The Assassins of Tamurin (54 page)

“Do so. I’ll leave here after you’ve gone.”

She stepped aside to let me go. I was very alert, but she made no hostile move, and I found myself outside the gate in the cold sunhght.

It was later than I’d thought, mid-aftemoon. I retumed to the govemment compound, neither hurrying nor dawdhng, and asked if the Sun Lord had retumed. But he hadn’t; he was still outside the walls with the army. So I trudged over to the stables and ordered a mount to be saddled, and then I went to the villa and up to our bedchamber. The servants had lit a brazier, and with the sun pouring in as well, the room was pleasantly warm. I got my cosmetic box from my traveling chest, sat on the edge of the bed, and opened the hd. I’d hidden the double poison in plain sight, among my vials of scent.

I knew what I must do and also what must happen to me afterward, unless I took precautions. Nilang’s presence at the Aviya mansion had reminded me of that, if I needed a reminder. Her daughters would come for me and I was in no mind to suffer what Adrine had suffered. I would kill myself first.

I had no doubt I could do so, yet I felt that I ought to commit myself, as one commits one’s fate to the sea by saihng out of harbor. So I took up one of the vials, broke the seal, and drank the venom. It was oily but almost tasteless, with just a hint of citrine. Nevertheless I choked a Uttle getting it down. My eyes watered and I wiped them on my sleeve, but I was almost sure I wasn’t crying.

I reckoned that, to ensure my death, I had to swallow the other dose before the second hour of the dusk watch. That meant I had to keep the second vial with me, and it must therefore seem to be other than it was. Because it aheady appeared to be scent, I would perfect the Ulusion; I unsealed it and added a tiny drop of Blue-Tinted Cloud from one of my perfume vials. A sniff told me the method had worked.

I resealed the waxed stopper over the brazier, sUpped the vial into my belt pouch, and left the villa. My horse was ready; I mounted, clattered out into the street, and headed for the Gate of Double Happiness. I had never seen a city as deserted as Gultekin, every boulevard and avenue lying empty. Had I been in a normal state of mind it would have been eerie and sinister, but in my present state I thought Uttle of it.

The city gate still stood open. The sentry captain recognized me and asked if I wanted an escort; I told him I didn’t and rode through. And there, spread out before me on the gently sloping plain, lay the war camp of the Army of Durdane, aU ditches and palisades and spindly wooden watch-towers and tents. The men had been building the camp for days, and now they’d moved in. From this base, tomorrow at dawn, they would move out to fight the Exiles.

I looked into the distance. Some three miles to the east, its crest visible above the paUsades, was a low ridge. Lying across this crest was a dark shadow, like the shadows of clouds. But there were no clouds, and I reaUzed it was a vast mass of horsemen. Ardavan had come.

I asked a passing cavalry captain if he’d seen the Sun Lord, and he told me that Terem had gone north toward the river. I followed, riding across the dry brown winter turf and the half-melted mud churned up by tens of thousands of men. Terem wouldn’t like this warm weather, and neither would Ardavan. They both needed hard, frozen ground for their horsemen.

I found him by the Jacinth. There was a castella there, and the engineers had roughly repaired its gates and ramparts. Terem was using the topmost floor of the keep as an observation post and headquarters. He wasn’t especially surprised to see me, and neither were the other half dozen officers present, even though I’d walked in on a staff conference. During the invasion of Lindu I’d acquired a reputation for audacity and impudence; despite the grinmess of the situation, a couple of the younger officers smiled surreptitiously.

“I wondered how long it would be before you tumed up,” Terem said. Before I could speak, he took my arm and dragged me to the narrow window. “Look there, on the ridge. He’s already set up his headquarters. It’s right under those banners. The white splash, that’ll be his tent.”

“I see it,” I agreed. “My lord, there’s something I have to tell you.”

My tone must have stmck him, because he released my arm and looked into my eyes. “What’s the matter, Lale?” “May I tell you alone, my lord?”

It was a difficult moment. The enemy was almost at our throats, and here was the Sun Lord’s Inamorata asking him for his precious time. The smiles vanished and I saw Terem waver, almost annoyed enough to dismiss me.

