The Devil Incarnate (The Devil of Ponong series #2) (21 page)

With a rush of impatience and disgust, Chief Justice Cuulon
grabbed both pipes before the governor could. “This is serious. Zul is making
his move. Mark my words, those soldiers are under his control. He brought them
here on that miserable junk the
Winged
Dragon
, and rumor has it that he was on board.”

Which Zul? Hadre? She couldn’t believe it. Besides, why
would it be worth mentioning that Hadre had been on board a Zul ship?

The governor’s gaze never strayed from the pipes.

“He’s going to use the slaves on Cay Rhi to discredit us
back in Surrayya. He swore he’d get his revenge on us when we forced him out
years ago. I warned you not to let the soldiers keep the Rhi as slaves. Our
secret died with the Ravidians on that island, and we would have been safe if
only you’d listened to me.”

QuiTai sat back, her hand over her mouth. She looked at the
ceiling as she gathered her thoughts.

I don’t have time to
mull over this. Sort through the facts later. Collect them now, while you can.

She lifted her heavy skirts and moved over to Governor
Turyat. It was going to make her nauseous, but she had little time left and she
wanted to see his memories too.

QuiTai glared at
Governor Turyat’s prone body. His head lolled against a red pillow, exposing
the loose, wrinkled excess skin on his neck to her. As before, she shielded her
mouth as she milked a drop of venom into his mouth.

How have you manipulated your memories to
make it possible to live with what you’ve allowed to happen, Governor?

His mind was a mess. His connections were weak, and there
were far fewer of them than in the chief justice’s memories. How did he
retrieve anything? How did he rule? If strong memories were the ones people
attached the most importance to, then he thought only black lotus and sex
workers were important. However, it was clear that he feared the new soldiers
as much as the chief justice did, and he had no control over them.

“Please let the Ponongese back into the marketplace,” he
whined to the soldiers’ leader when they visited his office in the government
building. “You’re going to anger the Devil’s Concubine. You have no idea how
dangerous she is, or her power over the snakes.”

The soldier smiled.

Sweat trickled down QuiTai’s face. While she’d expected the
disorienting whirl from being connected to two conduits at the same time, she’d
forgotten how bad it could get as memories overlapped. Her brain simply
couldn’t handle more than one vision at a time.

Her heavy Thampurian
clothes clung to her back, and she felt as if she had another fever. Any moment
now, she was going to throw up. But at the same time, she was sinking down into
vapor dream. Unnerving blank moments disrupted her train of thought.

“Will you two shut up,” she said as she shoved her fingers
into her ears. It made no difference. Their connection was inside her head, not
buzzing around it like a mosquito. She kicked the train of her heavy skirt
behind her and paced the room to escape the tendrils of vapor chasing her.

“If they find out we took money from the Ravidians, they’ll
hang us.”

QuiTai spun around. Which one of them had that memory come
from? She’d long suspected that they’d been as corrupt as the Harbor Master,
but these two had helped the Ravidians? She’d kill them both.

“You have no idea what you’ve brought down on your heads,”
she told the insensate men. Despite her promise to Lizzriat, she advanced on
the governor. Unlike Petrof, he was going to die quickly.

Their memories still flowed to her. She no longer tried to
sort out which man’s mind they came from as she bent over the governor.

There were footsteps in the hallway. The door began to slide
open. QuiTai pressed her fangs against her roof of her mouth with her tongue
and forced her temper to cool. It was just as well she’d been interrupted.
Until she learned what they knew about Petrof, she had to let the governor and
chief justice live. That was fine. She could wait. Patience was a Ponongese
virtue.

Lizzriat rushed into the den and shut the door behind her.
“Your time is up.”

~ ~ ~

QuiTai needed to get out of the claustrophobic den. The
smothering heat and dense fabrics threatened to suck all the air out of the
room. If she never touched velvet again, she’d die happy. Besides, she didn’t
need to be near the conduits to tap into their memories.

“A moment. I must put my lenses back on.”

Lizzriat shuddered when QuiTai lowered her inner eyelids. If
she blanched when the glass disks were put in place, QuiTai couldn’t see it.

