The room, as we’d hoped, was occupied. The occupant stood in the precise center of the little room—cell, really—and stared at us anxiously. He was, I judged, not much past ten or twelve. Dark-haired, dark-skinned, brown-eyed, clad in silken jade-green jodhpurs and soiled lime-colored tunic; two months had played havoc with all his finery. He was thin, a little gaunt, but still had both arms, both legs, his head. Rez’s tanzeer, it appeared, didn’t want to injure Hafiz’s heir, only to arrange a more equitable trade alliance.
And now the leverage was gone.
“Here, Dario.” Del, smiling encouragingly, reached under a couple of layers of silken harem robes and pulled out more clouds of the stuff. Orange. It dripped from her hands: a woman’s robes. “Put these on. Use the hood and modesty veil. Walk with your head down. Stay close to me and they’ll never know the difference.” Her warm smile flashed again. “We’re getting you out of this place.”
The boy didn’t move. “Hamidaa’n tells us women are abominations, unclean vessels placed upon the earth by demons. They are the excrescence of all our former lives.” Dario spoke matter-of-factly in a thin, clear voice. “I will touch nothing of women, speak to no women, admit nothing of women into my thoughts. I am khemi.”
After a moment of absolute silence in which all I could hear were the rats scraping in the wall and Neesha’s breathing close behind me, I looked at Del.
She was pale but otherwise unshaken. At least, I thought she was. Sometimes you can’t tell, with her. She can be cold, she can be hard, she can be ruthless—out of the circle as well as in. But she can also laugh and cry and shout aloud in an almost childish display of spirits too exuberant to be contained.
She did none of those things now, but I thought, as I watched her looking at the boy, she had never met an opponent such as this son of the Hamidaa’n. And I thought, She is at a loss for what to do and how to answer for the first time in her life.
Slowly I squatted down in the cell. I was eye to eye with the boy. I pulled down the veil so he could see the beard stubble and know I was not a eunuch. “Choices,” I said casually, “are sometimes difficult to make. A man may believe a choice between life and death is no choice at all, given his preference for staying alive, but it isn’t always that simple. Now, something tells me you’d like very much to get out of here. Am I right?”
His chin trembled a little. He firmed it. “My father will send men to rescue me.”
“Your father sent us to rescue you.” I didn’t bother to tell him his khemi father had no idea one of my partners was a woman.
Neesha spoke quietly. “A choice, Dario. Come with us now and we’ll take you to your father, or stay here in this stinking rat-hole.”
Something squeaked and scrabbled in the wall behind the boy. I couldn’t have said it—or timed it—better.
Dario looked down at his bare feet sharply. Like the rest of him, they were dirty. But they also bore torn, triangular rat bites.
I closed a hand over one thin shoulder, picking up Neesha’s theme. “Choices, Dario, are sometimes easy to make. But, once made, you have to live with them.”
He was shaking. Tears gathered in his eyes. Teeth bit into his lower lip as he stared resolutely at me, ignoring Del altogether. “Hamidaa’n tells us women are abominations, unclean vessels—”
He stopped talking because I closed his mouth with my hand. I am large. So is my hand. Most of Dario’s face disappeared beneath my palm and fingers. “Enough,” I told him pleasantly. “I have no doubts you can quote scripture with the best of them, khemi, but now is not the time. Now is the time for you to make your choice.” I released him and rose, gesturing toward Del and the silks.
Dario scrubbed the heel of a grimy hand across an equally dirty face. He stretched the flesh all out of shape, especially around the eyes—an attempt to persuade imminent tears to go elsewhere immediately. He caught a handful of lank hair behind an ear and tugged, hard, as if hoping that pain would make the decision itself less painful. I watched the boy struggle with his convictions and thought him very strong, if totally misguided.
Finally he looked up at me from fierce brown eyes. “I will walk out like this. In these clothes.”
“And be caught in an instant,” I pointed out. “The idea here, Dario, is to pass you off as a woman—or at least a girl—because otherwise we don’t stand a chance of getting you out.” I glanced sidelong at Del; her silence is always very eloquent. Neesha also offered nothing. “Decide, Dario. We can’t waste any more time on you.”
He flinched. But he made his decision more quickly than I’d expected. “You hand me the clothes.”
That annoyed the hoolies out of me. “Oh, I see—from my hands they’re cleaner?” I jerked the silks from Del’s hand and threw them at Dario. “Put them on. Now.”
He allowed them to slither off his body to the ground. I thought he might grind them into the soiled flooring, but he didn’t. He picked them up and dragged them over his head, sliding stiff arms through the sleeves. The silks were much too large for him, but I thought as long as we stuffed him among us, it might work.
“Now,” I said, and Neesha and I each grabbed an arm and hustled Dario out of the cell right behind Del. We reached the nearest exit. I leaned on the door and it grated open, spilling sunlight into the corridor—and came face to face with six large eunuchs. Armed eunuchs.
“Hoolies,” Neesha muttered, freeing his sword even as I did.
Chapter 9
FOR A MOMENT I THOUGHT MAYBE, just maybe, we might fool the eunuchs. But I’d dropped my face veil for Dario. No doubt I was not a eunuch. They each drew a sword and advanced through the door as we gave way into the corridor.
I said, “I think our luck just ran out.”
“Something like,” Del agreed, and parted the folds of her silken robes to yank her own sword free.
I shoved Dario behind me, toward Neesha, nearly slamming the child into the wall in an effort to sweep him clear of danger. I wasted a moment more tearing the no-longer-necessary silks from my body.
Six to three. Not bad odds, when you consider Del and I are worth at least two to one when it comes to sword-dancing, probably more like three to one. Neesha was close. Sword fighting, however, is different, and it showed as the first eunuch pushed past Del to engage me and discovered discounting Del was as good as discounting life. He lost his.
I heard Dario’s outcry behind me. I spared him a glance. He was fine with Neesha; my son, bless him, had automatically assumed the duty of keeping the boy blocked from the eunuchs. Dario, peering around Neesha, stared gape-mouthed, in shock, at Del. Grimly I smiled as Del engaged another eunuch while the remaining four came at me. It was my duty to keep them from reaching Neesha.
When involved in a fight that may end your life at any moment, you don’t have much time to keep tabs on what anyone else is doing. It is deadly to split your concentration. And yet I found mine split thrice. There was Dario, of course; I was certain the eunuchs wouldn’t hurt him, but it was entirely possible he might not duck a sword swipe meant for me. But there was also Del, and Neesha. I knew better than to worry about Del—she’d proved her worth with a sword already, even as she did again. So I didn’t worry about Del, exactly, but I did keep an eye on her just to make sure she wasn’t in any trouble. I’d learned that was all right in the parlance of our partnership; often enough, and even now, she did the same for me. It’s an equality two sword-dancers must share if they are working together in the circle. Ours was an equality fashioned by shared danger and shared victory, in the circle and out of it. And I’d learned that, in the circle, in the sword-dance, because of Del, gender no longer mattered.