Sworn in Steel (24 page)

“Say whatever you want,” I said as I staggered through the doorway. “All I know is I had the longer blade and managed to put it in the right place at the right time.”

“Um,” said Raaz. His gaze was a little too searching, his tone a little too contemplative, for my comfort. I needed to change the subject.

“So,” I said, “how about you tell me what’s inside Jelem’s package that’s so damn important?”

That got him. The Mouth sat up and made a point of looking at anything but me. “What?” he said.

“You heard me.” I adjust Fowler’s drape across my shoulder and considered the blood-smeared steps before me. Damn, but it was hot in here. I blinked the sweat out of my eyes
and inched my foot forward, as if testing for thin ice. “If the
neyajin
are as rarified as you say, I can’t imagine she was there on my account. So what’s that leave
us?”

“It’s tribal business,” said Raaz, a bit too quickly. “Or, at the least,
tal
related. Either way, to think that someone would pay the price demanded by a
neyajin
to steal a—”

“A what?” I said. “What happened here wasn’t about a blood feud, and we both know it. When you go hunting for vengeance, you do it with your own people, with your own
hands. You want to see and feel and taste the blood, to make sure it was done right.” I’d spent enough time on Ildrecca’s streets, and seen enough vengeance in the Raffa
Na’ir cordon back home, to know that there were certain values the Djanese and the Kin shared when it came to getting your own. “You don’t hire this kind of thing done—not
if it matters. You stay in the clan.” You stayed in the organization.

Raaz didn’t answer.

My legs were trembling by now. I took another look at the steps, thought better of it, and bent down to ease Fowler off my shoulders.

“Ow,” she murmured as she half slid, half fell onto the steps. Then, softly, “Asshole.”

That was a good sign. I took a breath and sat down on the steps beside her, mindless of the blood. I turned my gaze back to Raaz.

“Listen,” I said, leaning forward and putting my elbows on my knees. My head felt loose. “We both know what happened down there was about more than me getting into the Old
City. Shadow magic? Assassins? I’m not nobody, but that’s more of a party than I deserve, especially here. Which means it had to be something else, and the only other thing down there
besides you, me, and Fowler was the package Jelem sent. So, what is it?”

He continued to look away.

“Secrets?” I said. No reaction. “Maps?” Nothing. I swallowed, now worried. “Glimmer?”

A flick of the
yazani
’s eyes, a tensing of his shoulders.

I felt my stomach go sour.

Shit!

There was only one kind of magic Jelem would be sending into Djan; one kind of swag that would warrant this much attention. In a place as steeped in magic as the Despotate, I could only think of
one thing the empire had that anyone here would want when it came to glimmer. The empire’s secret weapon.

Imperial magic.

Angels! What had Jelem been thinking? No, scratch that. I knew what he’d been thinking: If anyone knew how to slip something across the border, it was me. I’d been smuggling imperial
relics out of the empire for years—hell, the first time I’d met Jelem, it was when one of my early smuggling attempts had gone wrong and we’d been forced to hole up for three days
while Imperial and Djanese border troops fought over who would get to kill us. He knew I knew how to move swag.

But to use me—me!—to smuggle Imperial glimmer into Djan; magic I’d given him in the first place. Magic the emperor was so jealous of he’d wiped out an entire cordon to
keep it secret. Magic that, up until a few months ago, no one but the Imperial Paragons had ever studied, let alone known how to use. People had vanished over the years for thinking too hard about
the damn stuff, never mind possessing it.

And here I was, walking around with some of it my pocket. Again.

Jelem, you bastard.

I raised a shaking hand and ran it through my hair.

“Are you all right?” Raaz was staring at me, a strange, blurry look on his face.

“No, I’m not all right,” I said. “I just found out I got used. Plus, I’m angry. And tired. And still don’t have a way to get my people into the Old City in a
week’s time. But mostly, I’m angry.” I looked at my hand. “And tired.”

“No, not that,” said the
yazani
, still staring. He pointed. “I mean the cut on your forearm. How did you get it?”

“This?” I said, plucking at my bloody sleeve with my left hand. “I got it from the
neyajin
. I didn’t quite catch her blade in the dark and—”

“What?” said Raaz, leaping to his feet. Funny how I hadn’t noticed the stars trailing after his movements before this. “By the Wandering Family of—why didn’t
you tell me?”

