The Prince of Shadow (56 page)

Llesho shuddered for his brother. For much of the period of his bondage Llesho's treatment had been harsh and debasing, but until Markko he had never been singled out for personal humiliation by his owner. He had hoped that Adar had fared better. Now he hoped only to see his brother alive through whatever damage slavery had done him. The general's pressure on his hand warned him against voicing some protest.

“I am sure you will strike a fair bargain for me, Mistress Trader.” Shou rose from his chair and bowed.

“Fair for rare.” She reminded him that the price would be high.

Shou returned her a casual shrug. “I will not barter the boy, but your owner may state his price in gold or silver. You will, of course, add your percentage to the price.”

“As you will, Master.” She wrote out a note to confirm the commission and handed it to the general, then wrote another and called for a servant, who attended her at once.

“I will see you tomorrow, then, good sir?” She led the way to the front of the countinghouse, and opened the sliding panel into the entry room again.

“Tomorrow,” General Shou promised, and with a last bow, he waited until Llesho had opened the door for him, and they departed.

“You did that very smoothly,” Llesho commented when they were well away from the countinghouse.

“Is that a compliment on my skills as an actor, or an accusation that I own slaves.

“You tell me.”

The general huffed an exhalation—whether of guilt or frustration, Llesho could not tell. Shou kept his face clear of all expression.

“If you are asking, do I own slaves, the answer is ‘yes,' though I believe I have always behaved honorably toward them.”

They had entered the market square. Llesho noted the noise and bustle at the edges of his awareness, but his senses had tunneled down to one focus: the slave block at the market's center leaked blood around the edges of his vision. “I don't see how you can use the words ‘slave' and ‘honor' in the same statement,” he objected.

“Old customs are hard to break.” It seemed that Shou was trying to justify his actions, but his next words were a surprise: “Lately, though, I have come to believe you may be right. For the most part, however, it was acting.”

“I think that worries me more.” Llesho didn't look at the general. He would see only the face Shou wanted him to, so looking for clues in the man's eyes or the depth of the lines above his brow seemed pointless. “I don't know what to trust of your motives. Have you lied to me as easily as you lied to the slave trader?”

“Not as easily or as well as I would have liked, obviously, or you would trust me more.” The general laughed. “Are you hungry?”

For a moment Llesho wondered if General Shou had simply lost his mind. But he
was
hungry. Very. The smells coming from the food stalls on his left reminded him that he'd had breakfast a long time ago, and he'd eaten nothing since. The general gave him a shove in the direction of those wonderful smells, and suddenly Llesho's awareness of his surroundings opened up.

The market square was huge. He had thought so looking out on it from the slave block as a child, and his impression of its size hadn't changed much. Now, however, he was conscious of the excitement buzzing in the colors and the noise and the smells. This, much more than the square in front of the palace, seemed to be the center of Shan. They passed a booth where bits of meat were roasting on skewers over an open flame, but the general didn't stop.

“He has no butcher's bill, and his shop is remarkably free of rats,” General Shou explained.

He went farther, toward a stall surrounded by customers pressing their demands for service. He waved a hand with two fingers raised at the fat old woman behind the counter, on which a variety of fillings sat beside a stack of flatbreads. The woman smiled her recognition, and had their order ready by the time they had cut through the crowd to reach her.

“Little Shou!” she hailed him. “I do not see you for a full summer, and you appear at my stall hungry as ever and with an outlander at your heels! What have you been up to this time?”

“I've traveled the wide world ‘round looking for the equal to your flatbread, Darit, and found only a friend to share your treasure with.”

“I can believe it,” she answered him with a laugh, handing Llesho a flatbread covered with a combination of hot and cold fillings that made his mouth water. “He's nothing but a stick—buy him two, before he fades away to a shadow.”

“That wouldn't do at all,” Shou agreed, pressing a few copper coins into her hand. He bit into his own flatbread and motioned for Llesho to take the extra that she had wrapped in paper for him.

She wished them enjoyment of the market and added, “Take him to see the performers over by the Temple to The Seven. The puppets have a play that reenacts the ascension of the new emperor, and a woman with a performing bear has drawn favorable audiences enough to annoy the cloth merchants.”

“Why don't the cloth merchants like the bear dancer?” Llesho asked her around a mouthful of flatbread and meat.

“Her audiences block their entrances, so their business suffers when her bear dances. He is a very droll bear, however.”

Llesho wasn't in the mood for watching bears dancing. He'd lost Mara to the dragon and Lleck first to death and later to the rapid current of Golden Dragon River, and the memory of his lost friends still hurt. That was all before he'd met General Shou, of course. The general couldn't know about Llesho's harrowing escape at the river, or his anguish at watching the healer give her life for his safety. So Shou headed straight for the knot of laughing people at the steps of a low, shabby temple.

Pushing his way through the crowd which had already begun to disperse, Llesho followed. When they reached the steps of the temple where the performers worked, the bear dancer had already gone. Shou stopped to chat companionably with a temple priest in threadbare garments who gathered up the offerings of the day from the worn wooden steps. No thick packets of cash changed hands here, but a flower, a bowl of rice, and one of vegetables fresh from a supplicant's garden. The priest interrupted his conversation to give thanks for each as he gathered it into his basket.

Llesho gave the area a quick scan—the bear dancer could not have disappeared so quickly—and caught a glimpse of her turning a corner between two vast warehouses almost before he recognized her.

“Mara!” He followed and discovered a short alley leading away from the market square. The alley had collected a few people on their way home, but Llesho saw nothing of the woman or the bear, who must be Lleck if he had seen the bear dancer aright.

