The Prince of Shadow (62 page)

“General Shou?” Llesho muttered.

Kaydu had followed him out of the temple, and she'd come to her own conclusions: “He looks like General Shou. They could be brothers.” She gave Llesho a measuring frown. “They look more like brothers than you and Adar, at any rate.”

“He said once that he was a member of the nobility,” Llesho offered her the weak explanation, but inside, he knew. General Shou
was
the Emperor of Shan and for some reason, he had kept that knowledge from Llesho and his party while he roamed the city with them. He'd even fought in Habiba's war under a false identity. Llesho wanted an explanation. First, however, he wanted his pearl back, and the few other possessions that were supposed to be waiting for him in the palace.

 

 

He did not immediately get his wish. After the emperor's procession had passed, his own party made their way to the palace and, for a change, presented themselves at the Ministry of Government for entrance. The clerk who guarded the gate assured them that they were expected within. Unfortunately, he determined that, as they represented no recognized government, neither Llesho nor his brothers carried any standing sufficient to gain entrance to the palace. Master Den, as a former general and adviser to the emperor's army had had the necessary rank at one time, but unless he carried a present rank in that army, he could not be admitted either.

As the daughter of the representative of Thousand Lakes Province and Farshore Province, Kaydu, however, had the necessary position for admittance. With a sweep of her hand, Kaydu declared the rest of their party, princes and general and soldiers alike, her personal servants. They had no sooner entered the palace as a group than they were separated again, Llesho's guard to a wide hallway with gilt panels, and Llesho down a darker, more forbidding passage, into a room that the prince knew from his first explorations of the palace. He had thought the room a private one for the questioning of Shou's spies. It had a few chairs and a small table, but nothing more to see or hold the attention. Shokar trembled with fine tremors of terror but refused to be separated from his brother.

Llesho knew the way to his room in the palace from here. He tried the panel to the outer hall, but the two guards that waited there with swords drawn would not let him pass this time. The recent battle had left them all, on both sides of the door, too ready to fight. Llesho shook his head and withdrew.

He didn't have to wait long, however. A panel opened in the opposite wall, and Shou walked through, wearing comfortable robes that suited neither the general nor the emperor, but ably fit the man. Shokar bowed deeply to the emperor, but Llesho didn't move. “Why didn't you tell me?”

“I thought Lleck taught you better than that,” the emperor chided him. He sat in one of the stiff wooden armchairs, threw one booted leg over the arm, and tossed a peach into the air, absently catching it with no thought to regal dignity, but exuding a lethal menace without even trying.

In spite of his apparent informality, this face of the man scared Llesho more than any of the others he had seen, because he had a sick feeling that this was the real thing. He blushed, feeling foolish for having asked the question. He knew the answer, really. “I suppose you wanted to see for yourself if I was who Habiba said I was, or if it was some sort of plot. But you could not trust to official appearances.”

“Part of it, yes.” The emperor waited.

“You wanted to know if I was worth taking a stand for.”

“Not that.” The emperor was laughing softly, but with no humor. “Shan could not afford to acknowledge your claim under any circumstances, however true and worthy that claim might be.”

“It didn't matter, then? That my claims for Thebin are true.” The reminder of that truth was carved over Llesho's heart, and he laid a protective hand over the bandages that covered his chest.

“Oh, yes, it did matter.” Shou wasn't laughing now. His face was hard and his eyes looked past Llesho, into some time or place that was closed to his questioner. “We have won a small skirmish, but the war remains to be fought. And while the Harn press at our borders, we cannot give the Prince of Thebin what he wants.”

“And what is that?”

“Thebin, of course.” Shou—it was hard not to think of him that way—let go of an exasperated sigh and swung his leg off the chair. “But privately, as a man who speaks to a man, and not as an emperor who speaks to a deposed prince, we can acknowledge mutual interest in the downfall of our shared enemy.”

“How does that help either of us?”

“It has already helped Shan.” General Shou—the emperor—stood with a predatory grin that showed all his teeth and led them to the panel that had been denied them earlier. “Master Markko has failed in his attempt to throw down the empire. The Harn have failed to garner the spoils of their puppet's campaign, and must return to their plotting. Thebin isn't the problem of Shan's emperor.”

“Then how am I to go home?”

“The way you had planned to do it originally, but with a bit more help than I should be giving you,” Shou admitted. He frowned at Llesho and sighed. When he slid the panel open, the guard entered with sword drawn. Llesho swallowed around the dry lump in his throat, but the emperor dismissed the man with a careless wave.

“I had planned to offer my services to the guard detail of a trade caravan leaving for the West,” Llesho explained as he followed the emperor down a hall that looked far too shabby and unused to be a part of the formal palace. It looked more like they were wandering through more of those hidden passageways that riddled the place like an abandoned beehive.

“And so you will.” Shou stopped in front of a sturdy looking door and pressed the release. “Actu ally, the Harn raiders fell right into our hands with their little raid. The traders who organize the caravans have already approached the palace for protection along the route.”

Inside the room behind the door, three women waited at a table on which were spread all of Llesho's missing belongings: his knife and sword and his bow and arrows, the jadeite cup and the short spear from her ladyship, and inside the cup, Lleck's black pearl. Llesho first took inventory of his possessions, not because he cared about their material value, but because he knew they were somehow vital to his quest. But he did not touch them, looking instead to the women who waited for his acknowledgment.

