The Assassins of Tamurin (50 page)

Adrine. I woke sweating and shivering and Terem worried that I was sickening with a chill. He was especially concemed because that was how Merihan’s fatal illness had begun, so I had to endure the attentions of one of the palace physicians. The woman found nothing wrong with me but asked if I had any signs of quickening. Terem and I had been sleeping together for three months now, so she thought it about time, apparently. I told her I did not, nor did I tell her about the precautions I took against conceiving a child, just as I hadn’t told Terem. I saw less of him now, as he was so occupied with preparations for the war that was to begin in the spring, and I occupied myself with reading and visiting friends.

The month of Snow began. Thin sheets of ice, smooth as fine glass, formed at the margins of Reed Pavilion’s pond. Terem and I moved to the winter bedchamber and slept on the tiled stove. In the other rooms braziers glowed, and in my villa the servant girls wore leggings under their skirts. The month lived up to its name as snow fell twice, but as usual in Kurjain the blanket was only a finger’s thickness and melted by late aftemoon. Still, it clung lacily to the trees and was very beautifull while it lasted.

Then, just after the tum of the month, Mother sent word, through Nilang, that she was especially happy with me. This, she indicated, was because she could not allow Terem to inherit Yazar’s realm and riches, and my timely waming of the secret negotiations had given her time to forestall it. I was still enough her creature to be pleased by such congratulations, when I might more justly have tied iron weights to my legs and thrown myself into the nearest canal. But I had no idea, yet, of what I had done.

In early Snow, word came to the Chancellery that Ardavan had concluded an alliance with the three remaining Exile Kings of Suarai, Ishban, and Mirsing. This information was a month old when we got it, and, disturbingly, it also suggested that the three monarchs would provide Ardavan with troops, no doubt in the hope that this might secure their shaky thrones. But unsettling as the report was, it was utterly overshadowed for me by the news from Istana.

This first reached Kurjain around 13 Snow, a day of sleet and freezing fog. But it didn’t come in all at once, and several days passed before the details of the revolt against Yazar became common knowledge. They were horrible, but for me, the worst horror of all came from Nilang.

I’d felt a mounting dread as the stories trickled into Kurjain, and finally I slipped away from Jade Lagoon to find her. I knew I didn’t look at all well, but she made no comment upon it, merely waited for me to speak.

“What happened?” I asked her. “What did she do?”

Her thin black eyebrows rose. “What would you expect? She informed Yazar’s cousins that he intended to bequeath the Despotate to the Sun Lord. They acted.”

Nausea surged in my belly. “But I thought... Mother has so much money. I thought she’d give Yazar what he needed, so he wouldn’t have to go to Terem at all.”

“Why would she pay for a result that others will give her for nothing?”

I could barely speak. “So it was me—”

“Yes. You have given her a great victory over the Sun Lord.”

My next words were like lye in my mouth, but I uttered them because I had to. “I’m glad. Glad that I served her so well.”

“Good,” Nilang said. “But I see that you are indisposed. Go home.”

I did, and before very long I knew the full, hideous story. Warned by Mother, Yazar’s cousins rebelled before he could conclude his arrangements with Terem. Many of the Despot’s unpaid soldiers joined the revolt, but others remained loyal, and fighting broke out in Istana. Soon the people of the city’s poor quarters, who had felt the grip of Yazar’s tax gatherers most bitterly, boiled out of their warrens and added their fiiry to that of the rebels. Other troops marched in from garrisons elsewhere, some declaring for

Yazar, some against him. A fire started in an oil storehouse by the canal docks, and in the turmoil no one tried to extinguish it. The flames spread rapidly, and by evening almost all Istana was alight, except for Yazar’s lovely palace and the prefecture, where Master Luasin and both the theater companies were in residence.

Then Yazar was killed and his last loyal troops gave way, and all that night the mob and the rebels sacked both palace and prefecture. In their fury at Yazar’s luxurious ways, they slaughtered every person they caught within the walls, then bumed everything to the ground. None of the Younger Company, and only a few of the Elder, escaped the butchery. Master Luasin was not among them. Nor was Perin, my sweet beautifiil Perin, my friend. I never found out exactly how she died, but enough stories reached Kuijain for me to know that she’d had no easy death.

