The Assassin's Curse (8 page)

  "Midnight's claws," he said. "You can read."

  "Of course I can read." I folded the paper down as small as it would go and slipped it into my pocket. "And why would you give me a list if you thought I couldn't read?"

  "I assumed you'd hand it over to the vendors."

  "Oh, that's wise," I said. "Let them give me some fountain grass when I paid for swamp yirrus. Whatever that is." I shook my head. "How'd you get your supplies before you met me, anyway?"

  "Not from a night market."

  I let him have the last word, cause I was so hungry I could hardly think straight. I stuck my hand on the doorknob and was halfway to turning it when he roared, "Stop!" like a troop of Empire navymen were about to come bursting through the door. I froze, all my aching muscles preparing for yet another knife fight. But Naji just slouched toward me, the heel of his hand pressed against his forehead. "Curses and darkness," he said.

  "What the hell's wrong with you?"

  He reached into his robe and pulled out the charm from the battle and tossed it at me. The minute it was in my hands he straightened up.

  "I hope that'll stave it off," he muttered, more to the air in the room than to me.

  "What are you talking about?"

  "Wear that charm." He pointed at my chest. "Keep it on you at all times."

  "Why?"

  "It's for protection."

  "I know what it's for. I'm more curious what it's protection against."

  He glowered. "Probably nothing. But I… I don't like sending you out alone."

  "You sent me downstairs."

  "That was different. You were still in the building."

  "So? You can look through walls or something? What if someone snatched me when the innkeep wasn't looking?"

  "No one was going to snatch you."

  "But someone's gonna snatch me at the night market?"

  "Probably not."

  "But you still need to give me protection?"

  "Stop asking questions!" he roared. "I thought you were hungry!"

  "I am hungry! I just want to know I ain't walking into a trap is all."

  Naji rubbed at his forehead, his eyes closed. "You aren't walking into a trap. As long as you swear to me that you won't take off the charm, you'll be safe."

  I stared at him.

  He opened his eyes. "I need you to swear it."

  "I don't swear," I finally said. "But I'll promise." I looped the charm around my neck. That feeling of safety drizzled over me. I thought the whole thing was off, like I'd just been handed a key to something I shoulda understood, but I was so hungry I didn't much care. I was out the door and into the kitchen before Naji could say another word.

 

The night market in the pleasure district was a lot bigger than the one where Naji had almost killed me. It stretched from the row of brothels all the way down to the docks, and I could make out the outline of ship sails in the distance, blocking out the sky's bright stars. Vendors crowded onto the street like weeds, shouting at me to come buy their charms and enchantments as I walked past. Mostly love potions and the like. I ignored them.

  It took me less time than I expected to gather up all the things on Naji's list. Those plants I recognized – the powdered Echinacea, the rose petals, the hyacinth root – I picked up first, going from vendor to vendor so none of them would ask after what spells I planned on casting.

  That left the weird stuff. Like an uman flower. Never heard of that before, and as it turned out, it was extremely rare and extremely expensive, and only grew in a particular swamp in the southern part of Qilar. I had to ask five separate vendors after it, and I eventually got sent to an old man tucked away behind a stand selling vials of snake blood. He was all shriveled up like a walnut, and he peered up at me through the folds of wrinkled-up skin around his eyes. "What you needing a weed like this for?" he asked.

  "Magic."

  "Don't sass me, girl." But he rummaged underneath his table for a few seconds and produced a plant that reminded me of a body wrapped in burial shrouds. It wasn't like any flower I ever saw, what with its twisted wooden stem, all deformed and grotesque, and its long, fluttering white petals.

  "Be careful with her," the old man said. "You can call down the spirits, if you don't know what you're doing."

  I thanked him, so as to seem polite, and then tucked the uman flower away in my bag so I wouldn't have to look at it again.

  There was one rarity on the list that I did recognize: le'ki, which Mama had used sometimes in the tracking spells that helped us sift out the best merchant ships. I figured I could find that at the stands set up on the docks, and I was right. At the first one I went to, the vendor had a half-inch left, dried out and powdered like Naji had requested. Naji only wanted a quarterinch, but I bought all the vendor had, cause it reminded me of home, that briny sea scent and opalescent pink sheen, like the inside of a shell.

