Mistress of the Empire (34 page)

The shadows spilled long and purple between the fruit-laden trees of autumn. Hokanu chose a stone bench and sat down, but the heat still oppressed. No breeze came to cool him, and ash from the burning drifted still in the air, describing shafts through the foliage where the sun struck through. Hokanu fingered the raveled edges of the garment he had rent for Kamatsu’s ceremonial farewell. His hands closed, hard, bunching the fabric. He had an estate filled with guests that he should be thinking of; it felt selfish to steal a moment of peace for himself.

But the stillness of the contemplation glade, and the lazy drone of the insects that fed upon windfall fruit, allowed him space to think. Fumita’s warning had not been only for Mara, her consort perceived. Hokanu’s brows drew together. The magician’s spare words had been for the Shinzawai, and the son who now wore the Lord’s mantle. When he had said, ‘I cannot protect you,’ the ‘you’ was not plural but singular.

For if, as Lord of the Shinzawai, Hokanu chose aggression against the Anasati on Mara’s behalf, the Assembly of Magicians would have no choice but to act – because he was Mara’s consort; not her Ruling Lord, but half Acoma in heart, if not in name. He was not Servant of the Empire. He did not have Mara’s rank and honors as his shield.

No, the core of Fumita’s warning had not been for his Lady. It had been for himself, a caution against trying the patience of an assembly divided in opinion over issues that had no precedents.

Hokanu understood with a flash of cold sweat that he must at all costs keep the Shinzawai clear of the feud with Lord Jiro. He saw, with the family’s talent for perception, just what Fumita had left unsaid. That he was now Lord of one of the most powerful houses in the Empire and, while not officially Clan Warchief, would inherit the leadership of Clan Kanazawai at the next Council. If, through ties of marriage, Shinzawai and Acoma forces were seen to unite in common cause, leading Clan Kanazawai and Clan Hadama, no counterforce in the Nations could stop them. The fragmented Assembly would end their contention, forced by most desperate circumstances to act.

That reason must never be given, or Acoma and Shinzawai would both be ground down into the dust, never to rise, never to recover. Hokanu had seen the death of two hundred warriors, followed by the annihilation of an honored house, all at the hands of
one
magician. Hundreds of them, united, no army in the Empire could oppose.

Hokanu arose to leave. The sacred grove of Shinzawai no longer seemed a haven of peace, and the sweat on his skin gave him chills. The place at his side where Mara might have stood felt colder and emptier still.

Arakasi waited.

Below him, the sentry moved silently, upon feet clad in padded stockings designed for stealth. He wore the traditional short black robe and trousers of the Hamoi Tong assassins, and his head covering masked all but his eyes. Across his back a short bow was slung, and at his belt a hip quiver of arrows and a variety of hand weapons were hooked within easy reach. He moved beneath the tree where the Spy Master perched, barely breathing, and vanished into the dusk like a shade of the dead. Arakasi counted in his mind, his numbers a complex formula he had devised over years, that fixed an exact passage of time, independent of breathing, heart rate, or any other condition that might influence the count. Practice with sand-filled hourglasses had perfected his system to a fine point. When he reached the number that signified ten seconds, his searching eyes caught a movement at the far end of the trail. He knew satisfaction heady as triumph. The second sentry had arrived exactly as anticipated.

The most perilous task he had ever undertaken was off to an auspicious start. Arakasi held no illusions that such luck would long continue; he was one man alone, and in a position where even the favor of heaven could not safeguard a man’s life. Arakasi lay motionless on a tree branch in the garden of the Hamoi Tong’s Obajan. Below him paced a guard who would kill him without hesitation. Like his predecessor, this new sentry scouted grass, paths, and bushes for the telltale signs of an intruder. The Spy Master had left no tracks; yet he sweated. The guards were
uncannily thorough. The second assassin moved along his beat. Counting for a specific interval, Arakasi judged his moment, then noiselessly lowered himself from tree to ground. Taking care to step only on the flat, ornamental stones between flower beds, he scurried off to a small depression within a drainage ditch where he had secreted his few belongings. There, behind a masking of khadi brush, just beyond the limit of the Hamoi Tong sentries’ line of patrol, he breathed deeply and settled taut nerves.

At the edge of the woods a hundred paces west, his own backup man waited, knife already in hand to answer unwelcome discovery. Arakasi lifted a stripped branch and used gestures to indicate that the patrol was moving according to schedule. The garden he sought to infiltrate was protected by eighteen assassins, all alert, cautious sentries, but human enough to be fallible. The guard pattern they followed was complex and at first appearance seemingly random. But few observers had Arakasi’s icy patience, or his keen fascination with mathematics. He had thought nothing of the days spent crouched in dirt, bitten by insects, and lashed by sun and rain. What mattered was that he had unraveled their measure, and worked up formulas to predict their routes.

