The Devil Incarnate (The Devil of Ponong series #2) (11 page)

Honest people like RhiLan rarely bought black market rice or
anything that QuiTai’s network sold. They simply sighed and paid the higher
prices from legitimate merchants because they didn’t like doing business with
the Devil. But the Thampurians had a different view. If there was one thing a
Thampurian loved, it was a bargain. Prying money from their tight fists was
going to be delicious.

RhiHanya folded her
arms and scowled disapproval down at QuiTai. “I may not know you well, little
sister, but I know mischief is brewing when someone smiles like that. What are
you thinking?”

QuiTai put on her
best stage expression of innocence. “I –”

“Uh huh.”

During her stint as a magician’s assistant back on the
continent, QuiTai had learned the importance of misdirection. She had to make RhiHanya
and her cousin focus on anything but rice by doing something unexpected and
shocking. In her experience, nothing distracted her fellow Ponongese like a
display of appalling manners.

She sat up prim as a schoolteacher and said, “In the
meantime, we have a situation. No good guest would ever imply that her hostesses’
hospitality is lacking, but she wouldn’t allow her hostesses’ children to go to
bed hungry either. So what do I do? Do I let RhiLan spend her entire afternoon
in search of rice and allow her to be insulted by Thampurian merchants? Or do I
send word to LiHoun and tell him to bring us some?” With eyebrows raised,
QuiTai looked from RhiHanya to RhiLan. They stared at her as if she’d lost her
mind. She was quite pleased with herself.

RhiLan’s face went bright red. “I couldn’t –”

“Yes, you could. And you will,” RhiHanya said.

Oh, how I adore practical women, RhiHanya. If you only knew.

“It’s just rice, after all, cousin. It’s not as if she’s
offering pork.”

RhiLan seemed close
to tears. She tugged her hair as she paced the small apartment. “If only the
regular soldiers had been at the marketplace. They may be rude, but they see me
every day. They know I belong there. They know I don’t make trouble. They might
have let me in.”

Different soldiers?

RhiLan shrank back
from QuiTai’s intense gaze.

“Tell me about these different soldiers, auntie. Tell me everything.”

~ ~ ~

During their somber dinner, QuiTai
stifled her screams of boredom and smiled politely, but she wasn’t sure she
could hold them in much longer. The one thing they would not talk about in
front of the children were the events in the marketplace, and the unspoken
subject weighed heavily on the conversation though, leaving the adults in a
mood to only pick at their food. RhiLan’s man hadn’t been allowed to pass
through the town square to the harbor path, so there was no fish. Unless the
other Ponongese families in Levapur could find goat or pork tomorrow, tonight
might be their last meal with meat.

A meal without meat or
rice is indistinguishable from an empty bowl.

The effort to join the meaningless chatter exhausted QuiTai.
Every smile felt brittle as cheap jellylantern glass. Each inane bit of small
talk made her teeth grind. All she could do was cast glances at LiHoun and hope
he understood that she wanted to talk to him alone. She couldn’t ask her hosts
to leave their apartment while she chatted with LiHoun, and she couldn’t talk
the Devil’s business in front of them, so she forced herself to sit still,
listen, and make appropriate noises of concern and sympathy while frustration
burned through her gut.

Finally, RhiLan rose and dragged the bathing tub from the
corner. The middle son carried buckets of collected rain water from the veranda
and put them on the cooking fire to boil while his sister dragged a privacy
screen in front of the tub. RhiLan’s man took some of their rice to see if he
could barter with the neighbors for eggs and oil. RhiHanya stayed where she was,
though. Perhaps she expected LiHoun and QuiTai would discuss freeing the slaves
left behind on Cay Rhi, and she fully expected to be part of the conversation.

“The rain has stopped. Perhaps auntie QuiTai would like to
exercise her legs with a short walk on the veranda?” LiHoun asked.

Bless you, uncle.

“She can’t be seen,” RhiHanya reminded him.

Stop hovering over me,
woman! I don’t need protection.

“I’ll stay close to the wall. There’s little moonlight
tonight, and no jellylanterns out there. No one will see my face.” QuiTai came
to her feet.

RhiHanya immediately rose and supported QuiTai by the elbow.

“You’ve been stuck watching me all day, auntie RhiHanya. Let
LiHoun give you a moment’s rest.”