QuiTai groped for
Lizzriat’s arm. With an apologetic smile, she said, “Lead on.” But if Lizzriat
thought she was helpless, she was wrong. All QuiTai had to do was raise her
inner eyelids. Her lenses would pop off and be lost forever, but she’d have her
full sight.

They returned to the
office. “I have a secret exit. I’ll take you down it,” Lizzriat said. “But
first...” She pulled a black scarf from her desk drawer. “I’m sure you
understand.”

QuiTai let Lizzriat
drape the scarf across her eyes. It was better that she not admit how blind she
was.

Warm fingertips
traced down her neck behind her ear.

“Under different
circumstances, this could have been fun,
krith
amaci,
” Lizzriat whispered.

Before QuiTai could reply, she felt Lizzriat leave her side.
She strained to hear Lizzriat’s movements. Although she didn’t sense danger,
her pulse raced. Her neck still tingled from Lizzriat’s touch.

“Out of habit, I’ve been using a female pronoun for you.
What do you prefer?” QuiTai’s voice sounded unnaturally loud to herself, and
her attempt at normal conversation strained.

“I thought you were beyond such matters.”

“In bed, yes, but Thampurian only allows two genders and I
prefer to use the one you like.”

“I prefer Ingosolian; it’s so much more civilized. But here,
in Thampurian territory, use
he
.”
There was a quiet click before muffled footsteps crossed the thick carpet back
to QuiTai’s side. “I’d hate for the Thampurians to decide I was female and take
my Dragon Pearl from me.”

“I will not make the mistake of thinking of you as female
again.”

Rather than take
QuiTai’s elbow, Lizzriat wrapped an arm around her waist and led her across the
room.

We’re going around the desk.

She extended her arm and brushed the space before her with
her fingertips. Lizzriat forced her hand down. They shuffled forward.

“First step,” Lizzriat said.

QuiTai carefully moved one foot forward. After a brief,
disorienting moment, her foot landed on a solid step.

“When my people perfect them, I’ll send you some instant
jellylanterns. I think you’ll find them useful,” QuiTai said. She wasn’t sure
why she needed the comfort of small talk when she was helpless. Normally, such
conversation bored her.

“Instant jellylanterns?”

“Glass tubes about
the size of a kuriwei fish. They don’t give off light until you break the seal
between the liquid half and the powder. Shake them up, and suddenly you have a
jellylantern.” QuiTai bumped against a wall. She placed her palm against it as
she climbed down the steps.

“Clever,” Lizzriat said.

“A Ravidian invention.”

Lizzriat sucked in a breath. “Ravidian? I’d rather be in
eternal darkness.”

“I’m not buying the jellylanterns from them; I stole the
idea.”

“Isn’t it illegal for – Hah! I forgot for a moment who
I was speaking too. I’ll take a dozen.”

“As soon as I figure out how to manufacture the glass tubes,
I’ll send them to you.”

Lizzriat stopped QuiTai and removed the blindfold. “We’re
here. Let me check the alleyway.”

QuiTai tried to see but the darkness was too complete. “I
appreciate your help.”

“Did you get your information?”

Something in
Lizzriat’s voice warned QuiTai that she – no, he – had spied on the
room. QuiTai tried to remember anything she’d said out loud. What did she owe
this Ingosolian? Nothing, maybe. But she didn’t feel right telling a lie to
someone who could have called for the soldiers.

“Not as much as I
would have liked.”

“Too bad.”
Lizzriat’s arm drew from her waist. “The alleyway is clear now. You’re on your
own from now on.”

QuiTai nodded. She
felt the quick press of lips to her cheek before a firm hand pushed her through
the hidden doorway and into the rainy alley. From the smell, she assumed she
was near an outhouse.

After
nearly a week
in RhiLan’s tiny apartment, QuiTai craved quiet. Nowhere in
Levapur was as tranquil and hushed as the neighborhood where apartment
buildings gave way to walled family compounds.

Her grandmother had
often mentioned that the rare swath of flat land had been fields for crops
before the Thampurians seized it. Once upon a time, the terraces her people had
carved into the sides of the mountains had been rice paddies. Once upon a time,
the Ponongese had been able to feed themselves. Now they were forbidden to grow
anything. They could harvest food that grew in the wild, such as fruit, jikal
roots, fish, and wild boars, but everything else had to be imported.

