Showing his teeth in a frustrated snarl, the cat looked around at the snoring prison-keeper. Exactly how deep was his slumber? Moving with deadly stealth, he crept to the man’s side.
And he took on a new form, un-witnessed in the secret shadows of those dungeons. In this new guise, he bent over the man, catching sight of his key ring. With a hand, not a paw, he reached out, long fingers gently touching the ring. It too was iron, and it made him gag.
The prison-keeper snorted, moaned, and stirred on his bench.
The cat, who was not a cat, considered his options. He was not afraid, for his talents were many and his ways of incapacitating an inconvenient enemy as varied as his vivid imagination. But he did not like to hurt the poor man, who, however deserving of hurt he might be, looked rather childlike in his sleep. His ugly mouth, far too often twisted in a leer, puckered, like a suckling babe’s.
So, rather than following his initial instinct and clunking the prison-keeper hard across the head, the cat-who-was-no-cat leaned down and put his mouth close to the prison-keeper’s ear. He sang:
“Sleep, little one. Sleep deeply, my knave.
I’ll frighten away all dreams of the grave,
I’ll frighten away the devils of fear.
Sleep, little one. Sleep now, my dear.
Sleep, little one, in this fastness of night,
Sleep as the darkness holds you so tight.
Wander no paths of the devil’s own making,
Sleep, little one, until morning’s waking.
Sleep deeply, my sweet, sleep on tonight.
Let oblivion all of your mem’ries benight.
Think yourself naught of lovers long dead.
Rest with a pillow tucked under your head.”
It wasn’t an enchantment. Or not entirely. But there was power in the words, the power of ageless centuries. Each line, each rhyme, spoken in a language the prison-keeper would not have recognized, sank into his unconscious mind and took root there, more real than any of his own thoughts or dreams. They worked a mighty persuasion, and this persuasion overcame any resistance his brain might have offered. His snoring ceased, his breathing eased, and he sank down and down, far deeper into unconsciousness than he had ever before ventured or ever would again.
At last, the cat-who-was-no-cat stepped back, satisfied. Then, taking a rather musty handkerchief from the prison-keeper’s pocket, he used this to catch hold of the key ring and lift it off the prison-keeper’s belt.
Even then he could feel the bite of iron stinging his fingertips, and he hurriedly discovered the correct key and applied it to the cell lock. The moment he heard the mechanism click, he tossed the key ring away, letting it rattle into the shadows beneath the prison-keeper’s bench. The cell door protested growlingly as it was pushed open, and the prisoner inside, his face lit by the glow of a single lantern, looked up in surprise and dread.
He saw an orange cat step through.
The cat, restored to his feline form, stood in the doorway, gazing into the cell, and his whiskers twitched with consternation. He could have sworn . . . no, he knew for a fact that Jovann’s scent had brought him here. But where was the mortal boy?
The prisoner in the cell lunged suddenly, rattling his chains. He opened his mouth and cried out, drawing the cat’s attention. The cat looked with little interest at a face he did not know; a handsome face for a mortal, he supposed, but dirty, grimy, and much too old for Jovann. And what was that lying in chains beside him? A corpse?
Suddenly the cat realized that the words the prisoner called out were gibberish in his ears. His eyes widened. Never before in his life had he been unable to understand mortal tongues of any kind. Stepping across the cold, straw-and-muck-littered floor, his white paws curling with disgust at each step, the cat approached the prisoner, studying him more closely. But no, he did not recognize him, not at all. Nor could he make out a single word being spoken.
The desperation in the strange man’s eyes was unmistakable. The cat shivered, certain, though he did not know why, that this stranger recognized him. How or from where he could not guess.
Since neither his eyes nor his ears were doing him any favors, the cat ignored them both and set his nose to work, sniffing, sniffing, sniffing. He smelled . . .
Enchantment.
Not an enchantment such as that which he had breathed into the prison-keeper’s ear. No, this was an enchantment of darkness, borne of Faeries but cast by mortal enslavers. Magicians—the cat’s lip curled at the thought. Mortals were not meant to wield Faerie powers. It was unnatural, unholy, a vile sin.