  I'd been half-avoiding coming down to the docks, but once I was there, I didn't want to leave. I had everything on the list but the swamp yirrus, and it wasn't even midnight yet. So I followed a dock away from the lights of the city, all the way out to its edge. Boats thumped against the water, that hollow wooden sound I always found so reassuring. Nobody was out but a single dock-guard, and he didn't pay me no mind. Not like one person can steal a boat anyway.

  I sat down on the pier, the bag filled with Naji's supplies in my lap, my feet dangling out over the ocean. Mama used to tell me the sea had an intelligence all her own, though I'd never been able to feel it like Mama could. I loved the ocean, don't get me wrong, but for me and Papa it was just water, huge and beautiful and strong and bigger than everything in the whole world, sure – but never something I could sit down and chat over my problems with.

  When I was younger I'd get up early sometimes and climb to the top of the rigging so I could watch Mama work her magic with the sea. Sometimes she stripped naked and swam in it, and the waves would buoy her around like a jellyfish. Other times she sang and threw offerings from our merchant runs – small things, like a few coins of pressed metal, or a necklace, or a bangled scarf. And the offerings wouldn't float away like jetsam, neither. The sea sucked them down to the depths, leaving a wisp of foam in their wake. Once Mama lowered a jar into the water and scooped that foam up and then drank it down. Three days later, we defeated the Lae clan in a battle everyone, even Papa, thought we'd lose.

  Thinking back to my childhood, and to Mama and her magic, and even that horrible battle, I started getting real sad. And I didn't want to be on the docks no more, sea spray kicking up along the hem of my dress. So I gathered up my bag and made my way back to the twinkling lights of the night market. My melancholy left me feeling distracted and confused, and I didn't know I'd taken a wrong turn until I realized I was back in the city proper – not the night market.

  I cursed and turned around, intending to follow my steps back to the docks. But the buildings all looked the same in the dim light of the magic-lanterns, and when I started going one direction I was sure it was the wrong way, so I turned and went another – and after doing that a couple times I realized it was hopeless. I was lost, and in a city, unlike the open ocean, it's best to just ask somebody for directions.

  Course, all the buildings were locked up tight for the night. I wandered for a while, kicking at stones in the street, fiddling with Naji's charm at my throat. Nothing.

  Then I caught the scent of incense.

  Incense means a temple, and the temples are always open for prayers and sanctuary. Figured the priestess wouldn't mind giving me directions, neither.

  I followed the incense for a few minutes, losing it on the wind and then finding it again, until I came across a little temple wedged up between a key-maker's shop and the office of a court magician. The lamps over the door burned golden with magic, and when I stepped inside, the light had a gilded quality that reminded me of the evening sun. There wasn't nobody praying at any of the portraits, but a priestess stepped out of the archway, her sacred jewelry chiming as she moved.

  "You look like you belong to the sea," she said, slipping languidly into the light. Priestesses always talk like that, like everything they say has got to be poetry.

  "That's right," I told her. "And I need to get back to it. Can you tell me the way to the docks?"

  She gave me a disapproving smile. "You mean the night market?"

  "No, I mean the docks. I gotta meet someone there."

  "Why don't you ask the gods for help?"

  Hell and sea salt. Figured I'd get a priestess who took her duties seriously.

  "The gods like to take their time answering, and I need to get back straightaway."

  She looked almost amused, but she handed me an incense stick and swept her arm out over the temple. I sighed and followed the line of portraits till I came to one of Kaol, the goddess of tides and typhoons, and the one who's said to watch over pirates. I lit the incense with the little white candle burning beneath her portrait, knelt down, breathed in the smoky sweetness, muttered something about having lost my way, and then stood up and looked expectantly at the priestess.

