The Assassins of Tamurin (18 page)

We had five instructors, of whom Mistress Ipip was the only woman. Like Nilang, they were of the race called the Taweret, from the Country of Circular Paths. I believe all five were related, although I never understood exactly how, because they calculated kinship differently from us Durdana. Cousins appeared to be more important kin to them than brothers or sisters, and uncles and fathers seemed indistinguishable.

These five were, in fact, the followers whom Nilang had brought to Chiran several years previously, when Mother gave her sanctuary from her enemies. She was related in some manner to both Mistress Ipip and Master Aa, and they and the other three were devoted to her. Tossi told me they’d all been condenmed to death at home and that Mother had offered them sanctuary and protection in exchange for their service.

At least, this was what Tossi said. But I remembered, or thought I remembered, that Mother had obscurely threatened Nilang on that fever-ridden night when I saw the Quiet World, and that there might be more to the arrangement than Tossi let on.

But then I told myself I’d misheard Mother’s words, or more likely imagined them in my sickness. It was not possible, I thought, that Nilang would serve Mother unwillingly, for surely not even a Despotana could place such a powerful sorceress under duress.

Nilang spent a lot of time at Three Springs, for she was the chief instructor there, and this explained why she used to vanish from Repose for such long periods. I was always nervous around her because of the wraiths, and I wasn’t the only one who felt this way ; none of us, even Tossi, was ever fully at ease in Nilang’s presence.

We all had to learn to recognize her sendings. They were eerie, especially since the voices did not come through our ears but seemed rather to emanate from within our heads. The first waming of one was a tingling at the back of the neck and a numbness of the lips, after which we would perceive the manifestation.

This was weirder than it sounds, because of the caprices of the entities she employed. Once I was confronted by a fringed salamander that took on a child’s face, delivered Nilang’s words, and scurried away. The things were capable, however, of bearing only the simplest messages; they were like those southem birds that can leam to imitate, but not understand, a few words of human speech. As a result, messages of more than a simple phrase had to be committed to paper, and for this we learned various Taweret codes and ciphers.

Sendings were useful, though, and one day, egged on by the rest of us, Kidrin asked why we students couldn’t leam to do them ourselves. At this, the sorceress gazed silently at the poor girl until she began to look quite frightened. Then Nilang said, “Because none of you has the talent, and even if you had, you would need twenty years to learn it, as I did.”

I soon learned that Nilang was versed in much more than sorcery. In order to survive in their turbulent realm, Taweret lords spied with feverish intensity not only on their enemies but also on their allies and their rulers. Those who prospered did so by constructing vast and intricate webs of observers, agents, double agents, and assassins. Nilang, a cousin of such a magnate, had become highly skilled in such clandestine work, and she and her five companions had served him with their own special skills of combat, concealment, treachery, and subterfuge.

Of course, Mother was no stranger to spying—no Despot was—but Taweret practices were far more sophisticated than those of the Durdana. So Mother recast her methods according to the Taweret mold and Nilang’s advice, and thus the Midnight School was bom.

Our studies were interwoven with rigorous physical training, but strength and endurance were merely die foundation of our craft. As the months passed, I learned to make fire with a rawhide thong and three sticks, to take game with snare and bow, and to eat well in a winter forest. I learned to climb sheer rock walls using my fingertips, toes, knees, and elbows; to walk along a rope fifty feet above the ground; to use an inflated sheep’s bladder to support myself through a long swim. I could throw a hunting javelin or a climbing grapnel and almost never miss my target, although Dilara, somewhat to my chagrin, never missed at all.

We also became adept in the Taweret modes of fighting without weapons. There was nothing honorable or fair about this form of combat, the ideal being to strike lethally from ambush. Surprise and speed were of the essence: a foot broke a leg; an elbow, a rib; a stiffened hand crushed a windpipe.

Weapons were not neglected, however. Many Durdana women, especially those whose husbands spent months away from home as mariners or traders, had swords or spears in the house and knew how to use them. But our training went far beyond that. We learned the long knife, throwing knife, short sword, short halberd, long spear, bow, quarterstaff, and others. Some of those others were quite strange, being Taweret devices: weighted chains, fighting sticks, the hand trident, and clawed gloves. I was good at chain work and delighted in tangling my opponent at the knees, sweeping her off her feet, and finishing her off with the edge of my hand.

But all this training was a tool, not an end in itself. Nilang taught us that the real foundations of our success must be concealment and deception, not combat. If we had to use our fighting skills, it meant an enemy had detected us, and this was next door to failure. Being detected was not, as Nilang put it,
elegant,
even if we got away unscathed. We would have exchanges like this with her:

“Kidrin! What is the pinnacle of elegance in our profession?”

“Mistress Nilang, it is as follows. That we act without being detected, so that the enemy does not know who has carried out the attack against him. He is befuddled and does not know whom to blame.”

“Wrong! You are lax in your application! It is that the enemy does not know that there has
been
an attack, until he discovers that his strength is dispersed, his defenses nullified, and that he is suddenly in the hands of his enemy.” She tumed to me. “Kidrin’s position, however, has an element of virtue. Lale! Tell us why.”

I said, “Because, in the world as it is, the pinnacle is the ideal and therefore difficult to achieve. Thus, while we should strive for the ideal, we must not always disdain the less elegant solution. Through reaching too high, one invites failure.”

“Well put. In other words, if there is no paved road up the mountain, we must make do with the sheep track.”

She also taught us that men were particularly vulnerable to young, attractive women. They could easily be induced to boast about their knowledge and power and in doing so reveal what we wished to discover. And since men did not normally perceive females as dangerous, even those who were well guarded against assassination would often let a woman approach within killing range. But achieving this might, she wamed, involve some erotic dalliance.