Was this man, then, the magician himself or one of his victims? Unwillingly the cat took another step in, still sniffing, still searching. He caught another scent just beneath the enchantment, so faint that one less sensitive and aware than he (he flattered himself) would never catch it.
He whispered, “Jovann?”
In that moment there was a shuddering, a seizing-up in the very fabric of the mortal universe. The cat, with a scream, whirled around, tail bristling, and saw the air break before him, break like a glass window when a stone is hurled at its surface. The break grew, widened; and darkness far deeper than dungeon shadows poured through like liquid night, oozing, dripping, and pooling as it spread. The cat gazed out of the mortal realm into the dark Between.
With a snarl the cat dove into the farthest corner of the cell. For he knew what this break was, this opening into worlds beyond. A scent all too dreadful and familiar overwhelmed him: a scent of sulfur, of hatred, of fire and brimstone.
The Dragon.
The docks of Lunthea Maly were the loudest and busiest to be found in all the eastern continent; for Lunthea Maly was a great city for trade, and all nations wished to bring their wares to its shores, to barter with its businessmen, and to establish a foothold, however small, in the empire of Noorhitam.
The noise was the first thing to strike Sunan as he stepped off the good ship Noknou—a humble but affordable junk on which he had taken passage—into the hurly-burly of the city docks. And after the noise came the smell. A Chhayan nomad would scarcely have noticed it, but seven years of Pen-Chan elegance had both increased the sensibilities and reduced the hardiness of Sunan’s nose. He nearly gagged. Not once, not twice, but five times he doubled over while trying to make his way across the docks, jostled on all sides, struggling to keep his stomach in line. Three of those times he could have sworn he felt hands slip into his pockets, and if he had not previously safeguarded his worldly goods deep under his robes, wrapped tight against his body, he would have been robbed blind.
But he had reached Lunthea Maly. He had followed his orders.
When he at last reached the end of the docks, and the city proper loomed before him in all its labyrinthine grime and glory, Sunan looked back sorrowfully. His eyes sought the red sails of the Noknou but failed to spy them through the forest of sails and masts between him and the ship. His heart felt oddly melancholy in his chest. Chhayans were no sailors, and he had not been brought up to think of the sea. When sent away to his uncle’s house in Nua-Pratut, he had traveled overland. Through the course of his studies, he had learned about Pen-Chan shipwrights and sea exploration, but it had all been distant, academic knowledge, nothing to do with him personally.
But a journey from Suthinnakor to Lunthea Maly took a good five months by land and only three by sea. So, grasping his courage in both hands, Sunan had booked passage on the Noknou and set out, according to orders, for the great city. The first week was agony. The week following, he had discovered that he rather liked the sea. And over the course of his journey, he had even developed something of the sailor’s fever. The light of ocean vastness brightened his eye, and the sounds of waves and winds filled his heart. For a time he was able to forget his blood oath, to forget his long imprisonment, to forget the masters who sent him out into the unknown without so much as a hint regarding his purpose.
For a time, he had tasted freedom.
That was all
over now. Sunan, failing to discover the Noknou’s sails, was forced to turn his back on those three magnificent months, facing instead the enigma that was Lunthea Maly. The stench. The squalor. The rising splendor of Manusbau Palace and the towers of the Crown of the Moon at its center.
He stood at the entrance of a narrow street over which the rooftops of close-built houses crowded out all glimpse of the overcast sky. They seemed to clutch and hold the smells of human and animal filth, of sickness, of rotted garbage, of death, condensing them into a solid force ready to strike any who dared approach. Sunan’s stomach heaved for a sixth time, and he leaned heavily against a wall.
“Anwar’s blessed underpants!” a wheezing voice growled. “Find yer own little piece, will yer, and don’t be crowdin’ inter mine! I don’t want yer sick rainin’ down upon my head!”
Sunan, his arm on the wall, his head on his arm, opened one eye and looked down at a small, wizened creature unfolding on the ground before him. The beggar man was missing one arm and half of one leg, both on the same side, which gave him a most horrific impression of unbalance as he shook his only fist up at Sunan. He had been curled up asleep under a pile of rags so that Sunan had not seen him until this moment. He looked like little more than a pile of rags himself. His few teeth were black, and his eyes were runny with sickness.
