The Assassins of Tamurin (22 page)

“Is there anyone else in our party?”

“There will be one other lady,” Birek said. “Very well-bred and respectable, and already known to Wayfarers’ Guard—she’s traveled under our protection before. She’s going home to Istana.”

“She is?” I asked. This was out of curiosity rather than surprise, for even during the troubled days of the Partition women traveled almost as freely as men, and they did many other things as well. In fact, we Durdana women hold up half the sky, as the
Golden Discourse on Manners and Customs
says, and we mention this often enough to prevent Durdana men from forgetting it.

Still, long-distance travel, especially on land, was a lot more dangerous during the Partition than under the empire. Consequently, enterprising merchants had set up security firms that provided armed guards on contract. The best such firms would guarantee to escort a beautiful woman, with a casket of pearls and a trunk stuffed with gossamin robes.

from anywhere to anywhere in the Despotates or Bethiya, without harm or insult to herself or her possessions. They almost always made good on their promises, although such a level of protection, for one person, was very expensive. More usually, a group of people traveling the same road would hire an escort together, and so defray the costs. The Wa)^arers’ Guard was such a firm and had a fine reputation. It also provided a dispatch service for those who needed to move letters safely and quickly, and who could afford the steep rates for doing so.

\^at I didn’t know about Wayfarers’ then, and neither did anybody else except Mother, Nilang, and the Wayfarers’ supposed proprietor, was that Mother owned it. I suppose I should have worked this out for myself, since the advantages were so obvious: Owning Wayfarers’ allowed Mother to conceal the movements of agents like me among those of innocent clients, and its couriers could carry her dispatches and orders along with legitimate messages. And into the bargain, Wayfarers’ tumed a fat profit to help finance her other activities.

“What sort of business is the lady in?” I asked, hoping it might be an interesting one.

“The wine trade, I believe,” was Birek’s disappointing answer. He looked up as the seamen swung a net stuffed with bales of wool over our heads. “Now, let us all three get ashore, and we’ll go to the hostehy for breakfast.”

I won’t dwell on the tune I spent in Dirun, first because I was there for only a day, and second because it wasn’t a veiy mter-esting place. But I did notice that the decline I’d seen on my way to Tamurin years ago was in Dimn as well: Its once-magnificent public buildings were neglected and dirty, and a third of the city was abandoned to the hordes of desperately poor who worked for a few coppers a day at the docks and shipyards. Somewhat better off were the shopkeepers, middle-grade merchants, and craftsmen of the city’s westem quarter, who at least had something of their own to show for their labors.

These were the many, but there were also the few. On the hillsides, above the squalid rookeries of the lower city, rose the walled compounds that protected the mansions of the rich, all guarded night and day by heavily armed retainers. But for every man or woman who lived in those graceful halls, among those cool, shaded courtyards and galleries scented with flowers, a hundred sweltered in the heat and stink of the lower city.

Everybody knew that the common people had been better off before the Partition, but the equally common belief was that the disasters of the past century and a half were to blame for our decay. We did not realize how much of the blame lay with the Despots and the Sun Lords, and with the soldier-aristocrats who spread ruin as they pursued wealth and power. Hidden in the dismal record of their petty hatreds, their ferocious avarice, their treacheries and their brutal little wars, was the story of our decline. It had continued for a hundred years, this slow decay, our world slipping inexorably toward an abyss that few among us could perceive.

I was among the unperceptive, however, so during the next few days I was as cheerful as could be, watching the world go by as we sailed upstream aboard the river lorcha
Radiant Sunrise,
I shared a tiny cabin in the stem with Birek’s other client, a chubby woman twice my age. But I didn’t have much to do with her, as she spent most of our voyage working through a collection of account books. Her eyesight was poor and she used a round, polished crystal to make out the writing in her ledgers. I’d seen such things, because Sulen had needed one in the last year before she died. But grinding a crystal was very expensive, and this one was three times the size of Sulen’s, which made it uncommonly valuable. My curiosity at last overcoming my manners, I asked her how she’d come by such a treasure.

