Vengeance of Dragons (Secret Texts) (26 page)
BOOK: Vengeance of Dragons (Secret Texts)
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Dùghall said, “He’s right, Kait. All of you. I prefer to think of our mission as being divinely planned and divinely protected, but we have no assurance that we will succeed. Our only assurance is that
someone
will—that the Reborn will ultimately crush the Dragons.”
someone
will—that the Reborn will ultimately crush the Dragons.”
Valard, darkly pessimistic, said, “If you ask me, we should join the Dragons. No matter what your prophecy says, they sound like they have a better chance of winning this than we do. You say there are probably hundreds of them and possibly thousands, and you think they’ll have managed to put themselves in positions of power. They have the resources of Calimekka at their disposal, and probably, because of that, the resources of all of Ibera. And you’ve already admitted that their sort of magic is better than yours.”
“Stronger. Not necessarily better.”
“If you ask me, stronger
is
necessarily better.”
is
necessarily better.”
Kait had spent the last two days in the Z’tatnean ship listening to variations on this argument. “We aren’t strong enough to beat them in a fight,” or “We don’t have enough people to get through their guard,” or “No matter what your prophecy says, this whole mission is doomed to failure,” or “Why can’t we just get our families out of Calimekka and take them somewhere safe to live in peace for the rest of our lives?” Ry’s lieutenants seemed to have few loyalties or interests beyond maintaining his friendship. When he had volunteered to come with her to get back the Mirror, they had immediately exerted every effort to get him to change his mind. When it became clear that he didn’t intend to back down, they told him that they were going with him to help him. But it was clear to Kait that they would help only as long as Ry was involved—that they had no interest in the Reborn, and that their real interest, outside of Ry’s goodwill, lay with their families in Calimekka.
She let her eyes drift shut and listened to the back-and-forth bickering, the questions and answers, restatements and rebuttals, and all of them began to float away from her, as if the words themselves had been put on a boat, and the boat had been set into a different current that led far from her. She allowed her shield to dissipate, and focused on the thin tendril of magic that curled toward her from the still-distant Reborn. She followed it, watching as it grew brighter, feeling its increasing warmth, and at last she touched the Reborn’s soul.
Love and acceptance enveloped her, and hope filled her heart. She would be able to get the Mirror of Souls. She would survive. She would live to touch the Reborn, and she would help to bring about a world filled with love and goodness—a world that would rise out of the ashes of the Dragons’ evil.
* * *
She woke to a change in the rhythm of the ship and the tone of the voices around her. Now everything was hushed, the whispers urgent in character and brief in nature. The ship bucked fore and aft, and waves slapped loudly at the hull; the long rolling swells of the deep sea were gone. She opened her eyes to find herself alone. So they’d reached land. She rose and peeked over the hull, and saw a rocky shore rolling into gray mist and tattered fog in both directions. The clouds, thick and black, bellied near the ground, crowding into the steep sides of mountains, obscuring their peaks. Hooded strangers stood among the men with whom she’d traveled and whispered prices and dates of delivery and return, and never asked questions about what was wanted, or why.
She clambered up to the edge of the hull, judged her distance from the deeper water where the ship lay at anchor to the shallows and the shore, and before she thought about it, bunched her muscles and jumped. She was in the air and irreversibly aimed for dry ground when she recalled that neither the strangers with whom her uncle bargained nor the Z’tatneans who had brought them to Ibera’s shore knew her secret. Carelessness. Damnall carelessness. She should have waited for someone to row back to get her, or should have let herself fall short of dry ground if she jumped.
They were watching her when she landed. Expressions of surprise, curiosity, instant distrust. One of the strangers turned to Dùghall and said, “Athletic, isn’t she?” but his voice asked more than his words. In a land where any difference was suspect of being both a curse of the gods and a crime punishable by death, even criminals sometimes had their own brand of piety.
Kait gave him a cold, calculating look and said, “I ought to be. I’ve spent my entire life training in gymnastics. It makes my . . . work . . . both safer and easier.”