  "Kaol doesn't usually answer requests," the priestess said. "You'd have done better to pray to E'mko." She pointed at the portrait hanging beside Kaol's, and where Kaol's ocean was darkness and chaos, a gray spitting storm and jagged scars of lightning, E'mko's was calm, flat, and dull, his benevolent eyes gazing down on his petitioners.

  "Ain't a sailor," I said. "E'mko's for sailors."

  The priestess tilted her head at me. "Are you a pirate?"

  I shrugged. "I told you, I just need to be down at the docks."

  "So you did. Kaol will help pirates." She smiled. "When the prayer finishes, we'll see if she answers."

  I sighed again and knelt down beside Kaol's portrait to wait for the incense to burn away – for the prayer to finish, as the priestess had said. I wasn't sure about the gods, since they didn't do much to make themselves known, but Papa used to swear that Kaol always looked out for her children, and that was why a pirate ship could sail through a typhoon unharmed when a navy boat couldn't.

  When the last of the incense burned up, I found myself holding my breath, half-expecting to hear a voice like thunder telling me the way back to the docks. Instead the priest took me by the hand and pulled me to my feet and said, "Follow the street until it deadends, then turn right. You'll be able to hear the sea."

  I scowled at her. "You couldn't have just told me that?"

  "I didn't," she said. "Kaol did."

  I didn't believe that for a second, but I thanked her anyway and then rushed out onto the street. I'd one more thing to buy – swamp yirrus – and no idea where to find it. Maybe I shoulda prayed to Kaol to help me find that, as well.

  The priestess's directions were good, at any rate, and soon as I heard the sea at the dead-end I followed the sound of it to the docks, and then I made way back to the night market. At the first vendor I came across, I asked after the swamp yirrus, but she shook her head.

  "Don't got anything like that, I'm afraid," she said. I must've looked disappointed, cause she leaned in close to me and whispered, "There's a new stall down near Lady Sea Salt's brothel. He might have it." She straightened up and tilted her head back toward the city. "He's set up next to a lemon tree, and he usually has a gray horse tied up with his things."

  I thanked her and set off. The crowds thinned out some, and a wind blew in from the desert, cold and dry as dust. Everybody seemed to huddle up inside of themselves, even the vendors. But then I spotted the lemon tree, twisted and bent with the direction of the wind. And the gray horse, just like the lady had said. It snorted at me as I walked up.

  The vendor had his back turned. The wind toyed with the fabric of his cloak, and even after I cleared my throat a few time, he didn't look up. Eventually, I said, "Excuse me!" I felt like I had to shout to be heard over the wind.

  "Yes, my dear?" He glanced at me over his shoulder. "You look a long way from home."

  He said it kindly, but it still left me unnerved. How could some street vendor at a Lisirran night market know my home from anyone else on the street?

  "Uh, I'm looking for swamp yirrus," I said. "Lady on the docks said you'd have it."

  The vendor turned around, and my whole body froze up immediately. He had the same gray-stone eyes the woman at the dress shop had had. I might've chalked it up to a coincidence except looking at his eyes got me dizzy, like all I could see was that gray.

  "Got one left," he said. He gave me a big dazzling smile. "I'll knock the price down some, too. Looks like you've amassed quite a collection of supplies there." He nodded at my sacks filled with Naji's stuff.

  I didn't say anything. I couldn't stop shaking. There was nothing sinister about him, none of the warning signs Papa always told me to look out for. Except for those damn eyes.

  "This is awfully advanced for someone like you, though," he added. "Someone so young."

  "I'm an apprentice," I spat out.

  He nodded and turned back to his jars and tins. "Give me just one moment…"

  I didn't. I turned and hauled off down the windy street fast as I could, my dress flying out behind me, my hair whipping into my face. The bags of plants banged up against my hip.

  I ran till I felt safe, and that meant getting out of the night market completely. I collapsed on a curb outside a drinkhouse, the scent of smoke and strong coffee drifting out into the night. Men laughed over some jangly music. A woman sang an old song I half-recognized. I figured Naji would let me have it for not getting everything on his list, but at least I hadn't spent all his money, and I had good reason.