RhiHanya gave LiHoun a long look. She didn’t want to let go,
but LiHoun was older than she, and thus worthy of respect, so she backed away
and let him take QuiTai’s arm.

~ ~ ~

 
As the horizon rose to meet the sun, a
blessedly cool ocean breeze blew inland. Levapur seemed to have relaxed into the
evening, but QuiTai wondered if behind the shutters, Ponongese were as fearful
as she was of the coming days. Uncertainty was a hard pillow.

“Banning us from the marketplace was bad enough, but no
fishing? How dare they? This is our island. We belong here. They don’t,” QuiTai
whispered. If words had venom, each of hers would have struck a Thampurian
dead. “And don’t even get me started on how they kept the workers from
repairing the funicular. Don’t they understand that everything they import has
to be carried up from the harbor until the funicular cable is replaced?”

It felt good to let out some of her anger, although she
still had plenty left. She closed her eyes, drew in a deep breath, and then
flashed a meaningless smile at LiHoun that disappeared as quickly as it had
appeared. “Forgive me for slaughtering your language, uncle. It has been a long
time since I’ve spoken in the words of the Li.”

QuiTai and LiHoun squatted on RhiLan’s veranda as they
shared a kur. Her gaze flitted to Kyam’s dark apartment.

“Another apartment shares this veranda,” LiHoun said.

“Kyam Zul lived there. He’s probably on a ship bound for
Thampur.”

“I saw him at the Red Happiness this afternoon.”

The news caught her by surprise. Curiosity overrode her fury
at the Thampurians. She checked her hair to make sure her braid was smooth
before she slipped over to the typhoon shutters and peered in through the
shutters. The apartment was dark and stillness seemed to have settled over it
like dust on furniture in an abandoned house. She pressed a hand to the frame
of a shutter and turned the handle. It wasn’t locked.

“Allow me, grandmother.” LiHoun slipped past her into the
room. He returned quickly. “Paintings are tied with twine and a trunk sits in
the center of the floor. The wardrobe is empty. It seems he plans to leave
soon.”

“Maybe he’s waiting
for the Golden Barracuda to sail.”

“It left the harbor
two days ago. There are more ships in the harbor, but only one flying the Zul
family chop. It’s an ugly old junk with faded sails.”

QuiTai closed the
shutter. The Oracle had said Kyam would be the governor of Ponong. She was
never wrong, but the timing of her visions was always a mystery. Still, it was
disquieting that Kyam hadn’t left yet. Even more worrisome were her mixed
feelings about that.

“Is your leg giving
you pain?” LiHoun asked.

She realized she’d winced, but not because of her ankle. “A
little, but I need to move. Lying on that divan all day is making me weak.” She
rested her hand on his shoulder. “I have asked far more of you in the past
weeks than before. If it’s a burden, be honest with me. You know that I will
not take offense. But also know that you’ve been a great help, favored uncle,
and I would be hard pressed to find a more worthy right hand.”

LiHoun pressed his hands together and bowed. “You honor me
with your trust, grandmother. And you’ve always been generous.”

That put one of her many worries to rest. With LiHoun at her
side, life would be much easier. There was so much she had to attend to. She
simply didn’t have time to train a new agent; not to mention that she’d have to
reveal that she was the Devil to someone who hadn’t proven themselves yet.
 
Eventually, the news would come out,
but for now it was safer to keep the myth of the Devil alive.

They reached the end of the veranda. She could barely smell
food, even though they were in an overcrowded neighborhood. Many families had
gone hungry tonight. That senseless cruelty sparked her anger.

Not willing to show how irritated she was, she said, “Smells
like rain.”

LiHoun sniffed the air. “And lightning.”

“A storm is coming.”

He watched her from
the corner of his eye. “It may be an ill wind.”

“That’s the foul
stench of Thampurian law burning inside your sensitive nose.”

LiHoun laughed.

She could tell that
he wanted to squat as they normally did and talk, but she tested her ankle with
mincing steps and decided not to strain it further.

“Does your goddess tell you anything?” LiHoun asked.