“Oh,” she said, looking up from her ledger and squinting at me, “it’s not a crystal. It’s glass—there’s a glass founder in Kuijain who makes them. See?”

“Really,” I said, examining the polished disk. There were no flaws or bubbles in it at all. “I’ve never seen glass so clear.”

“My husband says it’s new, something they do to it while it’s melted.”

“Ah,” I said. “In Kuijain.”

“That’s where it’s from, yes. They do all sorts of new things there nowadays. The Sun Lord encourages it. But I don’t suppose you know much about Kuijain and the Lord Terem, being from out there in the west.”

One of our strictest rules was never to speak ill of the Sun Lord; you never knew who might be listening. So I merely said, “It’s true Tamurin’s far away from Kuijain, but we do hear of the Lord Terem’s justice and generosity to his people. He is certainly very admirable. And perhaps I’ll visit Kuijain someday and see all these new things.”

“Perhaps you will,” she said, and screwed the glass back into her eye. Then she rather rudely retumed to her accounts, especially since I wanted to ask her about those other new things. So I found Birek and got him to play a game of odds and evens with me for pebble stakes, and won every pebble he had, without cheating even once.

We reached Istana after a fast passage of seven days, the speed owing to the moon being nearly full; the river masters will sail at night if there’s moonlight, because they can see to navigate safely. I’d hoped to stop at Sutkagin so I could visit a Bethiyan city, but we passed it after nightfall, and I only saw the distant glimmer of its lights across the water.

Istana more than made up for the loss. In imperial times the place had been very large, and, although the suburbs outside the walls were now mostly abandoned, it was still home to some eighty thousand people. But what impressed me was Istana’s prosperous air. It was the only place I’d seen since leaving Tamurin that didn’t look dilapidated.

The first reason for this was the Long Canal. Durdane is a land of canals, for the best way to move heavy loads over long distances is by boat, and we Durdana have been constructing waterways for a very long time. Istana was fortunate in that the Long Canal joined the Pearl beneath its walls, and there the Despot’s tax collectors waited with tally and ledger. Not a scrap of cloth, a sip of wine, or a length of spice cane moved from a canal boat onto a Pearl River lorcha without paying a levy to Yazar, the Despot of Brind.

This gave him a lavish income, for even during the Partition there remained an appetite in the north for the luxuries of the south, and most of these luxuries traveled up the Long Canal. The cargo boats were called slippers, both because of their shape and because they were built narrow to slip through the canal locks. On the Long Canal, a slipper could travel four hundred miles south to the border of Indar, assuming that the various Despots along the route kept the channels and locks in repair. (They were careful to do this, because they liked imposing transit taxes). Then, when the slipper reached the southem end of the Long Canal, it could sail across a small lake and enter the South Canal. Using this, it could eventually reach the Wing River of my childhood, although it would still be a long way from Riversong.

The canal trade was the first reason for Istana’s air of wealth. The second was that the city was Brind’s capital, and Yazar had lavished much attention on the place. He was famous both for his love of beauty and for his generosity to artists, so much so that even the canal revenues could not cover his expenses, and he was perennially in debt.

Yazar came of the Demirak bloodline that had bred fierce soldiers for the past several generations. He’d been on Brind’s dais for nineteen years, having won a violent succession stmggle that bumed down a quarter of Istana. After he won, he suspended the civil laws and summarily executed most of his surviving opponents, often along with their families; others fled before his men could haul them off to the mihtary courts. His behavior attracted little comment, being common in such situations, although the
Discourses
speak most vehemently against such barbarism.

Once he’d removed the threats to his position, however, Yazar put aside savagery and mled more or less by the laws. At bottom he preferred building things to knocking them down, and to this end he spent money as if it grew out of the earth. His wife was equally spendthrift, and determined to prove herself the fashionable equal of any Despotana in Durdane. She had even founded a school for orphan girls, to show herself as charitable and compassionate as Mother.