“Llesho!” General Shou caught up with him and grabbed his arm, and he couldn't be a good enough spy to fake the near panic in his eyes. “By ChiChu, boy, don't disappear like that.”

“I am not the trickster here,” Llesho answered tartly, but he knew he owed the man a sensible answer. Unfortunately, he didn't have one to give. “I know her. The bear dancer. I saw her die.”

He didn't add,
And if it is she, her bear used to be my teacher.
He had already given the man more wonder tales to believe than one afternoon could support, and didn't want to add any more fuel to that fire.

Shou peered down the alley as if he could see those few short minutes into the past and discover where the woman and her bear had gone, but his answer addressed the present. “Either you know her and she didn't die after all, or your friend is truly dead, and memory plays tricks on you.”

“I saw her die at Golden Dragon River,” Llesho repeated, “and I saw her slip into this alley just now.”

“If your dead are walking the streets of Shan,” the general said with a colder, harder tone than Llesho had heard him use before, “we had better find out why.”

“How?” Llesho asked him.

The general's expression had closed around his thought. “Your companions from the road should have reached the palace by now,” he said. “Perhaps they can shed some light on the question.”

Llesho didn't know how his friends could help him. They hadn't seen the Dragon swallow Mara whole, and hadn't seen her in the marketplace either, but they had known Mara, and Lleck, too. They could at least confirm he was not mad when he told Shou about the reincarnation of his teacher into the form of a bear. Habiba had seen the dragon eat Mara in payment for their passage across the river, however, and he had seemed sure that Llesho would see the healer again.

“We need Habiba.”

General Shou winced.

“I thought he was your friend.” Habiba had introduced him to the general, and Llesho left the question hanging:
What lie is about to catch up with you now?

“We are allies.” Shou scrunched up his face in a very unmilitary show of mixed feelings. “Habiba often does not agree with my methods.”

Llesho set aside that objection with a tart reply. “That makes two of us.”

The general laughed. “Don't tell Habiba that when you see him.” He led Llesho through the alley rather than back the way they had come, winding around the marketplace rather than through it. They met fewer passersby away from the square, though once a sharp-eyed Harn shoved by them with a sneer for Shou in his disguise as a merchant. The general gave no indication he had noticed the slight, but he uttered a single, sharp word when Llesho's hand wandered to his throat. Killing a single Harn trader wouldn't gain the prince anything but a moment's satisfaction, but it could cost him everything.

A wide boulevard emptied into the market square above the slave block. Crossing, Llesho did not let his gaze linger on the source of his nightmares, except as a reminder of his purpose here. He had a general at his side and tomorrow he would find his most beloved brother, Prince Adar. All he had to do was stand by and let it happen when General Shou bought Adar as a slave. He hoped he wasn't making the biggest mistake of his life. Habiba, and even Mara, could wait.

Chapter Thirty-three

SHOU'S winding path returned them to a secluded spot where a cluster of low bushes obscured the bottom half of the palace wall. Pulling away some branches, the general revealed a wayside shrine, carved in relief into the pink stone wall.

“Turn around,” the general instructed Llesho absently, while he studied the carvings intently. “I haven't used this passageway for years; it may take a few minutes to remember the sequence.”

Llesho did as he was told, but after a moment Shou gave a thoughtful grunt. With the grinding of stone shifting upon stone, the shrine swung inward to reveal a dark tunnel. The palace walls seemed so riddled with the things that Llesho wondered why they hadn't fallen in on themselves already, but he followed General Shou inside, took up a torch when it was handed to him, and helped to push the massive door back into place. When they were in pitch darkness, Llesho heard the snap of a match firing, saw the tiny flame, and watched it take hold on the fuel-soaked end of Shou's torch. The general waited until his torch burned steadily, then fired the one Llesho carried.

They walked some hundred paces down the straight passage, until they came to a dead end at a blank wall. Shou found a latch in what seemed to Llesho to be a flaw in the pointing of the rough stone, and another hidden door swung open.

“I used to sneak out of the palace by this route when I was about your age.” Shou laughed softly as he led the way up a narrow stairway of age-worn stone. “Good to see it hasn't been discovered since then.”

“You lived in the palace?” Llesho asked sharply. Of course, only a high-ranking nobleman could aspire to become a general of the Imperial Guard, but the idea suddenly made him nervous. Shou was also a spy, and when the general had come upon him in the park, Llesho had been too free with his opinions about the emperor. And he'd shown the man Lleck's pearl. Being a spy didn't make him a thief, but he'd clearly known more about the nacreous gem than he was telling.

However, General Shou was nodding. “I was raised here. Had anyone asked what title I wanted attached to my life, I would have told them explorer. Of course, that was not an option even then.”

Llesho thought that the general had too much excitement in his life as it was. “All I ever wanted was Thebin,” he answered. Not quite a reprimand, or a complaint about the unfairness of the world, it nevertheless made him uncomfortable to have said it out loud.

Fortunately, General Shou did not take the comment as a slight. “Then we will have to win Thebin back for you, won't we?” he promised, and led the prince down another turning.

They came out of the tunnel into a chamber shrouded in richly decorated banners hanging from ceiling to floor. Low couches had been pushed to the edges of the room, and a meeting table and chairs sat in the center. Lling lay in a restless sleep on one of the couches, her color flushed and sweat beading her temples. Hmishi sat next to her, occasionally stroking the hair from her forehead. They both still wore their Thebin uniforms, now stained with the dust and grime of the road—only the bandage on Lling's arm was clean and fresh. In the chairs, an equally travel-worn Bixei and Kaydu had draped themselves in poses of exhaustion and disappointment. Little Brother, Kaydu's monkey companion, sat in the middle of the table, peeling a banana, while Habiba paced nervously back and forth by the door.