“Your ladyship.” He bowed to the woman who had tested him on Pearl Island, and who had taught him archery. She wore clothes of white and green and blue, diaphanous layers that blended into the murky water colors of the Imperial Water Garden.

“SienMa.” She received his bow with a tilt of her head, and set another pearl, the match to the one he had received from Lleck's ghost in Pearl Bay, into the cup.

SienMa. One of the Seven Mortal Gods, the goddess of war. Llesho shivered.

“Kwan-ti.” Trembling, he bowed again, this time to the middle woman, dressed in silver, and with sparks of liquid silver in her hair. Kwan-ti had already shown herself as a dragon queen; but was she a goddess as well?

“Pearl Bay Dragon,” she revealed her true name with a nod, and a rueful smile. “You already have my gift, I am afraid. Your wily ghost stole it while my attention was elsewhere.”

Lleck's pearl. Llesho blushed. The third woman, dressed in gold, he had lately seen walking from the mouth of the Golden River Dragon. Was no one who they seemed? “Mara.”

“And Mara I am,” she said, “a seeker. Aspiring to be the eighth.” She, too, set a black pearl, the match of the others, into the jadeite cup. “Since the coming of the Harn to Thebin, the gates of heaven are sealed to us. We cannot return to serve the goddess as is our duty, and the goddess can reach us only in dreams.”

SeinMa, her ladyship, stretched out a hand to the pearls. “This is all that we could rescue of the goddess' most treasured adornment, the necklace called “string of midnights.” The goddess weeps for her necklace day and day, for night has fled from heaven.”

“The seas weep,” Pearl Bay Dragon said. “The goddess does not come. Open the gates. Return the balance to heaven and earth.”

The gates of heaven, high above Kungol in the mountains of Thebin. “You have my oath,” Llesho vowed, and Mara smiled at him like a mother.

“And you have my daughter. Carina will travel with you.”

Llesho wondered if they could see the heat rising in his face, but he didn't say anything. The emperor rescued him with more mundane details.

“You and your companions will be fitted with uniforms as soon as you are ready to travel. Now get some sleep. The guards will take you back to your old room, and orders have been given to billet your companions nearby.”

Llesho still had one question, however, and the presence of Master Den in their party told him more than anything how vital it was that he have an answer before they traveled any farther. He did not have to ask it, however. Den found in his hand a slip of paper that Llesho recognized from his first meeting with General Shou in the Imperial Water Garden.

“An unusual request to make of a trickster god.” He handed the offering back to the emperor.

“The gates of heaven are closed to all of us, Master ChiChu,” he said, “and not just to us mortals.”

“You were always a clever boy,” the god of the laundry, he of tears and laughter, smiled benignly on the emperor. “I will do what I can to keep this one safe. But even a god cannot know the future.”

The emperor bowed to the trickster god and then to the ladies, who preceded him from the room.

“Well, Llesho, what do you think?” the trickster god asked him.

Llesho answered as he always had, as student to teacher, with a bow and a smile. “The journey is begun. We are going home.”

Shokar, at his back, said nothing.

“SO this is dying.”

Llesho strained against his bonds, tormented by the fire burning in his gut and the icy sweat dripping from his shivering body. In his brief moments of lucidity, he wondered how he could burn and tremble with cold at the same time and where he was and how he had come to be a prisoner again. In his delirium, Master Markko came to him as a winged beast with the claws of a lion and the tail of a snake, or sometimes as a great bird with talons sharp as swords tearing the entrails from his belly. Always Llesho heard the magician's voice echoing inside his head:

“Among the weak, yes; this is dying.”

No escape. He knew, vaguely, that he cried out in his sleep, just as he knew that help wouldn't come. . . .

“Are you waiting for someone?” Master Den rounded the rough wooden bench and sat next to Llesho, quiet until the confusion had cleared from his face. “Your eyes were open, but you didn't answer when I called.”

“I was dreaming,” Llesho answered, his voice still fogged with distant horror. “Remembering a dream, actually.”

A low waterfall chuckled in front of him, reminding him of where he was. The Imperial City of Shan had many gardens, but the Imperial Water Garden in honor of Thousand Lakes Province had become Llesho's special place, where he came to sort out his thoughts. Like him, the Water Garden had taken some damage in the recent fighting. A delicate wooden bridge had burned to ash, and Harnish raiders had trampled a section of marsh grasses beside a stream that had flowed red with the blood of the fallen for many days. At the heart of the Imperial Water Garden, however, the waterfall still poured its clean bounty into a stone basin that fed the numerous streams winding among the river reeds. Water lilies still floated in the many protected pools and the lotus still rose out of the mud on defiant stalks. The little stone altar to ChiChu, the trickster god of laughter and tears, still lay hidden under a ledge beneath the chuckling water.

Like the garden, Llesho had survived and healed. He sat on the split log bench just beyond the reach of the fine spray the waterfall kicked up, contemplating the altar to the trickster god—a favored deity of an emperor fond of disguises and mentor to a young prince still learning how to be a king—as if it would give up the secrets of the heavens. In his hand he held a quarter tael of silver and a slip of paper, much wrinkled and dampened from the tight grip he held on it. With a sideways look at Master Den, who was the trickster god ChiChu in disguise, he placed the petition on the tiny altar with the coin inside it for an anchor. Then he sat back down on his bench and prepared to wait.

Master Den said nothing, nor did he reach for the offering on his altar. If it came to a contest, the trickster god had eternity to outsit him. Llesho gave a little sigh and surrendered.