His question surprised her. This was the second time he’d
mentioned the Oracle, though she’d never discussed her goddess with him. Maybe
he’d heard the other whores at PhaJut’s shyly ask her about the Oracle on those
late, lazy nights when they’d had no customers and all other talk had been
exhausted. Back then, she’d only known one way to evoke the goddess, and the
conduit always died. The Thampurians would have executed her for that, so she’d
never seriously considered summoning her goddess. Besides, she knew the other
workers and their troubles well enough to guess their futures. They didn’t like
to take her word for it, though. The Oracle was never wrong, but QuiTai was
just another whore with an opinion.

“Lately, the Oracle seems obsessed with the dull lives of
dull people.”

But maybe if she
stopped asking the Oracle for an answer... Hadn’t her mother and grandmother
always warned her that the goddess didn’t work like that? Or maybe the Oracle
didn’t like her selfish inquires. Maybe she would bring a vision for something
that affected her people.

Oh! QuiTai shut her eyes for a moment. Maybe that’s what the
Oracle had been trying to tell her – that she should focus on the
ordinary people and not on herself.

Maybe.

“The Oracle’s visions
can drive people mad,”
her grandmother always said.

Yes, they can.

She touched the veranda railing closest to the Rhi
apartment. Silhouetted by the light of the single green jellylantern in the
apartment, she noticed RhiHanya hovering near the shutters. Unless she spoke
Li, though, she wasn’t going to overhear anything she could understand. Still,
QuiTai leaned close to LiHoun’s ear. “Tell me about the black lotus sales.”

“Only the werewolves knew all their clients, but your
lieutenants visited every den, brothel, and gaming hall in town, so the major
customers now have a supply. As I told you last night, they barely noticed the
price difference. We told the ones who complained that they didn’t have to buy,
of course. They were so afraid we’d refuse to sell them any that they quickly
shut their mouths. Best of all, your lieutenants are singing your praises for
enriching their purses.”

“I do so love the sound of profits rolling like ocean waves.
Constant and reliable.”

“Rice, and meat.”

A wry smile tugged at the corners of QuiTai’s mouth. “Speaking
of rice...”

When she’d first
thought of her plan, she’d seen it as a contingency. For some foolish reason,
she’d hoped and believed that the colonial government would come to its senses.
Instead, matters only grew worse. Who knew what new insults would come with the
next day? Now she felt she had no choice but to shove back.

“How much rice should
I bring tomorrow?” LiHoun asked.

“Not too much. I don’t want to insult my hostess any more
than I already have. A quarter measure, I think. But that’s not what I wanted
to talk to you about. Uncle, this matter with the fishing fleet disturbs me. I
know the governor is a bit stupid sometimes, but I can’t fathom his reason for
starving everyone. Or why, after years of ignoring crime in Levapur, he
suddenly uses soldiers for enforcement.”

“Maybe he has more to command. RhiLan said the soldiers who
turned her back were strangers.”

“If we can believe that her observations are correct.” QuiTai
raised her hand to stop LiHoun from interrupting. “I’m not saying that she’s
mistaken, but does she know all the soldiers on sight? I don’t.”

“I will have your network observe and report,” LiHoun said.

“Get me an estimate
of their numbers.” She tugged on her bottom lip. “I suppose it’s possible that
the Thampurians sent extra troops to safeguard the plantation on Cay Rhi, but…”

LiHoun waited
silently for her to work through her reservations.

“If that’s true, then why are they disturbing the peace in
the town square instead of guarding Cay Rhi? And how did they get here so fast?
The
Golden Barracuda
is the fastest
ship in the Zul fleet, but even it can’t possibly sail round trip in three
days.”

Or could it? That engine she’d heard below decks had moved
them at speeds she’d never imagined. In open water, it might run even faster.
But between Ponong and Thampur, thousands of small islands formed a dangerous
archipelago. Only a fool would try to thread through them at high speed, even
if he knew the safe shipping lanes.

No. It seemed more probable that the troops had set sail
before she’d led Kyam to the Ravidians, which meant the two weren’t connected.
The only other possibility that came to mind immediately was that Governor
Turyat had asked for more troops before he knew about the Ravidians, so he’d been
planning to cut off the Ponongese from the marketplace for some time now. But
why? There had been no extraordinary tensions between the Ponongese and
Thampurians in the past few months. Admittedly, she’d sensed something odd in
the mood of the town, but Governor Turyat would be the last person to notice
such things. The sudden change mystified her. Could Governor Turyat simply have
brought the additional soldiers to Levapur to show his power?