His backup man wore the garb of a Lashiki bowman – a mercenary guard from the northern province. As with Arakasi, his outer trappings came no closer to his true identity than any of a dozen guises he had worn and then shed over the years. Nor was his real name Sabota. Arakasi never pressed him on this foible; his true origin was his own affair, for he had proven himself a reliable courier countless times over. Of all the agents near Ontoset the Acoma Spy Master could call upon, Sabota was the most trustworthy. And Arakasi had to give this man a mission as critical to the Lady’s survival as his own.

A month’s beard masked the Spy Master’s face. He
appeared more like a beggar than anything else, from the weeks spent in the countryside. Yet had there been a watcher close enough to see his eyes as he began a second, more complex signal with the stick, he could never have been mistaken for other than what he was: a supremely dangerous man about to embark upon a mission he did not expect to survive.

At the treeline, the man called Sabota studied the Spy Master’s message. His memory was impeccable. He nodded once and left without a glance backward.

Crouched behind a thin screen of thorn, Arakasi closed his eyes. He did not pray. He substituted hope. For Sabota took with him instructions to the second-in-command of the Acoma spy network, a man Mara had never met whom Arakasi had designated his replacement should he fail to return from this endeavor.

The stakes were now set. If a countermessage was not sent within a specified number of days, a new Spy Master would present himself to Lady Mara. Every detail on the tong that Arakasi had managed to uncover would be passed along, and plans would begin afresh to seek the destruction of the Hamoi Obajan and counter the infiltrations attempted by Chumaka of the Anasati.

Arakasi closed his eyes. His head ached from tension, which was not normal. Life to him had always been a bloodless, calculated dance, with danger his dispassionate partner. It bothered him to think he might have held Sabota with him longer than necessary: he had discerned the key to the patrols two days ago. The waiting he had done since had not been for precaution; in fact, it had only increased the risk that the tong might alter its habits to foil just the sort of study he had finished. Arakasi rubbed his temples. Unused to self-conflict, he drew a series of breaths to calm himself.

Arakasi had been driven by an abiding loyalty to Mara
since his long-sought vengeance against the Minwanabi had been completed by the Acoma. Concerns for his Lady’s safety haunted him now, for if he died in this insane task, a man of even lesser gifts would be left to undertake his post. After the attempt to infiltrate the City of the Magicians had been abandoned, signs of tampering had surfaced since the agents in Jamar had returned to active status. This could only be the work of Chumaka of the Anasati. Through sleepless nights watching the tong’s patrols, Arakasi had worried on the timing. With the net compromised, who knew how deeply, this was a frightening moment to contemplate handing over the reins. Arakasi gave himself a mental jab of reproach. Were he to die, what did his life matter? Never before had he wasted himself with worries that had no bearing on circumstances outside his control.

It was past time to be moving. Pushing aside another maddening incongruity, a memory of his hands sliding through the honey-gold hair of a courtesan he should have forgotten, he forced his thoughts to track the immediate. The next lull in the patrols was upon him. If he was to act tonight, he must not tarry, for by every indication gleaned through weeks of observation, the high, painted litter that had arrived at the estate house that afternoon had carried the long-absent master.

The Obajan of the Hamoi Tong was once again in residence at his pleasure retreat.

Arakasi wormed out of the ditch, pressed through the low bushes, and raced, bent over, down a garden path. He threw himself belly down in the shadow of a low tile wall, aware, now, that he was irrevocably committed. There were no more gaps in the patrols along the perimeter, and would not be, until daylight made it impossible to cross without being observed from one of the guard posts set in wooden balconies that jutted from the house’s peaks.

The wait under the wall would last an hour. To use the
time, Arakasi reviewed all of his preparations, turning over each success and frustration that had marked his mission to its current moment.

It had been a painstaking trail, which had begun with the tracking of the honey-haired courtesan’s sister. The slave trader who had brokered the girls had been easy enough to find, but at the market where Kamlio’s sibling should have been turned over to her tong purchaser, all traces of her vanished.

The work then had been hampered by its proximity to Ontoset, where the new network begun to replace the one disrupted by the silk warehouse mishap was still in its building stages. Weeks of following false leads had yielded the conclusion that girls selected for the tong never reached the Ontoset marketplace.

Arakasi had backtracked along the route, and from a drunken driver’s chance remark had learned that slave wagons bearing girls of unusual beauty were on rare occasions diverted into the rolling foothills to the north of the city. More weeks had been spent scouting out that area, to follow and map each footpath, game trail, and swamp in the wide lands north of Ontoset. Sabota and three other agents had done this, living off the surrounding land like bandits, stealing jigabirds or vegetables from farmers, fishing the brooks, even eating berries and nuts. One had been killed as he attempted to purchase grain in a village miles to the northwest – which had been a loss that yielded knowledge, for it marked that settlement as subject to the tong’s control, where strangers were not welcomed. The ‘farmer’ who had done the killing had taken the Acoma agent from behind with a knife; an expert in his own right with dagger work, Arakasi had examined the corpse fished out of the river. The murder was the work of a trained assassin. Arakasi had lain in the loft of a mill downstream, listening to gossip: the villagers who had observed the death
never commented, but continued with their daily affairs as if nothing untoward had occurred.