When I heard this, I went to my villa on Cloud Mirror Canal and walked its rooms like a weeping ghost. Terem thought it was because my friends were dead. He was right, but what he did not know was that they were dead because I’d killed them.

I didn’t sleep for days, nor did I eat; food sickened me. I went nowhere near Nilang, for I feared that she would look past my grief and perceive the remorse beneath it, and the reason for the remorse. Terem wanted me to retum to Jade Lagoon Palace but I refused, knowing I couldn’t go near him in this state; I didn’t know what my grief might cause me to blurt to him. So I remained alone with my pain, in the beautiful villa I had purchased with my iniquities.

I pulled myself together finally. I could do nothing else; to go on as I was would invite more questions than I could afford to answer. Seven days after I had immured myself at Cloud Mirror Canal, I retumed to the palace, pale and weary, uncertain what to do next.

I was certain of one thing, however: I should do nothing without plenty of forethought. To act rashly, given the web in which I was ensnared, was to risk disaster. But if I waited... one never knew what might tum up. This gave me a little hope, and pretty soon I managed to seem like my old self again, if somewhat subdued. Terem was much relieved, and I felt that in a few more days I could brave Nilang’s presence. But sooner or later, I told myself. I’d find some way out of my predicament. I had always been good at getting out of things.

That was at the end of Snow. On 2 Greater Frost, I went with Terem to the army barracks attached to the Jacinth Fortress, to review one of his new brigades. The sun was out and they made a brave sight: thousands of armored men in perfect rank, the officers’ parade plumes bobbing above their helmets, the long pikes stabbing toward the blue heaven, the brigade and battalion standards and the company banners aglow in the winter sunlight.

I watched from the portico of the headquarters building as Terem began the final ritual of the review, the sacrifice to Father Heaven and the Lord of the Dead. It had been a long ceremony. My feet were cold, and I wanted to go home.

Terem had just lit the incense when I heard an urgent voice within the headquarters. A rumpled young man with courier insignia appeared beside me in the portico, along with the fortress vice-commandant. The latter was always the epitome of polite behavior, but neither he nor the courier even glanced in my direction, and I realized that they were both extremely agitated. I wanted to ask them what the matter was, but their grim faces silenced me.

I waited uneasily for Terem to finish. At last he did, the homs boomed, and the brigade began to march off the parade field. As soon as they did, the vice-commandant and the courier hurried onto the parade ground. I followed.

“What is it?” Terem asked as we reached him. “News?” “My lord, yes. The courier has a dispatch from the east. The seals were broken at the Chancellery, and Lord Geray sent it directly here.”

Terem took the packet, opened it, and began to read. I watched his face, my alarm increasing as his mouth grew tight.

“He’s gulled me, by Father Heaven,” he said furiously, rolling up the dispatch. “Well, now we have to set to work. Sooner than I’d expected, curse him. Ah, well, the sooner begun, the sooner ended.”

“My lord?” I asked. “What’s happened?”

“Ardavan’s over the Savath, with more than a hundred thousand men behind him. Came boiling out of his winter quarters eleven days ago. He left twenty thousand to mask Tanay and the border fortresses, but he’s got plenty left, and it looks as if they’re heading for Gultekin. He means to put an end to us.”

“But it’s winter!” I exclaimed. “Nobody fights in winter! What will they live on?”

“Plunder and scavenging and speed. He’s a gambler, is our Ardavan. Risks all to take me with my trousers around my ankles. But we’ll see if he can move fast enough. If he doesn’t. I’ll give him a trouncing he won’t soon forget.”

He strode into the headquarters building with me hot on his heels, and in minutes we were on our way to the palace. As the sequina raced through the water, with periangs and smaller craft darting out of our way like frightened water beetles, I asked, “What are you going to do?”

“Fight him. He hopes to defeat me a piece at a time, before I can concentrate my strength, so that he’ll outnumber me in every fight. But I’ve got ten brigades at Gultekin, three here, and demi-brigades at Takrun and Malal. He’ll lose men on the march. I may be able to match his numbers by the time he makes Gultekin.”

