Immortal at the Edge of the World (19 page)

The drawing on the back of Abraham’s letter was crude, and full of notations that would probably make very little sense to most people. For me, it was something of a
eureka
moment because I’d heard this object described a very long time ago by someone—Hsu—with a flair for the poetic. It was possible he just had no word for it, so he described it as well as he could. Or he was being a pain in the ass on purpose.

That was probably it. He liked being a pain in the ass.

“I was told that if I held this against the sky and walked toward the star that wasn’t there I would step off the edge of the world.”

“That makes no sense.”

“It made no sense when I first heard it. With this drawing it makes a little bit of sense. This is called an astrolabe. Now sit down, and I’ll tell you the whole story.”

Chapter Twelve

If I had more than one lifetime to work with I could have built sufficient equity and standing to get the attention of the person Hsu needed to get the attention of. But I only had one lifetime, and even though it was the lifetime of a goblin who was already much older than he was supposed to be, it was still a limited one.

We were further limited by the expected lifespan of the person we were trying to attract, one Abraham bin Yasser, a Jewish merchant who, while still young, was nonetheless only likely to be approachable for another decade or so.

Let me back up. Hsu lost an object to Abraham and wanted it back. He seemed to think for whatever reason that Abraham still had the item and had not sold it because the nature of said item was unusual enough to warrant keeping. Hsu would not tell me what the object was, only dropping hints and wondering, I guess, if I was going to figure it out on my own. All I did know was it was small enough to be worn around a neck.

There were a large number of different ways to get the object back from Abraham, but all of those ways involved finding him and getting into the same room with him, and this was where we were running into a problem because unless you were doing business with Abraham bin Yasser, you weren’t going to be sitting down with him. He was the son-in-law of one of the most successful merchants in the Middle East, and undoubtedly the most successful unconverted one.

Converting to Islam was a very popular business decision during this period. If you had asked me at the time which religion would survive into the twenty-first century, I would have picked Islam before Christianity, and probably Hinduism, too. Because back then the Christian faith was a hot mess built on top of a Roman architecture that had already shown itself to not be all that tolerant to change, whereas in Islam nobody forcefully converted anybody, they just made it economically advantageous to do so. Converted Muslims paid lower taxes on bought and sold goods, so if you happened to be a merchant in a region that had fallen under the influence of Allah, it was in your best interest to bow to Mecca. I converted myself. It was like having coupons.

Anyway, Abraham’s family had not converted, but they didn’t have to because he and his father-in-law controlled the market on a number of rare East Indies spices, so if their taxes went up they just raised their prices to offset the loss. Since the people liked their spices, they rarely had a problem with taxation.

Abraham’s family—this was before the concept of companies, really—had a trade route that went from Indonesia by sea to India, over land to the other side of the Indian peninsula, by sea again to North Africa, and from there north to various parts of the Middle East. Their miniature commercial empire was seemingly impervious to political changes, religious disputes, or wars. If a region got too dangerous for one reason or another, Abraham just negotiated a different route.

In a lot of ways, then, he was one of the more impressive people nobody has ever heard of. For that period he and his family were something like geniuses.

Abraham bin Yasser was not an easy man to meet, however. He was constantly on the move, and his business dealings were intensely private matters. This made perfect sense to me. When I was a successful merchant in Carthage I guarded my list of suppliers very closely, too. It was just smart business.

But because of how successful he was, there were people in the world whose entire job consisted of trying to figure out where the man was going to be, and who he was going to be sitting down with, and when. And none of them were having much luck with this. Hsu and I, with almost nothing in the way of resources aside from our wits, had no chance of locating him at all. So the only obvious solution was to make Abraham want to come to us.

This meant remaking myself into a merchant important enough to attract his notice, which was, as I said, something I could do if I had a couple of lifetimes to spare. Since I didn’t, I did the next best thing—I stole someone else’s reputation.

*
 
*
 
*

Traveling along the Silk Road was not an incredibly safe thing to do, because the trade routes—there were several and they were all called the Silk Road—went through some pretty unkind territories full of raiding Mongol hordes and self-important warlords, people who thought of themselves as kings, and crusaders and bandits and the occasional dragon. So since by nature travelers along the trade routes had their valuables
with
them, it was in their best interest to surround themselves with for-hire freelancers, family, and anyone else who fit the description of someone they could trust with their lives. It was also in their best interest to know where the nearest Buddhist monastery was.

In the first regard, after Hsu and I agreed to work together—he because it was his idea, I because he had piqued my curiosity—the first thing on our agenda was to put together a band of trustworthy people.

We both had some people we could turn to, although technically very few of them were actual people. Hsu had two goblin friends—one male, one female—that owed him their lives for something that was never explained to me. The female was by her own definition an elf, but we didn’t hold that against her. I had a few humans who owed me favors, a friendly but suicidal vampire named Sven, and a succubus who called herself Indira. I don’t recall exactly how I became an acquaintance of Sven, only that I remember spending a lot more time than it was really worth trying to talk him out of staying up to watch the sunrise. Indira I remember very well. Not only was she fantastic to have around—for the sex, obviously—but she was the best recruiter I could have asked for when it came time to build the small army I would need just to get around.

But first I had to come up with a reason to have a small army, which was where the monasteries came in. Almost half the Silk Road—the part that came after what’s now Turkey if you’re heading east—was dotted by Buddhist monasteries. They were like the Denny’s of the ancient world. For a small donation, a traveler could get a meal and a place to stay, and a near-absolute guarantee of personal safety, because nobody shed blood in a holy place. Even if you weren’t a Buddhist, it just wasn’t done.