The Thampurians were about to learn their laws could cut
both ways.

No one was on the wide lane that meandered through the
Thampurian Quarter. It was rumored that their Ponongese servants had fled the
compounds when the soldiers attacked the market in Old Levapur, but QuiTai
hadn’t heard yet if that was true. She hoped the Thampurian ladies were
stooping over their own cooking fires. Thampurian men had it much easier since
they viewed their women as servants anyway. The men probably didn’t care who
made their dinner as long as it appeared on the table before them.

Since no one was likely to see her in this still, quiet
place, she paused to remove the lenses from her eyes. With her inner eyelids
raised, the details came back into focus: limbs of the trees on the side of the
road stretched overhead and tangled together; rain dripped from the pointed
tips of leaves. She hopped the puddles between islands of gravel on the road to
avoid the slimy mud.

As she traveled
deeper into the neighborhood, the compound gates were further apart and the
walls were higher. Inside the smaller compounds, the houses were close enough
to the lane that she could see the second story windows, but by the time she
heard the ocean waves crashing against the nearby cliffs, she could only see
the roofs of the buildings behind the walls.

Near the end of the lane, she stopped at a high carved
wooden gate. A brass bell hung from a gracefully arching bracket beside the
gate. She didn’t ring it. No one had invited her, and she knew no one would be
inside. The gate swung open for her. She was surprised, but grateful, that it
wasn’t locked.

The gate opened into a formal first courtyard almost as big
as RhiLan’s apartment. A blue tiled privacy wall bearing the Zul family chop
sat in the middle of the courtyard. A stone basin brimming with rain water sat
in the corner. If a servant had let her in, he would have offered her a dipper
of the water with which to ritually wash her hands in the Thampurian manner.
QuiTai, however, felt no need to cleanse herself of anything that might offend
lurking ancestral ghosts.

She didn’t give the ornate festoon gate a second glance as
she passed through it; she’d seen similar carvings on the red and gold columns
of the government building. Her heart broke a little more each time she saw
Ponongese boys playing on the steps of the government building as they waited
for a Thampurian to hire them to carry shopping or run errands. She always wanted
to force them to look at the snakes writhing under the cruel claws of the sea
dragons and remind them that they should be angry about the crude depictions of
the Ponongese people, but she knew that outrage was a difficult state to
maintain. It sapped your heart and soul but did nothing to hurt your enemies or
change the future. In the end, all it did was leave you exhausted and
frustrated. But she wished they wouldn’t act as if it didn’t matter that they
had to see themselves depicted that way everywhere they looked.

And how could she scold them for not caring, when so many
times on the stage she’d played the part of the comical servant – rolling
her eyes, dressing like a savage, speaking in broken language? She’d refused to
go along with it after a while and demanded dignity, but it had always been a
battle. It would be the worst hypocrisy to pretend she hadn’t taken such roles.

“It didn’t use to be this way,” she wanted to tell the
children. “Once upon a time, this island was ours alone. We were a free, sovereign
people.” But how could you convince children that such tales were true when you
had never seen it either? All she had were her grandmother’s stories; and the
next generation would never hear such tales directly from the witnesses.

The main courtyard was beyond the festoon gates. Built by
Grandfather Zul when he’d been the first colonial governor of Ponong, the
compound had once been a raw, uncouth statement of Thampurian power. Now it was
a ghost mansion where jungle vines pushed aside courtyard tiles and deep green
ferns sprouted from walls.

A large, stately two-story residential building with a
Thampurian roof and architectural details sat on one side of the inner
courtyard. Typhoon shutters on the second floor opened onto a veranda, the one
nod to Ponongese design. The kitchen was in a separate building at the back of
the compound. That’s where she and Kyam had slept when he’d brought her to the
compound to hide from Petrof. Perhaps she should have been insulted that he’d
kept her in the servants’ quarters rather than allowing her into the family
home, but she doubted he’d done it because she was Ponongese. He’d said that
there was no furniture to speak of left in the main house, so the servant’s
quarters would be more comfortable, and she’d believed him.