The Prince of Shadow (19 page)

“I intend to fight Madon in the arena for at least another year or two, if he survives,” Lord Yueh said with a twisted leer. He clearly expected Lord Chin-shi to kill the man who may have ruined his chances at financial recovery with the deathblow in the arena. “I had hoped to purchase the teacher, Master Jaks, to replace the trainer I lost to the fever.”

“You should have spoken sooner,” Lord Chin-shi bowed apologetically. “Another bidder made an offer, and the contract has already been signed.”

“Am I come at an inopportune time, honored sirs?” A stranger dressed in the sumptuous layers of a lord, but with a thin gold chain around his throat that marked him as the personal slave of some great house, joined the lords at their negotiations.”

“Not at all,” Lord Chin-shi gave the stranger a thin smile. “I was just explaining to Lord Yueh why Master Jaks is not available for his purchase.”

Lord Yueh bowed deeply to the newcomer, and his face when he straightened had grown very pale. “I understand completely, my lord.”

“Still and all,” the stranger said with a pointed glance in Madon's direction, “you seem to have done well enough for yourself today, Yueh.”

“Yes, my lord.” To Llesho's astonishment, Yueh bowed again, almost groveling at the feet of the wealthy house slave.

“Who is he?” Llesho whispered to Stipes, who answered, “With luck, you will never find out.”

If luck were involved, Llesho thought, he was in trouble. Lord Yueh, who had ignored him in his first hunt through the ranks, had returned to face Llesho. He was now looking at him with the hungry eyes of a wolf. “Throw the boy in and we will call all debts canceled,” he said. “Not worth the value of the debt, of course, but he appeals to me.”

The stranger cast a careless glance at Llesho in his corner. “I think he's mine as well,” he said, and with a last look around caught sight of Bixei with his wounds newly dressed on the table. “And I'll take this one on his excellency's authority. We can arrange the fee at your convenience.”

Bixei started to rise, but Master Den pushed him back down again. “The boys are much in need of further training before they will be of use to you,” Den said.

The stranger gave him a soft smile. “And they don't like each other much, do they?” he asked.

“Not really.”

“Time will change that.” The stranger bowed to Master Den, but gave only the slightest tilt of his head to the lords, who returned the gesture of respect.

Lord Yueh hesitated, as if he was hoping the other man would leave first, but the stranger waited patiently. Finally, Lord Yueh made another bow.

“Send my property along before nightfall,” he said of his purchases. With a last furtive glance at Llesho, he darted out from under the benches and made his way to his box, leaving his consort to follow as best she could.

Lord Chin-shi's competitions were over, his house crashed about his head, but other houses remained, offering higher stakes. Lord Yueh was well known for betting death matches.

When Yueh had gone, Madon leaned heavily on the table for a moment before pushing off and presenting himself to his lord. He fell to his knees, his eyes round as copper coins with the shock, and bowed his head, waiting for his fate.

“His man was drugged to induce madness, you know.” The stranger addressed Madon, who made no move to rise or answer the stranger.

“On balance,” the stranger continued, “his excellency decided that the lives of two men could not stand in the way of peace in the provinces.”

Lord Chin-shi set his hand on Madon's shoulder, but addressed the stranger: “The Blood Tide?” Llesho recognized that soft tone, saw the wheels within wheels in Lord Chin-shi's eyes and the ironic half-smile that accompanied the stranger's shrug.

“The source of that plague, like the source of fever in Yueh's compound, remains hidden to us.”

“It was none of my doing,” Lord Chin-shi assured him, and the stranger shook his head. “I thought not. Had it been so, of course, the peace would have been broken, and we would be at war, and not sharing entertainments together.” He spoke ironically, his eyes fixed on the back of Madon's head, but his false smile held a warning. The governor had weighed the life of an honorable gladiator and the fortunes of one lord against the threat of war in the province, and he had decided. He put out his hand, and into it Lord Chin-shi placed the strangling rope.

“Relax,” the stranger said, and tipped Madon's head back to rest upon his leg. Then with a movement Llesho could hardly follow, the cord was around Madon's throat, and the harsh “snap” of bone cracking cut the air like an ax. “I'm sorry,” the stranger said, and when he released the cord, Madon fell dead at his feet. “Have him delivered to Lord Yueh with my regards.”

He strode to the open doorway without looking at the body on the ground, but turned to Master Jaks almost as an afterthought.

“Bring the boys,” he said, and for a moment he was nothing but an absence in the light of the doorway. Then he was gone.

“Who
is
he?” Llesho whispered to Stipes in the frozen silence that followed, but it was Master Jaks who answered the question. “His name is Habiba. He is the governor's witch.”

Lord Chin-shi shivered in his heavy robes. In the corner, his consort wept silently, her arms around Radimus' neck. “We are ruined,” she moaned into the sweaty leather that covered his chest, “Ruined. And that Yueh is to blame.”

“Not Yueh,” Lord Chin-shi corrected her carefully, his attention fixed on the body at his feet. “But fate. What man can wage war against his fate?”

“A true man,” his wife taunted him. She let her arms slip from Radimus' neck, trailed questing fingers down his arm until she could catch his hand in hers, and led the gladiator deeper into the shadows.

Lord Chin-shi did not look away from Madon's body. “You'd better go,” he said, with a vague gesture at Master Jaks. The teacher bowed, though his lordship did not see him or anything beyond the inward vision of his eyes as he walked away, into the sunlight of the arena.

“Damn,” Stipes muttered. He helped Bixei to stand and supported him to the door, where Master Jaks commanded a leather sling and two servants to carry him. Llesho followed through a silence that had grown thick in the air, like a coming storm.

