Mistress of the Empire (31 page)

As Arakasi drew breath to reply, Kamlio raised a finger and stopped his lips. Her nails were dusted with gilt, costliest of cosmetics. ‘Don’t say you’ll buy me my freedom for love. That would be trite.’

Arakasi blessed the rosy flesh of her fingertips with a kiss. Then, very gently, he removed her hand, so he could speak. His expression was faintly offended. ‘It would not be trite. It would be true.’ Mara had set no limits on his expenses, ever, and for stakes so high as access to the tong’s most guarded chieftain, she would hardly stint his needs.

The girl in his arms went icy with distrust. To free her from the seven-year contract signed and sold to her aged
master would be worth the cost of a town house; but to buy out her worth, and the expense of her training and upbringing, from the merchant of the pleasure house who had invested in her – that would be as much as a small estate. Her contracts would be sold, and sold again, until she was faded to the point where even her skills between the sheets would be spurned. ‘You were never so rich.’ Even her voice was contemptuous. ‘And if the master who employs you is so wealthy, then I risk my very life to be speaking to you.’

Arakasi bent his head and kissed her neck. His hands did not tighten against her tenseness; she could at any moment draw away, a nuance she understood, and in appreciation of the subtlety, she kept still. Few men treated her as though she had a will of her own, or feelings. This one was rare. And his hands were very schooled. She heard the note of sincerity in his voice as he added, ‘But I work for no master.’

His tone conveyed the nuance. His mistress, then, would have little use for an expensive courtesan. The offer of freedom might be genuine, if he had access to the money.

Arakasi’s hands recovered lost ground, and Kamlio quivered. He was more than rare: he was gifted. She settled a little, her flank melting into the curve of his body.

As though the footsteps of servants did not come and go in the corridor, separated by only a screen, Arakasi’s touch drifted down the girl’s golden flesh. She leaned into him. Pleasure came rarely enough to her, who was a thing bought and sold to meet the needs of others. Discovery might earn her a beating; her partner would wind up dishonorably dead on a rope end. He was either exceptionally brave, or else careless unto insanity. Through skin that had been caressed and cajoled into unwonted sensitivity, the girl could feel the unhurried beat of his heart.

‘This mistress,’ Kamlio murmured languidly. ‘She means so very much to you?’

‘Just at this moment I was not thinking of her,’ Arakasi said, but it was not his words that convinced as his lips met hers with a tenderness akin to worship. The kiss blurred all doubts and soon after, all thoughts. The filtered sunlight through the windows blended with a red-golden haze behind her eyes, as passion was drawn out of her and savored like fine wine.

At last, gasping and drenched with the fine sweat of lovemaking, Kamlio forgot herself and clung to the lean form of the man as she exploded into relief. She laughed and she wept, and somewhere between amazement and exhaustion, she whispered the location of the sister sold away in far Ontoset.

Despite his mysterious background, it did not occur to Kamlio that her partner might be no more than a consummate actor until she rolled over. The light touch that cradled her body was no more than the fold of warm sheets. She flung back damp hair, her beautiful eyes narrowed and furious to find the window opened, and himself gone, even to the clothes he had worn.

She opened her lips to call out, in a pique that would see him caught and executed, never mind his clever hands and lying promises. But on the moment the air filled her lungs, the latch on the screen tripped up.

Arakasi must have heard the heavy tread of her elderly master, returned early from his meeting with his hadonra. Stoop-shouldered, palsied, grey-haired, he shuffled into her chamber. His milky eyes blinked at the twisted sheets, and his dry, chill hands reached out and stroked her skin, heated still, and damp from a surfeit of passion.

‘My dear, are you ill?’ he said in his old man’s voice.

‘Bad dreams,’ she said, sulky, but trained by instinct to use the mood to increase her allure. ‘I dozed in the afternoon heat, and had nightmares, nothing more.’ Grateful that her deft, dark-haired lover had made clean his escape, Kamlio
sighed and bent her skills upon her decrepit master, who was harder, it sometimes seemed, to please than she was.