It was also a really fantastic place to get information.

Hsu and I spent several months loitering around three key monasteries that lay on cross routes between China, India, and the Turks. It was not ideal insofar as we were not going to be learning a lot of useful information about Abraham bin Yasser while among the monks. He wasn’t using the overland route for shipping. But it gave us lots of details on what kind of trade was going on in the regions where his influence could be felt.

It was through our mostly gentle questioning of the locals that we met Xuangang.

*
 
*
 
*

To say that he looked aggrieved when we first met him would be to undersell the degree of distress that marked his appearance that night in the monastery. We had been sitting with a large group of men, who we were pretty sure were full-time bandits when they weren’t enjoying the violence-free hospitality of the Buddhists, when Xuangang walked past us and took the most isolated part of the room for himself.

Hsu and I made for a pretty good team. He was much better versed in Eastern languages and customs than I was, which saved me about a hundred years of the practice needed to become fluent. (I am still not fully fluent in Chinese, because I had Hsu to speak for me.) I was more familiar with Western customs and had a lot more business experience to work with, and I knew a lot more about non-human cultures than just about anyone alive.

Between us we could speak familiarly with nearly anybody. If they were Westerners, I was a wealthy traveler and Hsu was my manservant or slave. If they were from the East, Hsu was a learned scholar and I was his pupil.

Xuangang entering the dining space alone was unusual enough to catch our attention. Most people on these roads traveled with friends, family, vassals, or employees. It just wasn’t safe to do otherwise. And inside the walls of the monastery everyone was equal, so it wasn’t likely he left the people he was with outside or something. And he was not dressed in a way one might expect a lone traveler to dress, which is to say it didn’t look like he was capable of independently defending himself. He had on the finery one would expect of a well-respected man from the emperor’s court. It’s difficult to describe how one
looked
well-respected, but it was possible. I think it was the combination of gold filigree, carriage, and general cleanliness.

More obvious than his station in life, it was clear he was in the midst of some species of misfortune.

We excused ourselves from the table of brigands—making note of everyone’s face as we stood, because it’s never a bad idea to keep a mental record of what the local robbers look like—and sat down next to the sullen Chinaman.

“Hello, friend,” Hsu greeted him in his native tongue. I knew basic greetings and a smattering of other words, so this I understood. Essentially, I could talk to someone in Chinese for about twenty seconds before I ran out of things to say.

Xuangang didn’t reply, or even look up from his rice. Hsu and I exchanged a glance, and then I tried.

“Everything all right?” I asked in Latin. And then in Hindi, “You appear troubled.”

He finally looked up, and studied us one at a time. “I am no one. Please leave me,” he said. Only he said it three times, in the three tongues we’d spoken.

“Clearly, you are a learned man,” I said. I stuck with Latin. “Why would such a man be traveling alone on roads such as these, in times such as this?”

“As I said, I am no one. My life was taken from me today. You speak now only to the earthly remains of a man once known as Xuangang.”

“You are very lively for a dead man,” Hsu said.

“The arrow that will fell me has already been loosed. There is nothing I can do to alter its course, and to step aside would be dishonorable. You speak to the dead.”

He was so depressed I felt like I should buy him a drink, except there wasn’t really any alcohol to be had in the monastery. Not unless you count rice wine, which I do not.

Hsu said, “We, too, are learned men, scholars such as yourself, and well versed in the ways of this route. Can we offer you any assistance?”

“I am a scholar, yes,” he said. He spoke it in Greek, though, which Hsu did not speak. “And you cannot help me.”

“These roads are not safe for one as studied as yourself,” I said, also in Greek. This caused him to raise an eyebrow, which was a tame expression of surprise.

Xuangang was young and gaunt, sporting a tiny moustache and the beginnings of a beard. His eyes flickered with intelligence but not necessarily wisdom, which comes more with age. He struck me in much the same way most recent college graduates do. He was full of information but had no applied knowledge.

“I know the roads are unsafe,” he said, switching back to Latin. “I have seen this for myself. But unless you two have an army lying in wait beneath your stools you have as much hope of aiding me as an ant in repelling a rainstorm.”

“We may well have an army, and insufficient room beneath our stools for them all. Why don’t you tell us what has befallen you?”

He looked us both up and down a few times before deciding he had nothing left to lose. And based on the story he told, he actually didn’t.

“I am the official representative of the great Fa Xi Han, of whom I am sure you have heard.”

We nodded heartily and looked impressed and silently agreed we had never heard of this person.

“Of course,” Hsu said. “What a great honor. Please continue.”

“It is the greatest honor.”

“Yes,” I said, hoping we didn’t have to discuss how great the honor was for very long.

“It was my greatest honor to take letters of introduction and a number of valuables to the court of the great Abbasid, and to negotiate matters of terrific import.”

This sentence raised many questions. First, the
valuables
in question could have been just about anything, but it was clear from looking at him that if there were a great many such valuables he no longer had them. A large quantity would take up a lot of space regardless of what those valuables happened to be. Metal—gold or tin—was the most portable wealth around, and it tended to be heavy enough to be noticeable if he had it on him. If he was coming from a Chinese court, the odds were decent the wealth in question was in the form of either silk or spices, both of which could travel great distances and not lose value, but were also very bulky. And foodstuff such as grain held less value, took up even more space, and didn’t do well in long bouts of inclement weather. The valuables, then, were no longer with him.