The Prince of Shadow (27 page)

Llesho remembered Lord Chin-shi's chambers, his lordship's pressing questions and his own regret that he had no answers to give. He had fallen asleep while Lord Chin-shi struggled through the night to find an antidote for the poisoned bay. Lord Chin-shi had failed, losing everything, and had died by his own hand. Llesho could not help feeling that the failure was somehow his own. “I think Lord Chin-shi believed I might be a witch, or that if Kwan-ti was truly a witch, she had taught me her spells, and that perhaps I could stop the Blood Tide,” he said. “But I'm not, and I couldn't.”

“You could have, Llesho,” she said, and touched a tentative hand to his cheek. “You are the favored of the goddess, had you but known to entreat her.”

“No,” he said, shaking his head, denying it to himself as much as correcting her ladyship's misunderstanding. “My only talent seems to be surviving disasters; I can't do a thing to prevent them, and for all I know, something about me calls disasters down on my head. But I don't have anything to do with it. It just happens.”

“Surviving is perhaps the greatest talent of all, child. But if not Kwan-ti, who killed Chin-shi's pearl beds?”

Her explanation of the tide had shed a different light on Lord Chin-shi's fall. If fate and the sea had set the plague on the oyster beds, the worst any of them had done was let it happen. He knew that Kwan-ti had not seeded the plague when she left, but she might have been healing the bay, holding off disaster until staying even a day longer meant her death. Freed of her restraining touch, the poison had quickly taken hold. And Llesho knew about poisons.

“Master Markko,” he said. “His workroom smelled of poisons and rot, and dead things.” He truly didn't want to think about Markko, or the workroom where the overseer had chained him to the floor. He didn't want to see Lord Chin-shi dead in the sand of the arena, either, but that had happened, too.

“I think Lord Chin-shi was himself a witch,” Llesho ventured, “but he couldn't find the cure for the pearl beds.”

“Not a witch,” the lady corrected him, “but certainly an alchemist, which is much the same thing and probably what your Kwan-ti was, more or less.” She stood up then, and handed the peach bowl to a servant while Llesho jumped to his feet.

“Master Markko has passed to Lord Yueh, who held many of Lord Chin-shi's debts,” she added.

It made sense, all except for why she was telling him, which he asked her pointedly.

“Because you need to know,” she answered as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, though he couldn't imagine why. “I hope we are not already too late.”

She left him there with one of the bows, and a quiver of arrows. He watched her go, unable to drive from his mind either their conversation or the fear that seemed to grip her at the last. Too late for what?

 

 

In the weeks that followed, the novices trained together in weapons and in unarmed combat. Her ladyship herself led them in archery on many days, and Llesho found that he excelled at the weapon. As he grew in skill he found his thoughts moving more deeply and more slowly, whereas his reflexes reacted like lightning. Kaydu taught a sharper, faster, dirtier form of hand-to-hand than Master Den had done, and she included deadly moves that grew out of forms that assumed a larger opponent with intent to kill.

Master Jaks took up the teaching of armed combat without the rules of engagement that governed the arena, but that was suited to working in pairs and groups to attain one goal. Extraction and infiltration became a part of the training, skills that no gladiator would need, but that turned them into soldiers capable of moving at the forefront of a massed troop, or running and fighting in small bursts of guerrilla action. Or working as assassins in the enemy camp.

It seemed natural that the novices should train together. They soon learned each other's strengths and weaknesses, and forged a purpose with Llesho at its center. Kaydu joined them when she could free herself from her own teaching duties, acting as student and as teacher under Master Jaks' instruction. Llesho grew confident in wielding his small cadre as a force, sending Bixei to the front with a glance when strength and intimidation might avoid bloodshed, unleashing Kaydu for stealth attacks; she could move soundlessly through dry reeds, and her combat skills fit her like her skin. Lling he begged with his eyes to talk them out of trouble, or to hold ground if talk did not work.

Hmishi, it turned out, was the fiercest fighter of them all, but only if the life of a companion was at risk. In practice his moves were hesitant and laden with apologies and the wounded pain of doing harm to others. When, in exasperation, Master Jaks pulled him in front of the troops at practice and told him to fight or die, Hmishi had stumbled and mumbled, absorbing the jeers of the guards and the curses of his teacher. Then a knife caught him in a deep downward slash across the cheek, and he realized that Master Jaks had meant every word. They weren't playing at tridents with their muck rakes anymore, and Master Jaks would kill him dead where he stood rather than let him be a burden on his team.

Kaydu said later that Hmishi would probably have died rather than hurt his teacher in that artificial setting of make-believe combat, but Llesho had refused, utterly, to lose a friend to that sort of game. He would not let them make enemies of each other, and he knew he could never trust Master Jaks again if Hmishi died at his hand. So he lunged at the master, latching on to his knife arm, and clinging to it while he shouted to Hmishi to run, to get away. Master Jaks had shaken Llesho loose and turned on him, a dreadful light in his eyes. Growling deep in his throat, Hmishi had attacked with a savagery that almost took the master down before he tumbled out of the way and set himself for defense. They battled then in earnest, Master Jaks' years of experience and cunning matched against the force of Hmishi's will focused on the death of his opponent. Master Jaks would have died in that battle if three hefty guards had not risked Hmishi's blade to knock him down and hold him while a fourth disarmed him.

“I don't care who you are,” Hmishi had screamed, straining against the arms that held him down. “If you hurt him, I will kill you. Anywhere. Anytime. I will kill you.”