No one had caught wind of the Spy Master’s presence; no one had noticed the trail he had erased when he left. He reviewed again the checks he had run in Ontoset, counting the farm carts that entered, and noting what color dust filmed their wheels as they presented themselves at the guard gate. He had not been followed, for a certainty. More weeks had been spent in a roadside ditch, living off dried cakes and fruit. Months after the murder of his agent, Arakasi had traced three carts from that village. Back in Ontoset, he had worn a drover’s robes and gone out for hard nights of drinking. Carts came and went, until finally one of those he had been seeking pulled in. A trip outside the tap with three swaying, singing companions: he had leaned on that wagon to piss, and with a knife concealed in his other hand had notched the hardened leather that bound the cartwheel’s rim.

Sabota, watching at the roadside, had waited more days for rain. Then at last, that distinctively marked wheel’s track had led to the location of the tong’s pleasure palace.

Arakasi knew his work was good. No one should have connected his drunken binge in the tavern with another poor, traveling laborer walking between harvests with his head drooping in the heat. Still, he sweated. The man he sought to take was the most secretive individual in the Empire, and by far the best guarded. There were Lords who had died for merely beholding the Obajan’s face.

Tasaio of the Minwanabi had been the singular exception, and the bribes he had paid in metal were the stuff of legend, if a man did not know he had purloined illicit contraband during his years of war service across the rift.

The break in the patrol would come soon. Arakasi chewed a strip of dried meat, though his appetite had
fled. Food was for survival now; or else this would be the last meal of his life.

He swallowed the last of his stores and lay flat upon damp soil. Eyes closed again, he tuned his senses to the night, hearing every sound and insect, and smelling the moisture-laden air. Any change would find him instantly at the ready. His timing required absolute concentration. He waited, sweating harder. His thoughts sought to wander, marred by some new, formless apprehension he could not name.

That anomaly troubled him sorely, but could not be examined, for the moment had come. The crunch of sandals crossed the gravel path just the other side of the wall; ten seconds, twenty seconds, thirty: Arakasi flowed through the night like a phantom.

Over the wall in a vault, he crossed the garden, leaping over the paths and keeping to slate borders of the flower beds that his step not disturb the raked gravel. Light flickered through the trees. Arakasi dove belly down and scraped under the arch of an ornamental bridge. The water in the little stream was high at this time of year, its trickle hiding his splashing. He barely had enough headroom under the center beam to keep his face clear of the surface. The sound of current over a rock underneath masked his fast breathing as he froze, his heartbeat racing. Up the path came a group of men. Four were wearing the black of assassins, white sashes proclaiming them to be of honored rank. Two more moved through the garden, flanking the party as guards. Of the pair they protected, one was thin, clad in silk woven in the hamoi-flower pattern, his eyes roving back and forth in nervous review. But it was to the other man that Arakasi’s attention was drawn.

This one was massively built, his wide girth carrying not one ounce of fat. He wore a flowing brown robe, the hood thrown back to reveal the face that would never be
uncovered away from home. The man who might earlier have posed as itinerant priest or monk proudly displayed the long topknot and fall of hair that proclaimed him of supreme rank. His shaved scalp bore the complex red tattoos that adorned only an Obajan.

In the darkness under the bridge, as footsteps thumped and creaked across the boards above, pressed tight between the structure and damp mud, Arakasi grinned to know his work had not been wasted. He was within striking distance of the ruler of the Hamoi Tong.

But now was no time to strike. The flanking guards were beating the bushes on either side of the path. The abnormally high water made the cranny under the bridge too small to shelter a full-sized man without backing up the flow. And indeed, no ordinary skulker could have wedged himself clear of the streamlet by bracing his elbows on the side beams. Arakasi ignored his aching muscles. Now there were twenty-four assassins in residence at the estate. He held back elation. Even a chance gleam of light on his teeth could betray him. Eighteen or twenty-four assassins, he was sticking his head into the mouth of a harulth and daring the most dangerous predator in Kelewan to bite down.

The Obajan’s party passed, probably on its way to enjoy the evening in the covered gazebo near the wall. Arakasi had the night left yet to wait. At the last hour before sunrise, he would attempt to enter the estate house. For there was only one way he had determined to infiltrate this nest of murderers, and after that, he grimly acknowledged, he had no safe way out.