Outside the window, screened from sight by a veiling of vines and unkempt akasi, Arakasi listened intently to the sounds that issued from the bedchamber. In relief, and an uncharacteristic anger, he silently donned his clothing. He had lied only once: never had he ceased thinking of his mistress. Over the years since he had sworn to Acoma service, Mara had become the linchpin of his life.

But the girl, half spoiled, fully hardened to the resentment of a whore brought up to the Reed Life, had touched him. His care for her had been real, and that by itself was disturbing. Arakasi shook off the memory of Kamlio’s long, fine hair and her jewel-clear eyes. He had work to do, before her freedom from usage could be arranged. For the information she had delivered in the naïve belief that she had disclosed only a family secret was the possible location of the harem of the Hamoi Tong’s Obajan. The tenuous link she had managed to retain with her sister, used to exchange spurious and widely erratic communication, held far more peril than she knew.

It had taken months for Arakasi to trace a rumor that a girl of unusual beauty, a sister to another, had been purchased by a certain trader, one whom Arakasi had suspected as a Hamoi Tong agent. He was now dead, a necessary by-product of Arakasi’s identifying him, but his purchase of so expensive a courtesan led Arakasi to the near certainty that she must belong to the Obajan, or one of his closest lieutenants.

And the fact she had been sent to Ontoset made peculiar sense; it was safer for the tong to have its seat so distant from where it was contacted, a minor shrine outside the Temple of Turakamu. Arakasi himself had many agents who suspected he was based in Jamar or Yankora, because that was where all their messages originated.

Arakasi had resisted the temptation to leave at once for Ontoset and had spent valuable weeks in Kentosani seeking out the girl’s sister.

The Spy Master had studied his prey for weeks before making himself known to her. Turning away Kamlio’s questions with vague references he led her to believe him the son of some powerful noble, fallen to low estate because of a romantic adventure.

As he repeatedly risked shameful death to see her, then at last Kamlio had welcomed him to her bed.

Without her, Arakasi might have searched a lifetime and never obtained a clue to what he sought by Mara’s command. As he sat, still as stone, awaiting the dusk and the chance to steal away, he pondered how much he owed to a girl who had been raised up to be no more than a bed toy. He knew he should leave this woman and never see her again, but something in him had been touched. Now he confronted a new fear: that he might entreat Mara to intercede and buy the girl’s contract, and that, once free, Kamlio might laugh at his genuine care for her.

For a man brought up by women of the Reed Life, understanding of her contempt came all too easily. Veiled by the bushes, suffering insect bites and muscle cramps from his pose of forced stillness, Arakasi sighed. He closed his eyes, but could not escape the sounds of Kamlio’s marathon efforts in the bedchamber to gratify the lechery of a man too old to perform. Arakasi endured a wait that passed painfully slowly. Once he was sure the old master was asleep, he silently made his departure. But with him came vivid memories and the uncomfortable, unwanted awareness that he had come to care for Kamlio. His feelings for her were folly; any emotional ties to those not of the Acoma made him vulnerable. And he knew that if he was vulnerable, so then was Lady Mara.

The messenger hesitated after he made his bow. Breathless still from his run through the hills bordering the estate, he might have been taking an ordinary pause to recover his wind; except that his hands were tense, and the eyes he raised to Hokanu were dark with pity.

The Shinzawai heir was not a man to shy from misfortune. Campaigns in the field had taught him that setbacks must be faced at once, and overcome, lest enemies gain opening and triumph. ‘The news is bad,’ he said quickly. ‘Tell me.’

Still mute, and with a second bow made out of sympathy, the messenger drew a scroll out of a carry tube fashioned of bone strips laced together with cord. The instant Hokanu saw the red dye that edged the parchment, he knew: the word was a death, and even as he accepted the document and cracked the seal, he guessed the name inside would be his father’s.

The timing could not be worse, he thought in that stunned, disbelieving interval before grief struck his mind like a fist. His father, gone. The man who had understood him as no other; who had adopted him when his blood sire had been called into the Assembly of Magicians, and who had raised him with all the love any son could require.

There would be no more midnight talks over hwaet beer, or jokes about hangovers in the mornings. There would be no more scholarly arguments, or reprimands, or shared elation over victories. The grandchild soon to be born to Mara would never meet his grandfather.