Yazar and his Despotana had no children, however, because he preferred men to women. He was also unlike other Despots in that his favorite leisure pastime was carpentry, rather than the more usual pursuits of hunting or horse racing. He built, among other things, a small, graceful pavilion in the palace gardens, where he liked to dine with his collection of artists and actors. Because of Yazar, Istana had attracted many such people, and the city in its way was as cultured as Kuijain. And with Master Luasin in residence, it could claim the finest High Theater company remaining in the world.

Yazar thought so highly of Master Luasin that he’d lent him the old prefectural residence, to provide living quarters for his actors and theater students, as well as space for the training and rehearsal stages. Adjoining the prefecture was Yazar’s opulent new palace, and he allowed us to walk in its splendid gardens whenever we Uked, a privilege extended to few.

We were very comfortable in the prefecture. The place was laid out in the manner of imperial times, on a north-south axis, with the family quarters arranged around a large inner courtyard. This courtyard had a garden with plum and pear trees, a reflecting pool, and a fountain. The large three-story building on its north side contained—among elegant formal rooms now left to dust and moths—^the students’ stage, a larger rehearsal stage, and a small theater once used for the prefect’s private enjoyment. Adjoining it were accommodation wings with verandas, where both students and ftill-fledged actors lived. On the south was the outer courtyard, where the servants’ quarters were, along with the stable, kitchen, storage magazine, the baths, and the porter’s lodge at the main gate.

The theater school was doing well by the time I arrived, and had produced its first crops of trained actors. Some had already sought their fortunes elsewhere, but Master Luasin was nevertheless able to maintain two full theater companies. The Younger Company remained at Istana year-round to regale Yazar, while the more experienced Elder Company did the summer tour up in Kuijain, under the supervision of Master Luasin himself. He and they had already departed for the north when I reached Istana; his deputy, Mourken, a man of combustible temperament but great ability, was in charge of our training.

Master Luasin’s ambitions, as so often with brilliant artists, were greater than his resources. Unfortunately, while Yazar was lavish in his support of the theater, he was not unreservedly so. Consequently Mother was financing Master Luasin with secret payments from her own treasury, and had been doing so since his visit to Chiran when I was fourteen. The amounts weren’t large, not enough to make Yazar wonder how Master Luasin did so much with so little. But they put him very firmly under Mother’s control, which was the real reason for her generosity.

I am sure that Master Luasin also served Yazar as an agent and reported to the Despot what he saw during the Elder Company’s travels. But he also sent this information secretly to Mother, along with similar gleanings about Yazar and Brind. Even the easygoing Yazar would have asked sharp questions if he’d known this, and this was Mother’s second hold over Master Luasin: She could destroy him in a moment, if she chose to, by revealing his spying.

Mother thus had no trouble getting me into the theater school, and she paid Master Luasin well for my training. If I’d shown no acting talent, I suppose she would have found another plausible way of moving me to the desired position on her game board; she was a very astute player of games, was Mother. But I did have talent, and consequently the game board looked just as she wanted it. I am sure that Master Luasin knew I was more than I appeared to be, but except for his aesthetic ambitions he was a man of good sense, and kept his questions to himself.

My first full month in Istana was Hot Sky, and the city sweltered. Usually there was a breeze off the Pearl, but it was not as cooling as the sea winds of Chiran, and at sundown it dropped to a zephyr. It was on one of those suffocating evenings, when the city smelled of river water and wilted flowers, that I first took a life.

I had been unsure how my fellow students would react to me, given that I was the protégé of the Despotana of Tamurin. There were ten of us, including me, of whom three were women. Some had already performed on the popular stage, others were from families with artistic backgrounds, and one was a leather merchant’s youngest son with more talent for song than for dressing hides. None of them had much money above what they needed to eat, drink a little, and pay for their training.