This aroused giggles from those of us who had fluttered over the young soldiers of the Heron Guard and the junior palace clerks, and scowls from those, like Dilara, whose pasts had given them a distaste and contempt for men. Back at Repose, Kidrin and several others had clearly enjoyed male attention, but I think it was their power over the men they enjoyed, not the attention itself, because they never let things go very far—^not that they could have, for our tutoresses had always watched us very closely, and Mother kept a vigilant eye on us as well. As for my opinion on the matter, it was simple: I would never leap into any man’s bed unless I was doing so for a very good reason, and I would leap out of it just as fast if the reason vanished.

A more congenial subject was deception. People usually see what they expect to see, instead of what is really in front of them, and we helped this tendency along with disguises of appearance, stance, action, and voice. For me, with my flair for acting, this was wine and meat. I was also a very good mimic, and I used to scare the other girls by sneaking up behind them and screeching at them in Nilang’s voice and accent, a trick that Dilara found excruciatingly funny.

Along with everything else, Nilang taught us about poisons. She had a plot of ground near the littie orchard in the Lower Terrace in which she grew various plants. Some were native, but others were not; I suppose she had carried their seeds with her when she fled her homeland.

Nilang’s garden was an odd place. It was not fenced, but no rodent or insect ever touched a leaf or stem of it, and even the bees, protected though they were by the Goddess, would not go near some of the flowers. One especially subtle poison was prepared from the root of one bush and the sap of another; either alone was harmless, but if consumed together they killed swiftly. A twist was that you could administer the two ingredients some time apart—at breakfast and at the noon meal, for example. If you did this, the symptoms were of a failure of the heart, so that the poisoning might go unsuspected.

As the months passed and young untrained women arrived, older trained women departed to begin their clandestine careers. Mother placed a few, quite openly, as tutoresses in prominent families, representing them as recent graduates of Repose while concealing their time at Three Springs. But most she sent to live quietly in the cities along the Pearl River, as sandal makers, public scribes, seamstresses, glass and pottery merchants, basket weavers, and the like. Their lack of family connections might cause some neighborhood comment, but so many bloodlines and clans had been fractured since the Partition that such unattached women were common. Furthermore, we were trained not to attract attention, and to deflect it if anyone became too interested in us. Finally, each of us memorized a false personal history, to which we could turn if we needed to conceal our connection with Mother.

It was through us that Mother knew so many secrets, and she used that knowledge both to enrich herself and to extend her power. She knew in advance when to buy cheap and sell dear, and thus acquired secret control of a dozen trading firms up and down the Pearl River and along the western seacoast. She used us to find out who in the Despots’ families and in the magnate clans were most hostile to the Sun Lord, and these she helped toward greater power, sometimes by removing others who stood in their way. My Three Springs sisters were adept at causing the accidents and illnesses that accomplished this, but more often they simply arranged for the local authorities to do Mother’s work for her. Nobody was more suspicious than a Despot, and forged documents, with some false evidence and a little judicious peijury, can lead the most upright of men to the scaffold.

The daughters she married off directly from Repose were also her tools, though not wittingly. Once in a while a Three Springs graduate might make a sisterly visit to such a wife, and by careful questioning find out about certain legal, political, or financial matters. Sometimes the wives could be induced to influence their husbands in directions useful to Mother. Some of the husbands had tastes above their income, and if the wife could negotiate a loan from Mother’s coffers ... well, so much the better, but the loan would never be quite paid off and the man would be firmly in Mother’s debt, and in her grip, thereafter.

Such were the skills we learned at the Midnight School. All were directed to one purpose: to protect our home and our family in a world that grew more dangerous every day. For us, in our innocence, that purpose justified an unthinking obedience to Mother; we never thought to ask whether we
ought
to be doing these things, or whether we might be better off doing something else. Fear of Nilang’s wraiths was only a small part of it; we served Mother because we wanted to, and because we loved her. It was almost impossible for us to imagine doing anything else. So we were all perfectly loyal, until Adrine came up the mountain.

She arrived at Three Springs about six months after I did, but she was no longer the self-effacing, nondescript girl who had always known the right answers in class. Her skin had cleared, her hair had a new gloss to it, and her figure had become more womanly. She was also more vivacious, at least for her. I never got to know her, though, because she was at the Midnight School for so short a time—^less than two hands, I think.

By chance, the incident happened while Nilang was away at Repose. Dilara, Neclan, Tulay, and I had been sent into the forest for three days, to test our winter survival skills, and when we tmdged back through the gate at Three Springs we found uproar, or as much uproar as Tossi would permit.

The instant we entered the Lower Terrace, Master Aa and Instmctor Shefenwep stopped us, told us not to talk to anybody, and escorted us to the little room from which Tossi managed the school’s business. Then they left. Tossi stood behind her worktable and scrutinized us carefully. Her face revealed little, but I sensed that she was very angry indeed, and almost as alarmed.

She said, “When did you last see Adrine?”

The four of us, dumbfounded, looked at her and then at one another. Impatiently, Tossi repeated, “When? Lale! Answer me!”

My confusion grew. We seemed to be under some suspicion, and I couldn’t imagine why. “The morning we left,” I replied. “She was eating breakfast.”

“Did you talk to her?”

“No. She never talks much. You know how she is.”

"‘Do
I?” Tossi snapped. “Tulay, when did you last see her?”

The same thing: at breakfast. That was the way of it with all four of us, and we told Tossi so. I was alarmed but also a little angry at being treated with such suspicion.

Finally Tossi said, “And you didn’t meet her in the forest? You didn’t help her?”