I could blurt out everything, but I didn’t want to reveal, in front of his men, how utterly he had been duped. “My lord,” I whispered, “I beg you.”

“Continue without me,” he said to the others, and we went through a low doorway onto the castella rampart. I made sure the door was closed behind us. There was nobody on the wall walk, but on the distant ridge the shadows were spreading like spilled oil. There were so many of them. “Are you ill?” he asked. “You don’t look at all well.” ‘Terem,” I said, “a woman my age, named Dilara, is going to try to kill you before moming. Don’t sleep at the villa. Keep a ring of guards around you at all times. She won’t have to get close to you to do it. She never misses with a throwing knife. All she’ll have to do is see you. And the knife will be envenomed.”

He stared at me for a long time. Then he said, “Lale, I know you’re an actress, but this is too much. What in the name of Father Heaven do you think you’re playing at?” “You know me better than that, Terem.”

Alarm awakened in his face, and a terrible apprehension. “How do you know this?” he asked.

“I’m a spy,” I said. I felt as if I were speaking lines. “Makina Seval sent me to Kuijain to become your lover. I’ve been telling her everything you intend to do. I told her you were going to invade Lindu, and I think she told Ardavan, and that’s how he stopped you at Bara. And now she’s ordered your assassination, so that Ardavan will win tomorrow.”

He still couldn’t quite believe me. But then his expression changed, and I knew he’d seen that I was neither mad nor deluded and that this horror I spoke was the truth.

“You,” he said slowly, “you’ve been betraying me all this time?”

“Yes. Utterly.”

After a long silence, during which I watched Ardavan’s host flood slowly across the distant ridge, he said, “So good an actress. I never doubted you for a moment. Not even Halis doubted you.”

“I was well trained,” I told him. “It took years. The Despotana has been at this for a long time.”

“Why? How does an Exile victory benefit her?”

“She hates you,” I said, “and the Chancellor, and many others in Bethiya. I don’t know why she wants Ardavan to win, unless it’s for that. Or maybe it’s something else. It could be anything. I think she’s mad.”

Terem shook himself, as if a nightmare gripped him and he struggled to awaken from it. ‘Tell me,” he rasped, “why I shouldn’t kill you where you stand.”

“Kill me after I’ve told you everything I can. It’s not just me and Dilara who work for the Despotana, Terem. She has people everywhere.”

“And now you’ve betrayed her, as well as me. Why should I trust you?”

“I’ve been on the wrong side,” I said wearily. I didn’t want to explain myself. I couldn’t, not in the time we had. “I realized it too late. Please, Terem. Do what you like with me. But protect yourself.”

“This Dilara. Why should I fear a woman so much?” “You don’t know what she’s capable of. She was trained as an assassin by Taweret fighting adepts. If she stood here instead of me, you’d be dead by now.”

His expression, which had already passed from disbelief to shock, was now stark with fury. “You’ll tell me everything. And you’ll tell Halis, too.”

“Halis will have to hear it from you, Terem. There’s a curse on me for betraying the Despotana. I won’t live long past sunset.”

There was another long silence. During it, he     somehow mastered his rage, a thing few men could     have done after such an injury. At length he said, “Why have you betrayed me, Lale? I thought you were on my side. How did she make you do such things?”

“It was because I loved her. She was my mother. I thought she loved me back. But she doesn’t, and she never did. I betrayed you, yes, but she betrayed me. She murdered Merihan. She used Dilara to poison her. Dilara herself told me that.”

He passed a hand over his eyes. “Merihan, too?”

“Yes. It was to clear my path to you.”

“Did you know my wife was to be killed?”

“I swear I did not. I didn’t find out about her murder until yesterday. But you didn’t know everything about your Surina.” I took a deep breath. I had told Ilishan I wouldn’t reveal the truth, but what was one more treachery among so many? “Merihan wasn’t of Aviya blood, she was a secret adoption. And she was my sister. The Despotana always knew she was my kin, but she kept it from me. So you see, Makina Seval had Dilara murder my only sibling.”

He glowered at me. “You’re mistaken. Or you’re lying. Merihan was an Aviya.”

