Sworn in Steel (40 page)

His fingers fidgeted some more. He licked his lips.

“Or are you hoping you can leave your post long enough to dispose of my body and not be missed?” I said. “Because, let me tell you, it’s a lot harder than you think to
drag this much deadweight someplace people won’t find it. Especially if there are dogs barking and yapping and getting in the way.”

I watched as he looked into the square behind me, considering the shadows and the hounds and where he might be able to dump me.

Fucking amateur. If you want to kill someone, kill him; thinking about it only gives you time to second-guess yourself.

I rattled the iron. “Just open the damn gate.”

He paused a moment longer, then transferred his spear to his left hand and pulled out a set of keys with his right. The gate opened with a mild squeal. I stepped inside, pretending not to see
the sheepish look on his face as he refused to meet my eye.

I considered telling Heron about this gap in the padishah’s defenses, then thought better of it. You never know when a weak link will come in handy.

The guard stepped back over to his post house and rang a hand bell. After a short delay, a boy dressed in enough silk and silver to make a courtesan spit with envy came running up, torch in
hand. He bowed to me and looked at the guard.

“For His Excellency, the Secretary to the Wazir of the Gardens of the Muse,” muttered the guard. He didn’t look at me as I left.

On the day we’d been escorted off the padishah’s estate, the troupe and I had followed a wide, paved road from the artist’s enclave to the main gate. Between the guards and the
trees lining the road, I’d only managed glimpses of the grounds: a serene pool here, a carefully cultivated glade there, a stone-walled pavilion roofed in silk, complete with the sound of
giggling maidens inside, up on a hill. It had been impressive, but hard to appreciate.

Now, though, I found myself walking through the midst of the garden’s glory. Manicured lawns rolled away on either side in the torchlight and polished marble stepping stones marked out the
path beneath our feet. We passed through a stand of trees planted to resemble what I could only guess were supposed to be the jungles of Bakshar to the south, and then, farther along, another grove
that reminded me of the tall pine forests of the empire’s Western Client Kingdoms. A stream crossed our path, thick with lazy fish, spanned by an arched bridge done in cedar and copper. The
flowing water fed into a small pond, its edges staked with weeds and willows. I watched as small ripples appeared and vanished on its surface, the fat fish growing fatter off the night bugs that
skated there.

The torch was spoiling my night vision, but its light allowed me to just make out buildings set off from the path. Some were large enough to be residences or stables, others smaller, their
shapes and locations suggesting more private purposes: tea pavilions and artists’ workshops and quiet rooms perfect for assignations . . . or assassinations. Most were dark, but a few showed
faint flickers of light. Soft music wafted from one, while low, fast moans came from another. Occasionally, our path crossed other people’s—court functionaries, servants, men and women
walking the grounds—but never any guards or patrols.

I asked my guide about this.

“These are the padishah’s grounds,” he said. “You don’t come here unless you’re invited. It is known.”

“But why?” I said.

He looked at me, as if not quite understanding the question. “It is known,” he said simply.

I let the subject drop. I was certain there were stories of guards and glimmer and the padishah and his father making gruesome examples of people who hopped the wall, but this clearly
wasn’t the time to hear them. Not that I didn’t think this boy was overflowing with tales—what boys and servants aren’t?—but he’d clearly learned not to share
servants’ gossip to visiting strangers, especially if those strangers were being taken to see someone who could have him beaten for talking out of turn.

Smart kid.

Two curving sweeps of the path later, we turned onto a wooden walkway and approached a low timber building set beside a hill. In a city that favored stone and brick and tile, this place stood
out for its dark earthiness. Lights flickered in narrow glass windows, and I could smell, if not see, smoke coming from a chimney somewhere. The boy placed his torch in an iron holder a short
distance from the building, then led me to the door and knocked.

A large man with a shining pate and an oiled mustache and beard opened the door. After relieving me of my rapier and Degan’s sword, not to mention the dagger on my belt, he closed the door
in the boy’s face and led me into the house.