Fighting sudden tears, Hokanu found himself mechanically dismissing the messenger. Jican appeared, as if spell-called, and quietly dealt with the matter of refreshments and disposition of the bone token that couriers received in acknowledgment of completion of their missions. The hadonra finished with necessities, and turned back to his
mistress’s husband, expectant. Hokanu had not moved, except to crush the red-bordered scroll between his fist.

‘The news was bad,’ Jican surmised in commiseration.

‘My father,’ Hokanu said tightly. ‘He died in his sleep, in no pain, of natural causes.’ He shut his eyes a moment, opened them, and added, ‘Our enemies will be gloating, nonetheless.’

Jican fingered the tassels on his sash, diffident, careworn, and silent. He had met Kamatsu of the Shinzawai; he knew the Lord’s hadonra well. The most enduring tribute he could think to mention was not the usual one, or the most elegant. He spoke anyway. ‘He is a man who will be missed by his servants, young master. He was well loved.’

Hokanu raised eyes dark with hurt. ‘My father was like that.’ He sighed. ‘He abused no man and no beast. His heart was great. Like Mara, he was able to see past tradition with fairness. Because of him, I am all that I am.’

Jican allowed the silence to stretch unbroken, while outside the window, the footsteps of a sentry passed by. Then he suggested, very gently, ‘Mara is in the work shed with the toy maker.’

The new-made Lord of Shinzawai nodded. He went to seek his wife with a weight on his elegant shoulders that the news he carried made fearful. More than ever, the heir his Lady carried was important. For while Hokanu had cousins aplenty, and even a bastard nephew or three, none of them had grown up schooled to his foster father’s breadth of vision. Not a one of them had the perception and the clarity of thought to fill the shoes of the man who had been the Emperor Ichindar’s right hand.

The ambience of the work shed was an amalgam of dust, warmth shed into dimness by the sunlit tiles of the roof, and the aromatic scents of wood shavings, resins, and the pungency of needra glue. The corners were murky with
shelves of scrap cloth, baskets of feathers, and an orderly arrangement of woodworker’s tools, among which was a priceless metal knife, imported from the barbarian world, and with which Mara had bought the undying admiration and services of Orcato, toy maker, genius, and dissembler, with a penchant for lewd jokes and drink. Mara overlooked his coarseness, his tendency to forget her femininity and speak with her as if she were an equal, and his stink, which was always of unwashed sweat and the tecca seeds with which he spiced his food. When Hokanu entered, Lady and artisan were engaged with bent heads over a waist-high contraption of wood, around which were arrayed an army of painted toy soldiers.

‘There,’ said Orcato in his tremulous old-man’s voice that also held childish enthusiasm. ‘If you’d pull that string and release that lever, there, mistress, we’ll know if we’ve wasted our time.’

His sarcasm was belied by the unholy gleam of joy in his eyes; disheveled, hot, and heavily pregnant, Mara bent a face marred by a smear of dust across one cheek. She gave an unladylike whoop and yanked a tasseled cord.

The contrivance on the floor responded with a click, a whap, and a violent whipping of cord, timber, and wicker. What Hokanu recognised as a replica of an engine designed to hurl rocks over the walls of a besieged city did not perform its intended office. Instead, its throwing arm spun in an arc, discharging its missiles amid the neat ranks of its allies. Toy soldiers scattered and bounced through the dusty air, and rocks cracked in rebound off the walls. Hokanu ducked the ricochets and winced at the Lady’s unfettered yell of delight.

Orcato the toy maker cackled with pleasure and from a pocket beneath his needra-hide apron produced a flask. ‘A toast to the Gods of Prank and Mischief?’ He offered the Lady a swig, and froze, seeing Hokanu in the doorway.

‘We’ve done it, my Lord,’ he announced, blithe as a boy in his excitement. ‘Found a way to turn Jiro’s penchant for engines back upon his own troops.’ He paused, drank deeply, and cackled again, then offered his dripping flask to the master.

It was Mara who noticed the stiffness of Hokanu’s face. ‘What has happened?’ she asked, her sudden concern as jarring as a shout. She maneuvered her swollen belly around the toy engine, stepping upon the scattered ranks of soldiers.