The curiosity vanished, and the man said, “Ahhh. Practical. I ought to consider having some of our young women trained the same way. They stay small enough that agility would be a real asset even once they become adults.” He looked back to Dùghall. “Now, about the horses . . .”
She turned away from him, pretending to study the sea, and felt the gorge rise in the back of her throat. Carelessness. She could let it kill her if she chose. Or she could remember that she was only lucky that the people with whom she traveled did not exercise their right to kill her for being the monster that she was. She could reclaim the wary, fearful, life-preserving habits of a lifetime, happily discarded in the last half year, and by so doing choose to survive.
They spent two days waiting for the arrival of their horses, their clothes, and their supplies, and four days on the road just to reach the outer edge of Calimekka. They spent another three days riding into the center of the city, signing false names to the documents at each gate, providing false identification, working out their stories bit by bit.
By the time they reached the center of the city, where the Houses of the Families marked the hilltops and the wealthy clustered together in their tall apartments and stately homes, they had discarded their stolen finery and bought more ordinary clothing, and had gone from being emigrating Salbarians and Territory failures returning from colonial disaster to well-to-do foreign traders looking for new markets.
Thank all the gods for diplomatic training, Kait thought. She spoke accentless Donneabba, the primary language of the Imumbarra Isles, and looked enough like a short, thin Donneai to convincingly act the part of Dùghall’s assistant. Ian turned out to be brilliant in Hmago, the trade language of the Manarkans. Hasmal claimed to be Hmoth by birthright, and his Hmago was perfect, too. Jaim and Trev looked like cousins; they pretended to be from the Veral Territories, since they spoke only the normal Iberan tongues. Yanth, who had skipped language studies as much as he could, could pass for nothing but a Calimekkan when he opened his mouth, so he played the part of the locally hired guard. Valard, too, was unmistakably Calimekkan; he donned scruffy leathers and joined Yanth in pretending to be a mercenary. Ry, tall and golden, with his exotic pale eyes and fierce blade of a nose, might as well have had the Sabir crest tattooed on his cheeks. But he’d dyed his hair with ecchan stain, which turned it a muddy, dismal shade of brown, and he’d changed his walk, slumping his shoulders a bit and shuffling to make himself appear both older and less threatening. His story was that he was back from the Sabir territory in western Manarkas.
They called themselves the Hawk-Kin Trading Alliance, and split up to work their way through the commercial districts of the city nearest the centers of power, Sabir House, Galweigh House, Embassy Row, and the Great Parnissery. They were hunting for Dragons, but in the week that they’d conducted their search, they’d found no sign, no rumors, no obvious marks of new magic.
Kait heard from a number of sources, just in passing, that the Galweighs were no more, and that Galweigh House had fallen and lay empty. She thought about that at night when she listened to Ry talking to his lieutenants in the room next to hers. The inn’s walls were thin; sometimes when he slept she could hear him breathing, and she thought about the rumors then, too. If the Galweigh Family was no more, what did she owe to its memory? Had the Sabirs overrun the Galweighs in the New Territories? In Galweigia? In the scattered cities and towns of Ibera? Had those distant Galweighs renounced their interest in Calimekka, or in her branch of the Family? She did not discuss the matter with Dùghall. She had a job to do, and any personal matters would wait until she had successfully completed it. Or died trying.
She had little success at that job, though, until she entered a gem shop on Amial Throalsday and started selling her story to the gauntest specter of a gem merchant she’d ever seen. “Hawk-Kin Trading Alliance offers you finest goods,” Kait was telling him. She leaned forward on his counter, simultaneously tucking her upper arms against her rib cage to deepen her cleavage, giving him a good opportunity to take a look. She wished she wasn’t so skinny—in general, men in Calimekka preferred plump women—but the stress of being in constant contact with Ry and not following her body’s desires had worn her to a stick-thin shadow of her already lean self. This particular merchant didn’t seem to mind, though. She was taking pains to keep her Imumbarra accent authentic, but from his glazed eyes and quickened breath, she figured she was probably wasting the effort. On him, anyway. His mournful gaze had never reached all the way up to her face.