The inside was much like the out: simple, elegant, and mildly out of place. Thick rugs that would have made a desert sheikh wilt with envy ran over plain wooden floors. The walls were imperial
in their feel—painted plaster, interspersed with the occasional mosaic done in cut stone and glass and marble, all depicting Angels and history (but not the emperor, I noticed)—while
the ceilings were distinctly Djanese, their crossbeams made of heavy carved and painted timber. Silver lamps burned in holders on the wall, their smoke rising to brush over and around copper disks
set above the flames: soot catchers, for making lampblack and ink. Heron, it seemed, was a clerk to the bone.

We walked along one hallway, turned down another, and then passed through a set of double doors already standing open. I crossed the threshold and stopped, awestruck.

Wall to wall, floor to ceiling, there were shelves. Shelves filled with books, with folios, with scrolls, with
stone tablets
, for Angels’ sake. Papers seemed to drip from them,
hanging out here, where a binding had split; there, where a scroll draped a teasing, curling corner across its neighbor; and off to the side, where a sheaf of documents bulged out, restrained only
by the twine that held them together. The place smelled dry and dusty and full of secrets.

I licked my lips. To hell with Baldezar—
I
wanted to work out an exchange with Heron, to browse and thumb and read my way through even a fraction of a single wall.

“Ah,” said, Heron. “On time. How pleasant. Tea?”

He was standing at a large, plain reading table near the far end of the room. The surface was immaculate, polished by years of leather covers and sheepskins rather than wax. A small iron tea
service sat at one end, an elaborate candelabra at the other. Behind him, a blank section of wall—the only one in the entire room—held a single antique long sword, a jade vase full of
dried flowers, and a large silk fan draped in black gauze. The fan, I knew, would be covered with intricately inked scenes—scenes that would start with a wedding and end with a funeral pyre
or a corpse, depending on which sect Heron followed. Once, when it had been plainer, it had belonged to Heron’s wife; now it was his widower’s fan.

Hints of figures and gold leaf taunted me through the gauze. I looked away before my eyes tried to make out too many details of their life together, done small.

“Thanks, no,” I said, coming the rest of the way into the room. I took out an
ahrami
seed instead. Heron noted it and nodded.

“I’ve not forgotten I owe you more,” he said, pouring himself a cup of pale green liquid.

“Nor have I.”

We both smiled thinly at that. I noticed that there was only one chair in the room. Heron took it, regarding me over his steaming cup.

“And how is el-Qaddice agreeing with you?” he said, running his eyes over my battered countenance. I could only imagine how I appeared, since I’d specifically avoided the offer
by Tobin to see “how wonderfully horrendous” I looked in his brass mirror. Ezak had stopped me on the way out to study my bruises for purposes of stage makeup.

“The city and I are still getting a feel for each other,” I said.

“I can see that. And our actors? How are things progressing with them?”

“They’re working their asses off.”

He took a small sip, watching me through the steam. “Will they be ready in time?”

“You know they won’t,” I said.

Another sip. “I do.”

“Did you get us more time?” I said.

Sip.

“Did you?”

His eyes flicked away. “One day.”

“What?” It came out louder than I’d intended, sounding out of place in such a hushed room. I didn’t care. “One day? What the hell help is that?”

Heron’s eyes came back to me. They were hard now. “It gives you one more day than you had.”

“One day’s nothing!” Not for Tobin’s people, and especially not for me.

“One day is more than I’d hoped for: Accept it for the gift it is and make the best of it.”

“You mean make our peace with being kicked out of the Old City.”

Heron shrugged. “It was never a question of your audition succeeding; it was merely one of how long you’d be allowed to stay before being forced to leave.”

“The Old City?”

“Djan.”

That brought me up short. I took a step forward, resting my hands on the table, and stared down at the clerk. Heron met my gaze and sipped his tea, unperturbed.

“Why the hell would anyone want to force us out of the Despotate?” I said.

“Because you embarrassed someone.”

“What?” I said. “Who?”

