Kizra wrinkled her nose. Lecture time. Tinoopa was going sententious again. She was getting tired of being instructed, especially as her memory drained back. She loosed the strings on the arranga, set it on a table and moved to a chair.
Tinoopa rubbed at her arms and frowned at one of the windows. A raindrop splatted against the glass, then another and another. “We haven’t seen a strong storm yet, not the kind they call a kwangkular. Sound of that wind says this might be it. Too bad. Lasts a good week they say. No flying in that weather. Those two oogaluks might be stuck here for days. You’ve been shut up with the Matja most of the time, you don’t hear what the chal are saying. It’s only a matter of time, they’re saying. Pirs is better than most Irrkuyon, but he won’t stand up to his father, he never has except maybe when he courted the Matja. They’re taking bets how long he’ll last.” She glanced at the door, stopped talking.
MEMORY:
Arel the smuggler got to his feet. He was a small dark man with a bony sardonic face, fans of fine wrinkles about the outer corners of his eyes and his mouth. His long dark hair was pulled through a filigreed silver clasp at the nape of his neck and hung halfway down his back.
“What am I doing here?”
“You can bypass Goyo Security, get a lander down and off again unnoticed?”
“Oh, Shadow Shadow, you need to ask that? It’s my business.”
“I need a back door. Just in case.”
“Operating against one of the families, aren’t you?” His brow shot up.
She didn’t answer, figuring it was none of his business.
“You owe me danger money, then; those Goyo are tricky bastards.”
Aghilo came in, two maidservants following her with bedding and rolled up pallets. She waved Tinoopa and Kizra aside to give the girls room to make up the beds. “I’m going back to my room for the night. The door out there, chapa Tinoopa, you lock and bar it when we’re gone.” She twisted a key from the chatelaine on her belt, tossed it to Tinoopa. “I’ll knock and call out my name in the morning when it’s time for you to be up. Be very sure who’s out there, chapa Tinoopa, before you open the door. Use the peep to see if I’m alone. Do you hear me?”
“I hear, Aghilo chal.”
She died again in her dreams. Plunged down and down through fire and pain and crashed.
She woke sweating.
Tinoopa was getting up, smoothing her hair out of her face, shaking out her nightgown.
Someone was pounding on the outer door.
What… Kizra scrubbed at her eyes. There was a terrible urgency in that knocking, though it wasn’t as noisy as she’d first thought when it crashed into her dream. She kicked off the blankets, rolled from the pallet, and got to her feet. Lifting the front of her borrowed nightgown so she wouldn’t step on it and fall on her face, she followed Tinoopa into the anteroom.
The knocking continued; she could feel the desperation, the fear and anger in the woman on the other side of the door. Aghilo. What was happening?
After a quick look through the peep, Tinoopa turned the key, slapped the bar up, and tugged the door open.
Aghilo stumbled inside. Her face was drained of color, her mouth was working. She put out her hand, flattened it against the wall, and stood leaning into her braced arm while she caught her breath and stifled her panic.
After a moment she straightened, looked quickly from Tinoopa to Kizra. “You’d better get dressed,” she said. “There’s trouble.” She started past Tinoopa, but the Shimmarohi caught her arm.
“What happened?”
“Contract woman. She killed Rintirry, hung herself. I have to wake the Arring.”
“Wait, wait, just a minute. It’s barely light now, you’ve got plenty of time before the Artwa goes nova. Sit down.” Using her size and her grip on Aghilo’s arm, she maneuvered the smaller woman to, one of the benches and muscled her down. Then she stood with feet apart, hands on her hips. “How’d you find out?”
MEMORY:
The room was as stale and sordid as she’d expected; she felt a little sick when she saw it. She closed her eyes and told herself it didn’t matter. But it did. Arel put his hands on her shoulders. He was exactly her height, his mouth on a level with hers. She focused on that mouth, not daring to meet his eyes. “Give me a minute, Luv.” Whistling softly, he tossed the filthy bedding into a closet, brought out clean sheets. He made the bed with an expertise that had her smiling; he caught her at it and his whole body laughed. For a moment she couldn’t breathe.
He took an incense burner from his shoulder bag, filled and lit it. The scent of pines drifted to her, cool and clean. He brought out a pair of thick green candles, lit them and turned off the light.
The room was filled with flickering shadow, touched with magic. The outside world with its threats and dangers was banished for the moment.
“Come here,” he said.
Kizra collected Tinoopa’s clothes, brought them to her, then started pulling on her own clothing. When she was dressed, she dropped to the rug behind Tinoopa, where she could watch Aghilo but be more or less out of sight.
Aghilo twisted her hands around and around each other as Tinoopa was dressing. The sight of the Shimmarohi shaking out the nightgown and starting to fold it seemed to reassure her and she began talking. “Well, first thing I knew, Loujary chal was beating at my door, he’d gone into the Honor Suite to clear up and make sure things were right for when they woke, you know, warm the towels, pick up whatever was thrown about, kind of things they’d expect to have done and get…” she grimaced, “get cranky about if it isn’t. Anyway, P’murr let him in, said it’d been a quiet night, Rintirry hadn’t given him any trouble. Loujary said they talked some before he went in, this and that, he didn’t go into what they said except what I told you. Soon as he was inside, he twisted the rheostat way down and turned the lights on and went around picking up, getting things ready, you know. He looked in at the Artwa. Old man was sleeping. Snoring. He went in, picked up there, folded, set out. You know. Artwa didn’t stir, just kept snoring. He went in Rintirry’s bedroom.” She shuddered. “I couldn’t believe him, I had to go see.” She pressed her hand across her mouth, closed her eyes briefly, then forced them open. “I can’t forget…”
Tinoopa took her shoulders, shook her a little. “No time for that now. Listen, I need to know what it means for us. Chaps and chat, what do we have to do to protect ourselves?”
Aghilo squeezed her hands together, moving one over the other endlessly, the soft sound of skin on skin filling the tense silence. “Amurra bless, I’ve never seen worse, even…” she shook her head while her hands kept moving. “She cut his throat, that was first, I suppose. It had to be, that’s where the blood was… you could smell the blood all over the suite, I don’t see how Loujary didn’t, I suppose the door was shut then, shut it in… cut his head completely off and set it on the pillow, the eyes were open, it was like he was looking at you. And she cut him… ah… cut it off and put it in his hand like he was… ah… and she cut open his chest and took his heart out and put it down there where… ah… and the skin on the arms and legs, it was gone… ah… except for his hands and feet, it was like he was wearing gloves and slippers and… ah… she’d cut the skin she got in strips and braided it into a rope… ah… it must have taken her most of the night… ah… and when she was finished, she used that rope to hang herself… ah… from one of the bed posts, it’s a big bed, like the Matja’s, you’ve seen hers, carved like that, with posts holding curtains… it’s the drafts, come winter, it’s hard to heat the rooms, we don’t have that much fuel… ah… there’s coal in the mountains, but we’ve just started getting it out… she was naked, red hair hanging down to her waist, no blood at all, she’d washed it off, in the bathroom, bloody water and she’d oiled her body, smelled like… ah… I had to look… see everything…”