But he snarled like a cur and shoved at Sunan with his stump of a leg. “Stuffy gents in yer stuffy robes! Thinkin’ yer can press and pester us little folk. Move on, pretty boy, move on, I say. And drop a coin in the bowl while yer kickin’ it!”
Sunan shuddered. He’d seen men of his father’s clan who had lost limbs in the various wars Chhayans had a talent for starting. There had always seemed to be a certain nobility about those men, who were venerated as heroes of true courage among the clan and given places of precedence at the campfires. This creature, however, was devoid of nobility. When he died, his bones would be laid to rest with no sacred chants, and his grave would be watered by no woman’s tears. He would rot where he fell, and the world might be made a little better for his absence.
Sunan made to move on, clutching his robes in both hands and attempting to step around the beggar. But one scrawny hand shot out and latched onto his ankle with surprising strength. “Yer from Nua-Pratut, ain’t yer, pretty boy?”
“Unhand me,” Sunan replied coldly. His skin crawled with chilly disgust.
But the beggar closed one eye and looked up at him shrewdly through the other. “Yer wouldn’t happen ter be called Juong-Khla Sunan, would yer?”
At this, Sunan’s stomach plummeted to his knees. He gaped at the beggar man. “How do you—How do you know my—”
“Ain’t got two good eyes in yer head, have yer?” said the beggar.
Then, with startling suddenness and strength, the creature unfolded and stood upright (though he still possessed, so far as Sunan could see, only one full leg), and the skinny hand switched its grasp from Sunan’s ankle to the cloth on his shoulder. It all happened so fast that Sunan had no chance to cry out in protest before he was dragged—dragged with such speed and force as should have been impossible from that rag-bag of a creature—into a nearby alley and shoved into deep, putrid shadows where no eyes could see him save the runny eyes of the beggar.
Sunan’s hand flew for a knife he kept tucked beneath his outermost robe. But he found only an empty sheath, and when his eyes flew to the beggar, he discovered the knife clutched between his rotting teeth. Impossible! The beggar’s only hand was still latched on Sunan’s shoulder.
With a sound like “Pithuuu!” the beggar spat the knife out, and it clattered dully into the shadows beneath their feet. Then he spoke in a voice of such polish as Sunan had only ever heard before at some of his uncle’s more elite dinner parties, during which scholars from the Center of Learning discussed politics, ethics, and various philosophies, both popular and disparaged, in tones of utterly polite elegance:
“Chaso—or ‘Old Rotting Bones,’ as the street-rat children affectionately named him—was not one of my more pleasant roles. I shall be glad to see the end of him.”
The sound of that silken voice falling from that hideous mouth was almost too much. Sunan shrank away, trying to make himself smaller so that he could slip out of the iron hold on his shoulder.
The beggar grinned, proudly displaying all of his black teeth. “Allow me to introduce myself. I am Domchu, Third Son of the House of Mohl. I understand you have made a blood oath vowing service to my brotherhood. You do recall as much, I trust?”
“Ah—um—”
“Loquacious, aren’t you? I’m going to release my hold, but if you try to run, I shall have to restrain you. I don’t have much about my person which may serve as a binding save for this old rag I am wearing. But I will use it if I must. And you will be blessed with the sight of this skeletal form in all its fetid glory. Neither of us wants that, do we?”
Sunan shook his head vigorously, and when the beggar let him go, he made no move to flee but stood shaking and staring, trying to see through a disguise that was far too good to be true. Had the man chopped off his own limbs and pulled out his own teeth, exposed himself to skin disease and lice for the purpose of this part? It couldn’t be! And yet . . .
Balancing on one leg as easily as though he stood on two, the beggar studied Sunan up and down, grunting in approval. “You look much like your uncle. He was a great friend of mine back in our school days. And his sister . . . what a beauty! It was a shame and a crime, what happened to her, and I was not alone in my disappointment. But your uncle and I remained close for many years. I was sorry to learn of his supposed death.”
