, if so, where it was. I am never one to pass on a drink.

“And I would like to thank the GREAT Xuangang for taking the time to come and visit our humble home!”

Hsu nodded as well, and smiled graciously. I was glad he had not yet jumped over the table and pulled open Abraham’s shirt, as he was still convinced that Abraham had the trinket on him.

“Now then, on to business! And then when we are DONE we shall have a GREAT feast!”

I was seriously confused, and decided to say so. “Honored Talus,” I said. “I am Blasius, and I speak for Xuangang’s interests in many things. Do I have your permission to speak in these walls?”

I have found, over the years, that when one is talking to royalty or people who like to think they are, and when you are in a disadvantageous situation strategically, the very best possible recourse is to flatter the hell out of them.

“Of COURSE, great Blasius, indeed much has been said about your GREATNESS as well!”

I was glad we were all great. “Gorrgon Talus, if I may ask, why are we meeting here? When I awoke this morning it was to engage in a discussion of business matters with bin Yasser. I am doubly honored to sit in the presence of one such as yourself, but I fear these are the most mundane of details that could scarcely interest you. Abraham bin Yasser, if I may ask, you wished to speak with us and I believe the matter concerns our spices and your trade route. Is this not so?”

“Yes,” Abraham said. And then he looked at Gorrgon and didn’t say anything else. He was either the dumbest negotiator in the world or something very odd was happening.

“We speak here today because bin Yasser’s business interests coincide with my business interests, as do the interests of Xuangang,” Gorrgon said, without using his dramatic voice. “We are here because I am interested, and that is all that is important to you.”

He smiled again, and returned his attentions to the rest of the table. “I am so VERY pleased Moshe decided to bring us all together. It seems—and please, correct me if I misspeak, Moshe—it seems the market has been unkind to Abraham bin Yasser of late. Black cardamom, a spice YOU specialize in, great Xuangang, has been pricing out the cardamom arriving to market on bin Yasser’s ships, and while it is clearly an INFERIOR product it is doing well because it is cheaper. Is that accurate, Moshe?”

“It is,” Moshe said.

“And so a solution was arrived at whereby bin Yasser intended to BUY the supply line for black cardamom from Xuangang and add it to his extant inventory, and make Xuangang and his associates wealthy men.”

Gorrgon rose from his seat and stood behind Abraham, placing his hands on the older man’s shoulders. “Now, when Gorrgon Talus HEARD of this he thought to himself, SURELY there is another way to go about this that will make both parties VERY HAPPY. Surely it would be best for EVERYONE if both Abraham bin Yasser and the GREAT Xuangang handed over their businesses to ME.”

I nearly laughed aloud, until I realized I was going to be the only one laughing. I looked at Hsu and saw that he had the same blissed-out expression on his face as Abraham and Moshe. And so did everyone else at the table.

“You mean, you would take over the black cardamom trade,
and
all of the business passing through here on Abraham’s ships?” I asked.

Gorrgon looked extremely annoyed that I was speaking again. “You will REFRAIN from speaking, for I am only interested in what the great Xuangang has to say.”

“Well, no, I won’t refrain from speaking,” I said.

Gorrgon Talus stared at me for a long time, then said, “Does everyone else here agree that this is a fantastic plan?”

Everyone did, in a variety of nods and grins and muttering noises. They all looked extremely happy about it, too.

“Excellent,” he said. Then he took his seat again and returned his attention to me. “Then the only question remaining, Blasius of Crimea, is what sort of being you happen to be.”

“I was going to ask you the same question, Gorrgon Talus. Except I think I know. You’re a djinn, aren’t you?”

“Indeed.”

This was the second or third time I had ever encountered a djinn, but the first time I’d met a family of them. It was also the first time I’d seen them as anything other than an odd sideshow, because I never really got what the big deal was. The book on djinn was they granted people wishes, but nobody believed that, even back when they were actually around. Up until the day I met the Talus family I thought djinn were just drug dealers, to be honest.

All charm had left the demeanor of Gorrgon Talus, whom I had clearly displeased for not swooning in time with everyone else at the table. “It was the handshakes, wasn’t it?” I asked.

“Yes. The hands of a djinn issue the stuff of pleasant dreams. These men are going to be happier in signing over their fortunes to me than any man before them or since, and I can make it so they remain exactly that happy for the rest of their lives if I am feeling generous. But you are a problem.”

“My apologies to the great Gorrgon Talus for being a problem.”

“You may stop that now. I’m going to have to have you killed, but before I do that I need to know what you are so that in the future, when I encounter one such as you, I can be more adequately prepared.”

I could have gone any number of ways with this. The truth was, there aren’t any men like me, and only one woman who
might
be like me. The odds of him encountering her were incredibly small, especially since I had been trying to encounter her regularly for a long time by then and had failed spectacularly.

But telling him this wouldn’t have done me much good because, assuming he believed me, it would bring to an end our conversation and my life.
 

I also couldn’t
not
answer, because he’d just end up torturing me until I gave him an answer he liked. My best option was to come up with a response that was so impressive he let me go, hopefully along with everyone else in my party. But I knew almost nothing about the djinn as a species, and this particular one had come across as alarmingly pragmatic when he wasn’t flattering everyone into submission. I didn’t think the odds were exceptional that he had a god I could have pretended to be.

My only real chance was that he assumed I had no chance, and also assumed that I had no weapons. I did not, but I knew where four were found on Hsu. Two were close enough for me to reach, and Hsu was in no condition to either protest or to defend himself. There were the two guards in the room that I was going to have to contend with, but they looked like they were part of the family, and the family was not blessed with a particularly athletic build. I was pretty sure I could take Gorrgon and the others all alone, in other words. But I had no clue what I was going to do after that unless I could figure out how to wake everybody up.