In the Labyrinth of Drakes (23 page)

Tom was pacing, hands linked behind his back. “How long will it take before we know whether the food is at fault? Will a day be enough?”

“Nour said two days, to be certain.”

His mouth compressed. “By all means, let us be certain. But then what? Tell Pensyth?”

Andrew looked up, startled, from the task of retying his boot. “You're going to wait? I was going to tell Pensyth tonight.”

Tom and I exchanged a swift look, confirming that we were in accord. “Don't,” I said.

“Why ever not?”

Tom snorted. “Because Pensyth isn't a subtle man.”

“He won't wait two days,” I said. “He'll clap Maazir in irons and start a row with the sheikh. And Maazir may be innocent; perhaps the problem is with the man selling him the food. Or it might be nothing! Perhaps I am only suffering from exhaustion in the heat. I want proof, before we start Pensyth baying like a hound.”

“But—” Andrew clamped his jaw in the way that said he wanted to argue, but couldn't think of any useful points he might bring to bear. It made him look nine years old, which I had good enough sense not to say.

“We will take food with us,” I said. “And see what happens. I will take no further action without data.”

 

FIFTEEN

A dirty labourer—An alley in Qurrat—Suhail's captive—Suspicious powder—Allies of the Banu Safr—Colonel Pensyth's news—What we were not told

Other people, however, were not so restrained.

When Maazir departed the next day on his usual trip to the market, I happened to be at a window overlooking the front gate. (Very well: it was not coincidence.) I do not know what I thought I might see—a pouch of poison swinging from one jaunty hand?—but I felt obliged to watch.

What I saw was one of the common labourers slipping out after him. There were any number of these around the compound on any given day; we had a great many menial jobs that needed to be done, such as tending to the livestock that fed the dragons and mucking out the enclosures, and the men who performed these tasks came and went. Some of them were city-dwellers, while others were nomads, earning a small bit of coin to purchase something before returning to their people in the desert.

The fellow I observed was of the second type, and not a particularly fine specimen of the breed, either. His clothes were patched and frayed, the scarf and veil on his head filthy with dust. He had been shuffling about as if one leg were less than hale—but as soon as Maazir was gone, his gait changed entirely. He crossed the courtyard with swift strides and was out of the compound almost before I could blink.

I stopped breathing as a suspicion formed in my heart.

It is not easy to fling oneself down stairs in a skirt; there is always the risk that you will tangle your legs and go headlong. But I made it to the courtyard and cracked the gate, peering out through the opening.

In the distance I saw Maazir. Between him and myself, the labourer, following.

Either Maazir was innocent, or he had been doing this for long enough that he no longer feared detection. (Or he was skilled enough that he knew not to look behind himself until he could make the action look casual. At the time, I did not know to consider that possibility.) As for the labourer, he was intent on his own quarry; he did not look behind, either, and so he did not see me following him.

Dar al-Tannaneen was not far from the gates of Qurrat. I nearly lost the labourer in the crowds there, and had to draw much closer than I felt comfortable with. Had he glanced over his shoulder, he would have seen me, for a Scirling woman is quite noticeable in that district, even when her dress is made of sedate khaki. I was glad to be following the labourer, rather than Maazir: the latter would not recognize the former, and I was far enough back to escape
his
eye.

And so we went, a daisy-chain of suspicion, wending our way through town. But not through the crowded market: Maazir turned off into an alley just before he reached that plaza. The labourer hurried to keep up, and I knew why. In the winding back ways of Qurrat, it would be easy to lose one's quarry entirely. Now my steps slowed, for avoiding detection there would be exceedingly difficult—even impossible. I had come out here without thinking, but continuing onward in the same manner was not advisable.

But the two men had not gone far. I peered around the corner in time to see the labourer lunge through a doorway. From within came the sound of shouts. Then Maazir hurled himself back out into the alley and came charging straight toward me.

I stepped into his path, my head empty of anything resembling a plan. I was no brawler, to tackle him to the ground. How did I propose to stop him? I was still standing there, indecisive, when he reached the mouth of the alley. He slammed into me—I do not think he even recognized me, despite my garb—and knocked me into a wall in his haste to reach the main street.

In that instant, I did the only thing I could think of. I raised my arm, pointed at the fleeing man, and shouted in the clearest Akhian I could muster, “That man just assaulted me!”

Let no one slander the gentlemen of Qurrat. Several looked up in startlement; one, understanding, took up the cry. Maazir did not make it twenty meters before someone had him by the collar and began dragging him back toward me.

I stood in the mouth of the alley, torn. Having accused Maazir, now I had to deal with him—but I suspected the true business was taking place behind me, in the building Maazir had fled.

“Bring him this way, please,” I said, when captor and captive arrived. “My escort is just down here.” I am not a pious woman, but I prayed with all the devotion I could muster that my suspicion would not prove incorrect.

Maazir twisted and squirmed, shouting for the other fellow to let him go, as we went down the alley. Half the market followed, it seemed; the commotion had drawn a great deal of curious attention. I stepped through the open doorway, and all the breath went out of me in relief.

Suhail was kneeling atop another man's back at the far side of the room. He had removed the dusty scarf from his head, and was using it to bind the fellow's wrists, cursing as his prisoner fought him. When I entered, it distracted him; the man got one arm free. A knife lay on the ground nearby, and the captive scrabbled for it, but it was just out of his reach. He tried to throw Suhail off, his body heaving. Suhail slammed the palm of his hand into his opponent's shoulder, flattening him to the ground, and got him tied up at last.