“Ask Ilishan. He told me she was adopted, and he intends to tell you the same. But think, Terem. Why am I so like Merihan? It’s because I’m her twin. The Despotana knew about me a long time ago, and plotted to put me in Merihan’s place. She hoped you’d see in me the one you lost. And you did.”

He hit me backhanded across my cheek. It was a hard blow, hard enough to make my ears ring, and it hurt. But it was far less than I deserved and far less than I must still suffer.

“And I thought,” he said, “that you loved me.”

I laughed. It made my face hurt even more. “That’s the terrible part, Terem. I do. Why else do you think I’ve told you all ¿lis now? I could have betrayed you and lived. Now I’ve betrayed
her,
so I’m going to die.”

“Ah.” His mouth was a cold, disbelieving line. “From this supposed curse the Despotana laid on you?”

I put my hand to my throbbing cheek and rubbed it. “Not
her
curse. The Taweret spirit summoner I go to in Kuijain, remember her? She was the Despotana’s house sorceress, and she’s no charlatan, she’s real. She laid it on me years ago. I once saw a girl die from it. And the Taweret fighting teachers were hers—she helped the Despotana from the beginning. She came to Kuijain when I did, to relay orders to me. We called her Nilang. She’s here in Gultekin somewhere, to watch me.”

“Describe her and the other one.”

I did so. When I fell silent we stood there, three paces apart. His face was that of a soldier who has taken a sword in his belly and thinks he is going to die. I had never seen Terem look like that, not even at Bara. It was more terrible to me than murderous fury.

“I have much to do,” he said in a toneless voice. “I'm sending you back to the villa, where you’ll be put under guard. While you’re there I want you to write everything down. I will send someone for it before midnight. You are not to speak of this to my officers or anyone else.”

“I will be dead by midnight,” I said.

“No curse works that fast, even a Taweret one. When I've beaten Ardavan, I'll consider what to do with you.”

I bowed my head in submission. He was right about the curse; Adrine would have needed days to die from the attentions of the wraiths. But I had my httle bottle. I would write as much as I could, then drink from it.

He took my arm in a painfully tight grasp and led me back into the keep. We’d been gone for some time. The officers looked up from their tablets and tallies, expressions of perplexity on their faces at first, then alarm. I bore the mark of his hand on my face, and we could not be mistaken for a happy couple.

“The Inamorata has been threatened with assassination,” Terem said. “So have I. Captain Sholaj, find six men and a subcaptain. Have them escort her to the villa and put her into the bedchamber. They are to place a guard at her door and below her window. Clear the building of servants. No one is to go in or out. Tuhan, I need a hundred men to search the city for a pair of women. As soon as you’re ready I'll give you particulars. Get to it, both of you.”

Thus he dismissed me, and Sholaj took me away and de-hvered me to the soldiers.

I suspected I had little time before Nilang’s daughters came for me, and I was right. As we neared the city gate a subtle unease began to penetrate my strange calm. I took it at first for apprehension about what was to happen to me.

but as we passed through the gate I saw the shadows clustering beneath the arch, and I knew.

But it was not as bad as I'd feared, and the soldiers around me noticed nothing. I didn’t tear at my face or shriek or throw myself from my horse, although in another hundred yards my heart was pounding with an eerie, unfocused dread. But I mastered it, though my hands shook and I knew my face was white. The subcaptain glanced curiously at me once or twice but said nothing and delivered me as ordered to the compound.

And then, as I dismounted by the villa entrance, the dread left me. I was astonished. Was this what had sent Adrine into paroxysms of terror? If such tremors were all Nilang’s wraiths could achieve, perhaps I could manage them. Against my will, a tiny thread of hope began to weave itself through my heart. Perhaps, I thought, time had wom the curse away. Perhaps, with me, Nilang had got it wrong. Perhaps my love for Terem would armor me against the wraiths.

So, as the soldiers escorted me upstairs to the bedchamber, a foolish part of me began to build temples in the air. I would manage Nilang’s daughters after all. Then all I'd need was a little time; I'd deal with the guards, slip over the wall and out into the countryside. I'd vanish. I'd be free at last, free of everyone.