Heron sighed. “Think. Your troupe arrives in el-Qaddice. It moves up the queue for first auditions without anyone raising an objection. Then, having barely performed a scene, your people
are granted conditional patronage and brought into the Old City to perform for the padishah. Clearly, someone was exerting influence on your behalf; and just as clearly, your success makes the
person in charge of vetting new artists look like an ineffective fool.”

“You mean the wazir?” I said.

“I mean the wazir,” said Heron. “Who, I might add, only gave you the extra day because it turns out to have the least propitious omens for the month.”

“Wait,” I said, straightening up. “Are you saying the only reason we got any extra time at all is because your boss thinks it will make things go even worse for us?”

Heron blew over his cup. “It seems the astrologer made an error in his initial calculations.”

I almost wanted to laugh. Instead, I stalked away from the table.

Court politics? No wonder we’d been given a new script and barely any time to rehearse: We were meant to fail. And not just fail, but fail spectacularly—to do something so bad, so
insulting, that the padishah would feel compelled to banish us from the Despotate.

Just what the hell was in that play, anyhow?

I could almost hear Christiana laughing from here. She would have seen this coming a league away, but me? No, not if it involved court politics, and especially not in Djan.

One extra day. Hell.

I turned and walked back over to stand beside Heron. I leaned back against the table and stared at his wall.

“What are our options?” I said. The dried flowers, I noted, were marjoram and larkspur, in imperial purple and deep indigo. Had he brought them with him, or harvested and dried them
here? Had his wife picked the bouquet at one point?

Things I didn’t need to know but was used to wondering.

“Options?” he said. “I’d suggest leaving early.”

“That bad?”

“It could get that way.” Heron shifted in his seat. “Mind, if you stay, I’d suggest you get an alternative translation of the play; not that I think it will make much of
a difference.”

“Banned?”

“Years ago. By the despot himself.”

I nodded. It wasn’t the most elegant setup, but it didn’t have to be—not against a bunch of Imperial players. The cards were already stacked against us, and no one had even
spoken a line yet.

That pissed me off.

“I’ll get the troupe out,” I said. Like it or not, I was still their patron, and still responsible for them.

“But not you?”

I let my eyes slide over to the sword. It was old but well cared for, the worn leather of the scabbard rich with oil. “I have unfinished business.”

“It’s not the actors who’ve earned my master’s ire,” noted Heron. “You’re the patron, so yours is the name that was whispered in the proper ears. Once
the wazir finds out you’re not with the troupe, he’ll send people to find you. And he will find you.”

“That’ll still give me a couple of extra days,” I said as I stared at the long sword. The handle looked to be chain-wrapped bone, but the cross guard was another matter. Curved
slightly forward toward the tip, the two bars of the guard had had piercings filed into the metal so that they formed three interlinked circles per side. As for the pommel, it had been chiseled
into the shape of a tulip, its three petals folded shut.

The sword clearly had imperial roots. I wondered whether it had been Heron’s at one point, or if it had come down during one of the earlier wars and been left behind.

“To do what?” said Heron.

“A lot of things,” I said, stepping forward. I raised my hand, almost unconsciously, to run my fingers along the cross guard.

“What kind of things?” said Heron, his tone becoming exasperated. “And please keep your hands to yourself.”

“To find a friend,” I said, my hand stopping but not moving away. “And to see about getting back something I gave awa—” I froze, my eyes going from the guard back
to the handle. It was too smooth to be bone, I realized; too fine. And the patterning in the material was all wrong. This looked more like . . .

“Holy shit,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper.

“What?” said Heron. He was still behind me, but I could tell by his voice that he was standing now.

What I’d taken for piercings in the cross guard weren’t. The white that stood out against the steel wasn’t the plaster showing through from behind; they were carefully shaved
and shaped pieces of material that had been set deep in the steel. I could almost imagine how, with the right light behind them, they would shine with a milky translucence. Like ivory.

“What?” said Heron again.

I looked from the ivory pieces to the long ivory handle, then reached out and gave the scabbard a quick tug. The pins under the cross guard kept the sword in place, allowing the leather to slide
down and reveal the watery gray and white pattern of the steel. And a single etched teardrop.