In that moment of struggle, I glimpsed his face. For all that the man wore the caftan and turban of a local, his features were Yelangese.

The room was rapidly filling up behind me. It did not take many people to crowd the place; the chamber was less than four meters on a side, and Maazir was still flailing about. I heard the men from the market speculating amongst themselves: this dirty labourer was my escort? Why was the other fellow tied up on the floor? Suhail got up long enough to drag the scarf from Maazir's head and use it to tie the feet of the Yelangese man, ensuring he could not escape. Then he looked at me and demanded in Scirling, “What are you doing here?”

“I could ask you the same,” I said, a little breathless. “Why were you following Maazir?” Then common sense, rendered tardy by the excitement, caught up. “Mahira told you what happened.”

Suhail dragged one hand through his curls, made unruly by his struggle with the Yelangese. He was out of breath himself, and a bit wild in the eyes. “You're being fed
poison,
Isabella.”

That had not been proven—but it had become a good deal more likely, with the probable culprit lying at Suhail's feet. A culprit he had gone after, on his own, without warning me. “You could have been killed.”

“So saith the woman who followed me here.” His hands twitched at his sides, and I cannot blame the heat for the sensation that came over me then. I recognized that motion: he wanted to reach out, grip me by the arms and make certain I was unharmed. I recognized it because I wanted to do the same, and my inability to do so made me light-headed. I had lost my husband to a single thrust of a knife, not much different from the one lying at Suhail's feet. But we had an audience; I could only curl my hands until my nails cut into my palms.

Suhail collected his wits and addressed the crowd in Akhian too rapid for me to follow well. Someone bound Maazir's hands; when that was done, our erstwhile employee sagged in defeat, and dropped to a crouch in the corner as soon as he was permitted. Some of the men departed, and I caught enough of the conversation to know they had been sent to fetch a magistrate.

I occupied myself searching the room. It was a bare place, with only two small chests and some battered cushions on the floor. Wherever the Yelangese fellow was living, it was not here. The chests contained nothing of interest, just a few bundles of cloth and some cracked dishes.

I am not a legal expert in my own nation, let alone Akhia, but I knew that if we wanted to convict our two captives of anything, we would need something more than the suspicions of one (female) physician. Suhail's word might be enough, depending on how much deference was given to the brother of a sheikh—but I did not want to test it.

The Yelangese man was squirming on the floor. My first instinct was that he was trying to get away … but he stood no chance of squirming past Suhail and the three men still with us in the room, and he was not making any forward progress, besides. I almost bent to grab him, then remembered my manners. “Suhail,” I said sharply, and he turned around.

The man thrashed as Suhail rolled him onto his back and delved into his caftan. The thrashing did him no good: Suhail's hand emerged holding a small bag of powder, which had come open and was spilling its contents over his fingers. My heart sped up. “Here,” I said, holding out one of the dishes. Suhail dropped the bag into it and dusted his hands off—then stood there, eyeing his own fingers warily. “What now?”

Without knowing what the powder was, I could only guess. It had not killed me or Tom … but what quantity had been going into our food? I took the corner of my headscarf in my hands and stared at it as if I had never seen fabric before, then blinked and shook sense back into my head. The knife was still on the floor. I picked it up and cut a square from the scarf, and Suhail used it to wipe his hands off. “Good thing Mother broke me of the habit of biting my nails,” he murmured, trying to smile.

The magistrate arrived not long after that. I delivered the dish and its contents to him, while Suhail explained that the Yelangese man had been trying to disperse the evidence. Our prisoners were bundled off to the local gaol, but dealing with them would be delayed; Suhail insisted he needed to accompany me back to Dar al-Tannaneen, after a brief detour to scrub his hands clean under a street pump.

I almost told him the escort was not necessary—that I had, after all, come here on my own, and could very well go back the same way. But I remembered my conversation with Andrew in the desert, and bit my tongue. I was glad of Suhail's company, and the gossip-mongers be damned.

We walked in silence for a few minutes. Then, abruptly, Suhail said, “Did you think you could take on those men by yourself?”

My mouth had become very dry; I wished profoundly for a glass of lemonade. “I knew I would not have to do so. Even in those clothes, Suhail, I knew you. I recognized your stride.”

He looked at me, startled. Then he looked away. I swallowed, trying to wet my throat, then said, “I was foolish, yes. But so were you. What if that man had friends with him?” He was lucky Maazir had chosen to run, rather than staying to fight.

In a low voice I almost could not hear through the noise of the market, Suhail said, “I was not thinking very clearly.”

The weight of everything we were not saying hung between us, as if from a rope that might snap at any moment. Suhail had seen me in peril before. He had been with me in the diving bell when the sea-serpent attacked, and had resuscitated me after I drowned. We had ridden other serpents together, stolen a caeliger, taken part in the Battle of Keonga. But at no point during that time had he been asked to sit idly by; and none of that had involved such carefully directed malice as this. He had not taken it well.

Nor had I. My hands still shook every time I envisioned what must have happened in that cramped room while I was stopping Maazir. One strike with that knife, and Suhail might not be at my side now.

I licked my lips and tried to focus on practical matters. “That man. The Yelangese. Maazir was going to meet him?”

S
UHAIL

“So it appears,” Suhail answered, straightening his shoulders. “To report in, or get more poison—I'm not sure. We'll know more once they've been questioned.”

That would not stop me from speculating now. “I imagine the Yelangese want to put a halt to our work, or at least to slow it down. Anything that might hamper Scirland—and Akhia, too—in getting more caeligers. We should count ourselves lucky they haven't been out in the desert—”