“Why?” I said. “It’s just. . . .” I stopped, looked at the cut, then thought of my own poisoned blade in my wrist sheath. Of course. No wonder Fowler had seemed so
damn heavy.

“Well, hell,” I slurred.

Then I passed out.

I
t was the poking that did it. A relentless, slow, rhythmic prodding to my side that finally made me claw my way back to daylight.

“Will you stop that?” I said, my voice sounding thicker and drier than I remembered.

“Finally!” said a voice. I felt a soft, warm pressure on my chest—a hand laid gently over me. “Took you fucking long enough.”

I chuckled deep in my throat, coughed, and chuckled again. Fowler. That was good.

I opened my eyes to warm, slanting sunlight. I glanced toward the source of the light, and then back again when I realized it wasn’t the window to my cell at the caravansary—that it
wasn’t an ordinary window at all. This one housed an intricate wooden screen of finely cut arabesques, done in what looked to be sandalwood. The inner shutters thrown back against the wall
were just as elaborate, with a duplicate pattern set into wood with riveted wrought iron. From what I could see of the edges, the shutters were grooved to interlock, the overlap blending in with
the overall pattern of the decoration.

It was gorgeous. It would also be almost impossible to crack from the outside when shut.

That last didn’t reassure me.

I lifted my head and looked down to see Fowler kneeling beside me, her hand on my chest. I’d been laid out on a well-stuffed mattress of some sort, which in turn was resting on the floor.
There was a mixture of anger and relief in her gaze.

“How do you feel?” she asked.

“Well enough, considering—”

“Good.” And she hit me, hand to chest. Hard. “That’s for being out for two and a half days, you asshole!” Another slap. “And that’s for trying to carry
me when you were poisoned.” Her hand pulled back again.

“Enough!” I said, sitting up partway and holding my hands out.

Fowler lowered her arm and glanced back over her shoulder. There was an ugly bruise on her left temple. “Is that awake enough?” she said.

“It will do admirably, yes,” said a thin voice in Imperial. His smile was obvious in his tone.

I looked past Fowler and saw a slender, well-turned-out man standing at the far end of the room. From his olive skin and sharp features, he was clearly Imperial, which stood in contrast to his
crisp yet simple Djanese clothing: small turban, tightly buttoned tunic with an open, flowing overcoat, and comfortably loose pants, all in a bone and pale purple brocade. The curled-toed slippers
on his feet were the color of amethysts, and even looked to have buttons of that same stuff holding them closed.

I also saw that I wasn’t on the floor: rather, I was on a wide, slightly raised platform that ran along two sides of the room. The portion I was on was called the iwan—the resting
and social area in most Djanese rooms. The iwan was covered in costly carpets and had damask bolsters against the walls in various spots, while the lower section was done with tile. I noticed
Fowler’s shoes on the tile. I also noticed that the heavy, carved door on the other side of the room stood ajar, giving me a glimpse of not only the hallway beyond, but the guard stationed
just outside the door. I doubted this was a coincidence.

I returned my attention to the Imperial and met his eyes, half expecting to find either arrogance or disdain within them. What I found instead was a challenge, but not based on authority or
power; rather, it almost seemed as if he were daring me to do something—to say or see something based on our shared Imperial blood. I looked the challenge back. After a moment, he nodded;
then he bowed.

When he straightened, the iron was gone from his eyes. Only calm, watery competence showed in his gaze, but I knew better. That glimpse hadn’t been an accident.

The man pitched his voice to carry the distance between us. It wasn’t a vast room, but it wasn’t small, either. “I need to apologize for Mistress Jess’s treatment of
you—”

“No, you don’t,” said Fowler.

“—but I fear it was necessary to wake you,” he said. “Nothing else had been working, and it was dangerous to let you sleep longer.”

“Why?”

“The poison,” said the man. “It was of a type designed to put you into a progressively deeper and deeper sleep—one from which you eventually don’t awake. Your dose
was mild enough that, had you simply stayed put, as was likely intended, you’d have woken up within six hours’ time.”

“Except you decided to carry me up the stairs,” said Fowler.

“Which made things worse,” said the man.