The customer at the back of the store was straining to hear, too, though, so she stayed in character. “Goods from secret harbors, from our own places. Top quality, low prices, nothing like you get from anyone else. Best-best stuff. Dream-with-eyes-open smoke, firestones and filigree, fine caberra, worked terrapin-shell and durrwood incenses and perfumes, the best ivory and greenstone you ever see, excellent white nalle pelts. Artifacts and Ancients’ books, too, if you know anybody want that sort of thing.”
“And how much do I have to pay up front?”
Kait shook her head. “We small, you small. Right now I looking for big fish.” She winked at him. “You know any big fish you can send me to, if he buys from us then you just give us order and, like magic, the big fish gonna pay expedition cost for you. You no tell, we no tell.”
The man’s gaze finally rose from her breasts to her face, and he smiled broadly. “Really? You’d do that?”
“Sure-sure. We got our own ship, got our return cargo mostly ready, but we need big spender to pay supply costs and cover trade expenses. You know what I mean?”
He nodded. “You need an investor.”
“Yah. In-vess-tor. Deep pockets, new money . . . somebody who not minding take chances to get a nice return. He get good stuff . . . you not have to worry you tell your rich friends about us. They still be your friends after. But you help us, we help you.”
“Firestones, you say? And ivory and greenstone? I suppose I know a few people . . . they probably know a few people.”
“We make meeting, your people and my people, yes?” Kait had given him the bait, which he didn’t take. No interest in books or artifacts from before the Wizards’ War. But she’d heard the spy who was studying the goldwork in the long cabinet across the room catch his breath when she’d mentioned them.
She thought her best chance to flush the eavesdropper would be to leave, and not to leave any contact information with this merchant. So she told the man, “You think at what I say, you talk your friends. I come back in day, maybe two days, and if they interested, Hawk-Kin and your people meet someplace.”
He nodded. “Anyplace I could reach you to let you know earlier?”
She shook her head. “Easier for me find you than for you find me.”
“Well, then. I’ll look forward to seeing you again.” He said that mostly to her breasts, but Kait suspected he was telling it to the promise of firestones delivered without shipping costs, too.
She sauntered out into the street and heard the customer slip out the door behind her. She kept her pace jaunty and confident, but allowed herself to do a bit of gawking, the way she’d noticed most tourists did when they came to Calimekka. She didn’t want to go so quickly that he lost her before he worked up his nerve to approach her.
As she was staring up at the six-story stone apartment buildings that rose above the street-level shops, and admiring the waterspouts carved in the shape of leopards and pythons, his courage fired to the catching point.
He cleared his throat and tapped her elbow. A light tap, but insistent. She had already begun to learn things about him before she turned—things that made her dislike him. He smelled of deviousness, and he walked like a thief. But when they were face-to-face, she managed a polite smile. She took in his narrowed eyes, the shiftiness of his stance, and the way his smile never revealed his teeth.
“I meet you before?” she asked him.
“We haven’t been introduced. But I heard that you were looking for investors. For a trading run.”
“You heard that listening, eh, but I not talking to you. No one ever telling you it not a good thing listening to people talking each other? No one ever tell you if you do then you hearing things you not like? Eh?”
“Sorry I was eavesdropping. And really, I don’t think any large investor would begrudge you giving free shipping to the man who hooked you up with your major investors. That’s not necessarily an everyday practice, but it isn’t as uncommon as you might think. However . . .” He raised one finger and his smile broadened and became even oilier. “
How
ever, I believe that I can give you all the investors you need without you having to resort to cutting prices. If you would be willing to talk with me, I can offer more than you might imagine.”
How
ever, I believe that I can give you all the investors you need without you having to resort to cutting prices. If you would be willing to talk with me, I can offer more than you might imagine.”
She stopped and leaned against the wall of the shop beside her. People hurried by, glancing at her and the man and then looking away. The street was packed, the noise tremendous. She waited with her arms folded tightly across her chest until a peddler hawking his tin wares had rattled by and rounded the corner. Then she said, “So, then. I sure-sure love to fill my hold and get back to sea, but you don’t look like rich man to me.”
BOOK: Vengeance of Dragons (Secret Texts)
9.92Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
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