As he moved from under the benches and into the sun, he saw a splash of brightly colored silk crumpled in a scarlet pool that was quickly soaking into the dust. Lord Chin-shi lay dead, his own knife buried in his heart. Master Jaks did not stop, or even slow his small procession, but stepped past his former lord without looking down. Llesho swallowed hard, and tightened his hands into fists, but followed the lead of his teacher. Bixei gritted his teeth, but the tears leaked from his eyes anyway. Llesho didn't know if he cried for Stipes, gone from his life forever, or for his lord, now dead at his own hand, or for the fate that awaited them in the wake of the governor's witch.

Llesho almost felt guilty that he still had Master Jaks, his teacher, while Bixei had nothing. But Minister Lleck had taught him to plot his course and then take one step toward it at a time, focused on that one step completely until the next. He was a gladiator, more or less, and off Pearl Island—steps one and two on his path—but an empire's reach from Thebin. Before he could decide his next move, he had to figure out where this last one had taken him. With Lord Chin-shi dead, there was certainly no way back.

Chapter Eleven

THE stranger, Habiba, led them to a door in the thick wall that circled the arena. He handed Llesho a torch and, with a snap of his fingers, set the fuel-soaked end of it on fire. The bearers carrying Bixei followed, then Master Jaks, who closed the door before lighting his own torch at Llesho's flame. They were in a long tunnel that sloped gently until Llesho was sure they were no longer inside the wall, but were under the arena itself. The roar of the crowd was muted here, though the pounding of so many feet thundered over their heads and shook dirt into their hair. Llesho wondered if the roof of the tunnel would hold, but neither Habiba nor Jaks seemed concerned, so he turned his attention to figuring out where they were going. Away from the main entrance, that was clear. Since he hadn't seen anything beyond the arena at the outskirts of the city, he couldn't tell much other than that they were heading away from the direction in which they had come.

They passed other tunnels feeding into the one they followed. One, with a heavy door barring their entrance, Llesho thought must lead from the official boxes of the governor and mayor of Farshore province and city. Just as he had started to wonder if the whole trip would be taken underground, the floor of the tunnel began to rise again, until they faced a closed door and nowhere else to go. The door had no handle. Llesho pushed, but the door didn't budge.

“Locked,” he said, and Habiba moved past him with a tight little smile.

“Aren't we lucky we have the key?” he asked, though he carried nothing but a lit torch.

Habiba waved his hand over the door and muttered a phrase that Llesho couldn't hear. Then he gave the door a light tap. It opened inward and Llesho jumped back, crashing into Bixei's litter in his effort to avoid being hit by the door.

“Get off me!” Panic edged Bixei's sharp voice, and he gave Llesho a shove that overbalanced the already precarious bearers and propelled Llesho out into the gloomy light of the minor sun. He was standing alone in a wood of low, gnarled ginkgo trees that stank of fallen fruit in the quickening breeze of nightfall. A moment later, Jaks exited the tunnel, followed by Bixei on his litter. Habiba came last; when they had all assembled outside the secret passage, he turned to secure the door with another wave of his hand. Again he accompanied the flourish with a muttered charm, but Llesho wondered if it wasn't really the tap on the door itself, at the center of a coiled dragon carved into its surface, that sealed the tunnel.

Jaks seemed to know the way; he led their little band no more than a quarter li to a lane canopied by the twisted branches of ancient trees on each side. The lane's deep, sinuous curves snaking through the forest hid them from anyone coming up from behind, but likewise hid from their sight anything waiting for them ahead. At first, when Llesho could see no houses or temples, he thought they must be leaving the city. Then the stranger rounded a bend and disappeared between two ordinary looking trees at the side of the road. Master Jaks followed, with the sling carrying Bixei right behind him, and Llesho took a deep breath and slipped between the same trees.

He found himself on a carefully manicured path set with flagstones of varying sizes that artfully mimicked the meandering flow of a stream. The flagstone walk led them to a series of low-roofed structures. A network of ponds and waterways separated the buildings from each other while a series of gracefully arched bridges connected them again. The dim light of the minor sun wrapped the whole in a soft green slumber. Dumbfounded, Llesho stared back the way he had come and saw behind him a stone wall rising higher than his head. From the lane that wall had been invisible. Not just out of sight, he realized, but
invisible,
hidden by some spell that buried the quiet garden in deeper privacy than even the high stone wall. Bixei had likewise looked back, and he met Llesho's astonishment with an attempt to look worldly, but missed.

“What have we got into?” Bixei asked him with a look, and Llesho's answering glance said, “Trouble.”

That Master Jaks showed no surprise at all only made matters worse, as far as Llesho was concerned. The governor's witch: Llesho wanted to know what his teacher knew about witches and witchcraft, and why he had let Llesho suffer through months of Overseer Markko's torment in search of answers Master Jaks could have given him for the asking. But they were crossing one of those fragile looking bridges, over a pond on which pink-and-white lotus flowers rose on stems above the water, swaying in the slight breeze.

On the other side, they passed under the roof of a gatehouse that led them into a private garden where a pale, cold woman waited to greet them. Llesho recognized her. She had tested him with the short spear and the knife in the weapons rooms on Pearl Island, and she had accompanied the governor when he greeted the gladiators in the arena. Master Jaks bowed with bland courtesy, as if to a stranger, so Llesho did the same. He trusted Jaks, though he was beginning to wonder why, as he worried about what plot not of his choosing he had unwittingly fallen into.

The woman opened her arms to greet them with a calculated smile that warred with something darker in her eyes. “The governor of Farshore Province welcomes you to his service,” she said. “You will need rest, of course—especially the young one with the wounds. Habiba will take care of your papers and show you to your quarters. And he will answer your questions.”