With an effort Sunan swallowed back the boiling venom in his heart, which always threatened to choke him when others spoke of his mother, and asked, “Supposed death, my . . . my lord—”
“Domchu,” the beggar interrupted. “Tu Domchu, to you. And yes, supposed death. We cannot know for certain. He was taken beneath the Crown of the Moon, down into the dungeons. When I arrived here some days ago, I wanted to search him out, to liberate him. But the Golden Mother had guessed his true purpose in coming to Lunthea Maly, and I dared not draw attention to the others of our order throughout the city.”
“What was his true purpose?” Sunan asked.
“My dear boy, you do not yet know his assumed purpose—hired as a gentleman assassin, in fact.”
“An assassin?”
“You are aware of the legendary role of Crouching Shadows are you not? Assassins of the highest order. Your uncle played the part of assassin on more than one occasion, lending credence to the rumors and allowing us to continue our true work undetected.”
Sunan shook his head. During those months spent coming to grips with the new realities of his life, he had never once stopped to consider those acts which his uncle, as a Crouching Shadow, must have committed in his life. It was like suddenly seeing the view out his window flipped into mirror image. All was so familiar, and yet nothing was right anymore.
“I will not,” Tu Domchu continued, “tell you more than you absolutely must know, so you needn’t bother asking questions. The more ignorant you are, the more ignorant you will behave and thus, we hope, throw that sharp-nosed Golden Mother and her bevy of lovely Daughters off the scent. Tell me, Kasemsan’s kin, what do you know of your purpose in coming to this Fragrant Flower of all cities?”
“Nothing,” Sunan said. “I was told nothing save to go to Lunthea Maly. Which I have done faithfully, according to my oath.”
“Good, good. I will now show you something, and I will give you one command. How you choose to carry out this command is your own business. I dare not help you. I dare not draw the Golden Mother’s eye my way. Are you prepared to receive your orders?”
Sunan swallowed with some difficulty. Then he nodded.
To his dismay, the beggar man stuck his one hand up to his own face and rammed his fingers into his eye. Sunan gasped, his horror suffocating any scream. The beggar gave a sad little mo
an of pain, though the pain was self-inflicted, and pulled. Sunan saw something long and dark stretching out, caught between the beggar’s thumb and index finger.
With a sudden crack that made no sound but seemed to rattle Sunan’s vision instead, the beggar vanished, replaced by a tall man in the prime of his life, possessed of all four limbs and clad in the beggar’s garments. He held a wriggling puff of smoke, made almost solid but not quite, between his fingers. As Sunan stared at it, he saw the smoke assume a face, so ugly, so snarling, that he thought it must be a demon.
“A Faerie,” said Tu Domchu, as though guessing Sunan’s thoughts. “One of our many slaves. I had two once upon a time, and this is my last one. Now I give it and the vision it possesses to you. Hold still.”
Before Sunan could make a move or protest, Tu Domchu caught him by the back of his head and shoved the imp into his own wide eye. It was like having a long needle bursting first through the eyeball, then into the brain, and had Tu Domchu not clamped a hand hard over Sunan’s mouth, his screams would surely have brought half the city running in hopes of witnessing a murder. Tears streamed down his face, and his body shivered against his will.
But the pain did not last long. He stood there, caught in Tu Domchu’s hold, and felt a new presence settle itself into his consciousness. It was a most unusual sensation. He thought he should analyze it, as any good scholar would, but his stomach was too busy turning flips in his gut to allow him much objective perspective.
“Now,” said Tu Domchu, his one hand still holding the back of Sunan’s head while the other let go of his mouth, “I want you to close your eyes. Wipe away your own vision and allow the imp to show you what it has seen.”
Sunan nodded and obeyed. At first he saw nothing but blackness with little pinpoints of light on the edges. Then, quite suddenly, a vision began to take shape.
A beautiful young woman lay upon a bed, her slender, feminine body atop the silk coverlets. Her hair spread across her pillows, thick, lush, and shining in the light of a gray morning pouring through a near window. He had never seen a face more beautiful or more sad. He thought for a moment that she was dead, but then he saw the slight rise and fall of her chest, and he knew that she lay in a deep trance.