For Llesho, time slowed to a frozen agony. Nothing moved but the blood dripping from the cut on Hmishi's face, and from another, shallower mark under Master Jaks' ear. Llesho thought he might walk unseen among them, like a wraith among mortals, tasting their blood and choosing who would live and who would die. He wanted to kill Master Jaks himself then, for what they both had done to his friend. But Master Jaks was watching Hmishi with relief touching the edges of a tension that had become a part of him over the weeks of training.

“You're ready,” he said. “Have your face seen to, and be prepared to march. All of you. We leave for Thousand Lakes Province in the morning.”

Ready. Tomorrow would be Llesho's sixteenth birthday. In Thebin, he realized, he would be going to his purification rites now. The eve of his natal day would have been spent in silent meditation and prayer, fasting and offerings of incense and fruit in the Temple of the Moon. His brothers had told stories of how the scent of the fruit would come to fill the world as the night lengthened and their hollow stomachs complained. And he'd heard the servants laughing at the bites in the plums they found after Adar passed the eve of his sixteenth birthday sampling the offerings.

But the jokes and the ceremony were only the surface of the rite. During the long night, the betrothed prince became the true husband of the goddess in all ways, and received from her hand the bridegroom gifts of the spirit that would mark his soul forever. Those gifts brought with them powers of sight and the shared dominion over the living realm. Or the goddess would pass over him, and he would leave the temple in the morning changed only from a boy to mortal man.

Llesho had no expectation that the goddess would choose him as her husband, but he did not want to enter into this new phase of hardship in his life still a boy. Tonight, therefore, he would observe the rites of the god-king to prepare for both journeys: into manhood, and then into the unknown. He left his companions on their way to the cookhouse, and followed one of the compound's many pathways, over several of the ethereal bridges, to the small shrine deep in her ladyship's gardens. Bowing low to the gods who lingered about the place, he drew his Thebin knife and lay it on the altar, the length of the blade stretching from knee to knee of the seated goddess. With an abject kowtow that she might accept him in his unworthiness, Llesho settled himself in the proper form for meditation, and began his long watch alone.

Chapter Sixteen

AS the darkness settled around him, Llesho's doubts seemed to curl themselves in the corners of the shrine, peeping out at him with hot, fierce eyes. The priests were dead, none left to call the goddess to her husband with their prayers, and her ladyship's shrine was small and far from the gates of heaven where the goddess dwelt. How would she find her betrothed, how would she even know to look for him, so far away and with none to herald his time?

With an effort he set aside his misgivings. Only rats lurked in the corners, attracted to the cool shelter of the stone altar. Like them, he must put his life in the hands of the goddess and trust to her decision. Sitting cross-legged in front of her stone image, Llesho had lost himself in the silent meditation of his past life that made up the long night of passage for a young man entering manhood. His mother in her library in the Temple of the Moon, holding him on her lap, and his father, sitting in judgment on his throne in the Palace of the Sun, the two sides of heaven always in each other's gaze across the city. The Long March, and slavery, Lleck speaking to him from beyond the grave, and Lord Chin-shi desperate to heal the dying sea, and spilling the blood of his regret upon the sand. Her ladyship, watching him at weapons, questioning him at the side of her husband, teaching him the forbidden secrets of the Way.

Sinking deeply into his own mind, he sifted through the details of his life. Where had he failed, and where had he striven to serve with all he had to give Her whom he worshiped? In the balance, did he prove wanting, or would the goddess cast her favor upon him? At midnight he was disturbed by the presence of another in the shrine: her ladyship, come with gifts of fresh peaches for the goddess.

“Peace is the most precious gift the goddess may offer us,” she said, holding up a piece of the fruit so that it glowed a rich gold in the candlelight. “Some say it is the one gift that man only appreciates when looking back in longing after he has rejected it. Others say the gift has no value except as a reward for strife. What do you believe, Llesho?”

She offered the peach and he took it, considering its soft richness, so unlike the cold white woman who offered it. “I believe,” he said, “that each gift is a test, and with each test met we go a little farther upon the Way of the Goddess. And we cannot know what the purpose of the gift or the test is until we reach the end of the Way.”

“Even peace?” she asked him.

Remembering the Harn descending upon Thebin, Llesho nodded his certainty. “Especially peace,” he answered.

Her ladyship studied him for a long moment, with eyes as sharp as Llesho's Thebin knife. Then she let out a sigh, so gently that Llesho almost could believe he hadn't heard it at all.

“Know the goddess loves you,” she said, and rested a cold hand over his heart. Llesho bowed his head, and heard but did not see when she stood and departed.

Alone again with the night and the rats with their glowing red eyes, he tried to settle into his meditations again, but the lady's words had disturbed him. The goddess might love him, as she loved all that lived within her dominion, but the night grew long, and she did not come.

 

 

In the deepest dark, when even the moon had set, meditation turned to memory and turned back on itself to mingle past and present in troubled patterns. He was grown, as now, but at home in the holy city of Kungol, alone and lost in the twisting mazes of the Temple of the Moon. From every wall remembered images of the goddess smiled down at him, but now they wore the face of her ladyship, the governor's wife. Somewhere in the distance, he heard his mother cry out, but when he tried to reach her, her cries seemed to grow more distant instead of closer, and the images on the walls seemed to grow colder. Through the dream-laced memories wove the screams of the dying, and the smell of smoke from the burning marketplace in the city.

“No!” His own voice broke the self-imposed spell of his meditation, but the sounds of pain and anger remained. The shouts of the watch summoning the guard and the slap of running feet were real. Here, now, in the governor's own gardens, it was happening again.