“Swearing by the ruler you betrayed? Not a good choice of oaths, I think.” Daikonas Vo experimentally lifted his blade until it hovered just a fingernail’s breadth from the boy’s eye, but the captain only wept. It seemed he truly had nothing more to say.
“Very well...” Vo began, then, with a fluidity learned only through long practice, snapped the knife across the room into Axamis Dorza’s throat. A good trick, Vo thought, but bad when you miss. The man’s hands flew to his neck, eyes wide with surprise. Gurgling, he sank to his knees.
“It had to be,” Vo said. “Be glad I give you a quick death, Captain. You would not have liked to find yourself in the hands of the autarch’s special craftsmen.”
Shrieking like a much younger child, the boy suddenly began to thrash in Daikonas Vo’s arms, trying to break away. Vo cursed his own inattentiveness—he had let his grip loosen when he threw the knife—but quickly managed to get the boy’s arm twisted behind his back again. He turned him then, put a boot in his backside, and shoved the youth’s head so hard into the table that the whole mass of oak tipped and turned. The boy was stunned but not dead. He lay bloody-headed in the broken crockery, weeping.
An instant later Vo was himself upended and knocked to the ground, a huge, red-smeared thing atop him like an angry mastiff. Dorza had not bled out as fast as Vo had thought he would, a misjudgment he was regretting already. Something smashed hard against his head, a blow he only partially managed to deflect with his forearm, and then the bloody face was right above his, eyes goggling with final rage and madness. Vo rolled so that he was on his side, then his hand went down his leg and another dagger came out of his boot. A moment later it was beneath the captain’s ribs, and the man’s bulk was jerking and stiffening even as Vo held him fast—as intimate as lovemaking, but somehow less distasteful. When the movement stopped, Vo rolled the corpse off and stood, wondering how he would get all the blood off his jerkin.
The boy was still on the floor, but he had drawn himself up onto his hands and knees, head wagging like an old dog’s, blood drizzling down the side of his face.
“Someday...” he said, “someday I’ll find you...and kill you.”
“Ah...Nikos, was it?” Vo wiped his dagger on the captain’s shirt before returning it to his boot, then tugged the other one loose from the gristle of the dead man’s throat. “I doubt it. I don’t leave enemies behind me, so there won’t be a someday, you see.” He took a few steps forward. Before the boy could pull away Daikonas Vo had his hair gripped tight, then slashed him beneath the throat like a pig held for slaughter.
Only now, as the boy wriggled in the spreading pool of red, did Vo hear the muffled sobbing of the children under the mattress, doing their best to be quiet but—understandably, given the circumstances—failing. He heaved up the heavy mass of the table and threw it on top of the pallet, then poured lantern oil on the floor and splashed it on the walls. He took a smoldering stick from the oven and tossed it over his shoulder as he went out the door. Flames had already begun to lick up the walls inside the house as he walked, swiftly but without obvious hurry, down the steep hill road.
So there’s a child with her, he thought. One of the boyeunuchs had disappeared from the Seclusion on the same night, but that escape had been linked only to the traitorous Favored Luian, not the girl he sought: Vo, like everyone else, assumed the boy had taken advantage of the confusion to run away, and now he was displeased with himself for making such an obvious but unwarranted assumption.
Well, if the child’s with her, it will make them that much easier to find. He could see yellow light gleaming fitfully on the roofs of the houses he was passing, which meant that up the hill the captain’s house must be burning well. Too bad about the children. He had nothing against children particularly, but he wanted no one knowing what he had questioned the captain about.
Yes, this might not be too difficult after all, he thought with satisfaction. Hiersol was full of girls and young women, but how many of them were traveling with a mute boy? Tracking down his quarry would be only a matter of time and effort, and Daikonas Vo had never been afraid of a little hard work.
12. Two Yisti Knives
When Zhafaris the Prince of Evening came to his manhood he became lord of all the gods. He took many wives, but highest among them were his nieces Ugeni and Shusayem, and I tell truth when I say they were as alike as two tamarind seeds. Soon both were heavy with the children of Zhafaris, but Ugeni was frightened and hid her children away, so that no one knew they had been born. However, Shusayem, her sister, brought forth her own children, Argal, Efiyal, and Xergal, and called them the heirs of Zhafaris.
Briony supposed it was possible for a person to feel more exhausted than she did at this moment, dirtier, more sodden with sweat, and less ladylike, but she could not quite imagine it.
I wanted to be treated like a boy, didn’t I? At the moment she was sitting on the ground sucking air, watching Shaso drink from a jar of watered wine. The old man had recovered some of his old bowstring-taut muscle during the days upon days they had been practicing; the sinews of his forearms writhed like snakes as he lifted the heavy jar. I didn’t want to be forced to wear confining dresses, or to be treated like a fragile blossom. Well, I’ve got my wish.
Thank you, Zoria, she prayed with only the smallest tinge of irony. Every day you teach me something new.
“Are you ready?” Shaso demanded, wiping his bearded mouth with the back of his hand. After keeping himself shaved and carefully trimmed all Briony’s life he had now let his whiskers and hair grow wild, and looked more than ever like some ancient oracle, the kind that had sailed across the sea on rafts to found the gods’ temples when Hierosol was little more than a fishing village.
She groaned and sat up. No doubt the old oracles had been just as hard-minded as Shaso. It explained a lot. “Ready, I suppose.”
“You have learned much,” he said when she was standing again. “But wooden sticks are poor weapons in many ways, and there are tricks that can only be learned with a true blade.” He squatted down and unfolded the leather bundle from which he had withdrawn the wooden dowels each day. Inside it lay four more objects, each wrapped in its own piece of oiled leather. “The first day we came here,” Shaso said, “I asked the boon of Effir dan-Mozan that I could choose among some of his trade goods. These were the best pieces he had.” He flipped open the wrappings, revealing four daggers, one pair larger than the other. The larger had curved crosspieces, the smaller barely any crosspieces at all. “They are Sanian steel, of excellent quality.”
Her hand stole toward the knives, but stopped. “Sanian?” “Sania is a country in the west of Xand. The Yisti metalworkers there are of Funderling stock, and make weapons that all Xandians covet. These four would cost you the price of a pair of warhorses.”
“That much?”
“Yisti weapons are said to be charmed.” He reached down and took one of the larger daggers in his big hand, balancing it on his palm. He pointed at the simple, elegant hilt. “Polished tortoiseshell,” he said. “Sacred to their god.”