“But our men are in winter quarters. Will they be ready to fight?”

“They’ll have to be made so. Unless we want Exile horsemen in Kurjain by the time the month’s out.”

He sounded calm, but from the set of his mouth I knew he was very, very angry—^mostly at himself, because he’d underestimated Ardavan’s willingness to gamble his army on a surprise attack. But nobody else had foreseen it, either. In winter, armies belonged in winter quarters. To campaign in bad weather was to invite calamity. Everybody knew that, except, apparently, Ardavan.

To my surprise, Terem suddenly laughed. I said, “What’s so funny?”

He smiled ruefully. “He has nerve. I’ll say that for him. Can you imagine the uproar in the War Ministry if I’d suggested the same thing? He knows how to lead men, no doubt of it. I wish there were two of him, and one was on my side.” “You admire him, don’t you?”

“Yes. And I want him dead. There’s not room in the world for both of us.”

“When you go to Gultekin, I’m coming, too.”

He grinned. The sequina’s oars swept the canal like flails, hissing. “Could I stop you?”

“No, not unless you lock me up.”

“I’d never do that. I’ll be happy to have you with me, but we’ll have little time together while we’re there, and when I tell you that you must leave, you must do so. Is it a bargain?” “Bargain,” I said, and we clasped hands on it. In that moment, inexplicably, I was happy. But then I remembered that I had to tell Nilang what Terem was going to do, or risk terrible consequences. My happiness fled, and I was my gloom-laden self again.

That evening, while I was rummaging through my old traveling chest for clothes for the journey, I came across a packet of papers. They were the love poems poor Adrine had written before she died; I hadn’t looked at them for a long time. I leafed through them and one caught my eye.

Dreaming in the cherry orchard, hear my song:

A night without him Is ten nights long,

I read it several times, realizing that I understood Adrine at last. Now I knew why she had done what she had, at the cost of everything. Now I knew what she had felt for Lahad, because I felt it for Terem. It was a spirit as dangerous as Nilang’s daughters, and perhaps more powerful.

It was love, and just as Adrine had been doomed to it, so was I.

Thus for the second time in a year I came to Gultekin, this time with the Sun Lord and his army, now called the Army of Durdane. Messages carried by the gallopers of the river fleet reported Ardavan’s main force as two days’ march away, moving relentlessly toward us. He’d captured a lot of shipping and had used it to speed his infantry down the Jacinth alongside his racing cavalry; our river rams sank some of these troop transports but not nearly enough. And while the winter weather and straggling had taken a toll of his numbers, he’d had even more men when he started out than we’d believed—^the reports stubbornly kept saying that eighty thousand marched on us. And it appeared, from the presence of the royal standards of Suarai, Mirsing, and Ish-ban, that the three remaining Exile Kings were with him.

And we Durdana? Terem had pulled together a respectable army, almost as many men as Ardavan supposedly commanded. There were additional brigades in garrison in the northwest, but while they were marching our way, they could not hope to reach Gultekin before Ardavan. Forty thousand more men were in the east, but Ardavan had left enough forces in his wake to keep them from coming quickly to our aid. They’d have to fight their way west, and would never get to us in time to help.

There was one good thing about the decline of our cities over the years: Gultekin had plenty of abandoned buildings to shelter our men from the winter’s rigors. The city was also a district govemment seat and was therefore walled, but these fortifications were of no great strength; if Ardavan defeated us, the city was doomed. Many citizens had fled, and the price of a downriver boat passage had increased tenfold. The district magistrate, however, showed no alarm, and most of his submagistrates and other officials remained at their posts.

The govemment buildings, while old, were well kept up. They were in a gated compound by the river wall; Terem moved me, himself, and his staff into the villa that was designated for official visitors. The rooms were spacious and the windows all had glass in them, a good thing given the cold winds blowing from the west. In the south wall of our bedchamber was a door that opened onto a small wrought-iron balcony, with a view over the compound wall and the city roofs.