I reached up and rubbed at the tender spot on my chest where Fowler had been thrusting her finger for Angels knew how long. “As opposed to poking me, which apparently helps.”

“I insisted,” said Fowler.

“She was very . . . determined,” agreed the man. “She also refused to let any of the assistant physicians come near you.”

I looked back at Fowler. She shrugged. “Easier to keep an eye on one person at a time. I figured the physicker was the best one to let in.”

“Which reminds me . . . ,” said the man, eyeing Fowler meaningfully.

Fowler sighed and held open her outer robe. “See, Heron? No weapons.”

“And the bulge at your back when you came in?”

Fowler reached back and pulled out a curved Djanese blade in a copper scabbard. “What, this? It’s more a piece of jewelry than a knife.”

Now it was Heron’s turn to sigh. “We agreed on no weapons after the incident with Mah’ud.”

Fowler snorted. “What ‘incident’? I didn’t even cut him.”

“Only because he ran screaming down the hall.”

“What the hell did he expect, sneaking in here like that?”

“He expected to change Master Drothe’s dressing, ideally without waking you.”

“Well, now he knows better. Besides, this trinket’s barely a blade to begin with. If you wanted to actually kill someone, you’d have to—”

“Fowler,” I said, stopping her before she went down a path I knew wouldn’t help. “Enough.”

Fowler grumbled but returned the knife to her back. Heron, I noted, chose not to argue the point. Wise man.

I sat up farther, wincing as I put weight on my wounded arm. As promised, it was in a clean, fresh dressing. Scared or not, Mah’ud seemed to know his business.

I looked around the room and saw my clothes, looking freshly brushed and folded, sitting on a chest beside the door. Fowler followed my gaze, then looked back at me and tapped the wallet hanging
at her cloth belt. Jelem’s letter and package, I took it, were safe.

I turned back to Heron, who hadn’t yet moved from his position across the room.

“You’re the physicker, then?” I said to the man, making a show of rubbing my forearm.

“Me? Oh, no. I’m just the secretary to the wazir.” He held up a leather-bound book that he’d been holding as if in proof. One finger was stuck between the covers, marking
his page. “Heronestes Karkappadolis, but ‘Heron’ is acceptable.”

I looked at Fowler.

She leaned in close and dropped her voice. “He’s our leash,” she whispered.

“Leash?” I said, glancing back at Heron while keeping my own voice low. He’d opened his book, apparently content to let us lean together and murmur for a moment. I wasn’t
in a hospital, then, or, at least, not the one Raaz had been talking about before I passed out. “Where the hell am I?”

“El-Qaddice,” said Fowler. “The Old City.”

I sat up farther. “You mean Tobin and his troupe pulled it off?”

“Maybe,” said Fowler, “but considering how fast the audition was arranged and held, I think they could’ve reenacted a pair of dogs rutting in a doorway and gotten
patronage.”

“A fix?” I whispered. Then, “Raaz.” Or his master—assuming the shadow man I’d seen lose his fingers had survived. They were the only ones I could think of
with both the resources and the reasons to smooth our way into the Old City.

“Someone sure has called in some favors,” said Fowler. “Not that I’ve been able to get anything one way or the other out of our friend over there.”

I peered past Fowler’s shoulder. Heron was regarding us over the binding of his tome. At my look, his turned his eyes back to the page.

Hmm.

“Any word from the mages, then?”

“Nothing.”

That didn’t reassure me. There should at least have been a message, if not a visit, by now. You didn’t pull strings the way they had and then walk away—not unless you had a
damn good reason for not wanting to be associated with the string pulling in the first place. Which told me just how dangerous the package Jelem had sent along was, even in Djan. Not that they
wouldn’t be wanting their bit of smuggled glimmer—they would: They’d just be very careful about when and how they asked for it.

And they’d be mindful of what they’d paid to get it, both in blood and in treasure.

It was that last bit that worried me.

I looked at the screened window, saw nothing but blue sky and the top of a palm tree. “So, where in el-Qaddice am I, precisely?” I said, my voice still low.

“Royal artist’s residence. I can’t pronounce the Djanese, but I’m told it means ‘Sanctuary of the Muse.’ All of the padishah’s potential performing toys
seem to be kept here.” Fowler rubbed gently at her temple. “Tobin and company love it.”