Three, some priests had declared the dragon auspicious for the Regent; but certain others had been heard to say it was an omen of calamity.
Four, the whole rebel army had crossed the bridge disguised as mercenaries and peasants and tradesmen, and was waiting some signal, when it would launch an attack on the camp and on the headquarters.
"One could wish," Shoka said, chin on fist, listening to the report from downstairs. "But not likely. I had a look. They're damn careful who passes."
"I could," Taizu said, lifting a brow, more cheerful, having glowered through the reports about demons and dragons. He knew how she would do it, by that look, remembering the basket. Probably the men had more fantastical notions.
"We'll manage without that," he said. "We'll know when we need to." They were careful naming names and details even here, in guarded privacy—because bad habits, he had told the men, otherwise encouraged deadly slips in public. "I'm going up to the bridge tonight."
"Us," Taizu said.
"You're too damned obvious."
Taizu held a lock of hair across her upper lip. He scowled at her.
"A boy can't grow a mustache like that."
She dropped the hair. "Basket," she said.
"The hell."
"Well, I'm not staying here!"
She had gotten all too easy with the men. She sat now sulking, he could tell it past the bandages, the all too conspicuous bandages.
"You're too easy to describe, wife. You want to see all of our heads on Lungan gate?"
She said nothing. She just looked at him. And then he worried, seeing her trekking right along the street behind him.
"We'll think of something," he said. In fact the thought of her across town and alone worried him—Taizu with her fear of cities, her inexperience in such simple things as walking through traffic.
None of which would stop her once she made her mind up. Nothing ever had.
"Someone's in the hall," Jian said. A board had creaked on the stairs, and there were quick footsteps.
"Eidi," Chun said as Jian sprang up to get the door: Eidi was the one of them on watch.
A thump at the door, a low voice: Jian unlatched the door and let Eidi in.
"Captain," Eidi panted, with a bow. "They're saying the Regent's going to give a speech, in the camp, to prove he's alive. That everybody's supposed to report in. That we're—that the rebels are in sight the other side of the river. That the Emperor's come in and he's going to be in the camp with the Regent."
That last was the bit that surprised him—that Beijun was alive. That the Regent made the move he did—
"Ghita's making his move," he muttered, and rubbed his neck, under a greasy fall of hair. "And our friends could be here a day early; or scouts could've spotted their camp; or engaged them; or Ghita knows damn well where they are and he's hoping to get us to move on a fake report and commit ourselves too early."
Worried looks surrounded him. "What do we do?" Taizu asked.
"I'm thinking," he said. He was, desperately—sat there with arms on knees, staring at the age-grayed boards of the floor, and figuring how to establish reliable contact with Reidi.
Dry, age-grayed boards.
"It's our turn," he said smugly—he could not help it. Things had gone amazingly well, considering he had improvised continually. And gotten the targets out into the open.
Maybe, he thought, considering it was Chiyaden at stake, the complacent gods were waking up.
Or maybe a certain old monk was praying them out of bed.
In his younger, more pious days he would have worried about a thought like that.
It looked like a parade, the general flow of soldiers toward the camp this late afternoon, all carrying their gear and their bedrolls; groups on foot and groups on horseback—but for a parade, Shoka thought, it had a scarcity of cheering onlookers. What citizens were on the streets or looked on from windows or shopfronts, just stared glumly at the forces that were, ostensibly, their own.
They had the remaining bow—Chun carried it and the quiver wrapped in the sole sleeping mat that had covered it on the way from the Peony to the Felicity.
Only blankets otherwise: everything else was still at the Peony. They were a poor-looking company that trekked up the street in the tail of the afternoon.
A gong crashed in the distance. All up and down the street soldiers looked up from their conversations and their preoccupations, and the heads of townsfolk turned, everything in the city attentive to that one sound.
"Must be Ghita," Shoka said, and after a moment more of walking: "Bringing the Emperor into camp. Where assassins can get at him. Or we can. It's a trap. Both ways it's a trap—to draw us out early and to draw us into Ghita's reach."
A few more paces.
"So what will we do?" Taizu asked.
The summons to the camp. The Emperor for bait.
Hell.
Chapter Twenty-one
A narrow lane cut in on the street near the market, like any of a score such alleys, except its clutter of refuse and broken shutters. It went in the general direction of the camp and some of the drift of soldiers toward the summons might take that darker, winding shortcut behind the riverfront buildings. Shoka took a glance back down the street, saw that a few bands still followed them, but the traffic was thinning.
So they took that way. And there was no one behind them yet to notice, he made sure of that, when they took a lane back north again, a twisting gut of a street that cut farther south, in the long run, just about the time it got to the vicinity of the camp.
The men were doubtless impressed. Himself, he only knew the lay of the town, a memory of maps—years ago—that the streets here tended to a diagonal, that the Old Emperor in his youth had seized a row of warehouses fronting the harbor and bricked up its windows and its harborside doors, as cheaper than building a thirty-foot wall.
And any street in this quarter that did not go through, ran up against that barrier, the northern wall of the square riverside enclosure that was the market in peacetime and the gate-garrison in anxious times, and that wall was the sealed face of old warehouses and brothels.
But the tenants had moved back in again—at least the warehouses. The brothels and the taverns sought more trafficked places. The city's poor nestled in the decay of the neighborhood's whorehouses.
"There's the wall," Shoka said, nodding up toward the thirty-foot face of buff stone that sealed off the end of the street between two leaning ramshackle apartments, past a tangle of hanging laundry and illicit built-ons before it became again the back wall of those buildings.
As the hammer of drums and the sound of trumpets announced an imperial arrival on the other side, and the poor folk on this side looked with fright at a motley group of soldiers where no soldiers would tend to come, and scuttled out to grab children and get doors and shutters between themselves and trouble.
"Get that door," Shoka said, as a girl, baby in arms, ran for a door a woman held. Chun and Wengadi vaulted the porch railing and bashed the door out of the woman's hands as Shoka came up the steps.
"Please," he said, in the northern accent, and bowed with utmost politeness to the terrified woman. "We're after the loan of your upstairs. Please."
Eyes widened. The terror was still there. But there was a different look to it.
"Ye're with Saukendar. . . ." As if that was no bad thing.
"Here." Taizu closed her fist around a gold amulet she wore, part of the mercenary's gaud, and took it off over her head. "Get! You can get killed around us! Go! Get clear! Get everyone out of here!"