The Skein of Lament (37 page)

Xejen crossed the room to face them, his thin features wan in the lantern light. There was an intensity in his eyes now, a fire ignited by his speech. Mishani had no doubt that he was a formidable orator when faced with a crowd. His conviction in his own words was indisputable.

‘Will you help us, Mistress Mishani?’

‘I will consider it,’ she said. ‘But I have a condition.’

‘Yes, you wish to have your confinement ended,’ Xejen finished for her. ‘Done. A sign of good faith. It would have been sooner, but I had too many other things to worry about. I don’t want you as a prisoner, I want you as an ally.’

‘You have my thanks,’ said Mishani. ‘And I will think on your proposal.’

‘I need not tell you, I suppose, that your freedom only extends to the walls of Zila,’ Xejen added. ‘If you try and leave the town, you will regrettably be shot. I am sure you will not attempt anything so foolish.’

‘Your advice is noted,’ Mishani said, and with that she made the requisite politenesses and left, telling Bakkara that she could find her own way back.

Chien was asleep when she returned, murmuring and stirring in the grip of a dream. She shut the door of their room quietly behind her and sat on a mat to think. A plan was forming in her mind. It was like the old days at court. The principal players had been introduced; now she just had to work out how best to exploit them.

But
this
man, she did not yet understand. There was a piece of the puzzle missing here, and had been since the start. Until she knew what it was, until she knew whether Chien was an enemy or a friend, she dared not act.

She studied him closely, trying to find an answer in the broad angles of his face. He muttered and turned away from her, rolling over on his mat and gathering the blankets around him tighter. He was shivering despite the warmth of the night.

‘What
is
your secret, Chien?’ she murmured. ‘Why are you here?’

After a time, she got up and extinguished the lantern, undressed in the moonlight and slipped beneath her own covers. She was just drowsing when Chien began to sing.

She felt a smile touch the corner of her lips. He was dreaming, his voice a tuneless drone, too soft to vocalise the words properly. She listened, and listened, and then suddenly she sat up in bed, staring across the dark room at him.

He continued, oblivious, singing his fevered song.

Mishani’s breath was a shudder. She felt her throat close up, and then she slowly sank down to her pillow and faced the wall, stifling her sobs with her blanket. Tears came and would not be held back, sliding over the bridge of her nose and dripping into the fabric.

She knew that song, and it all made sense now.

The Blood Emperor Mos tu Batik stormed through the marbled corridors of the Imperial Keep, his brow dark with fury. His beard, once close and tidy, had grown unkempt, the patches of grey more pronounced. His hair was a mess, hanging in draggles over his eyes and damp with sweat. Wine had spilled on his tunic, and his clothes were wrinkled and pungent.

There was madness in his eye.

Days and nights had blended into one, an endless half-consciousness swamped in alcohol. Sleep brought him no rest, only terrible dreams in which his wife rutted with faceless strangers. His waking hours were spent in a constant state of suspicion, punctuated by sporadic outbursts of rage, directed either at himself or at anyone else near him. He was spiralling slowly and inexorably into mania, and the only escape from the torture was intoxication, which provided a small surcease but only made him more bitter afterward.

He had taken enough. Now he meant to have it out, once and for all. He would not stand by while he was cuckolded.

There would be a reckoning.

It had started long ago, before Eszel the flamboyant poet. He had come to realise that, in the long nights he had spent alone while spite gnawed at his soul. He remembered other times, when Laranya had wanted to pursue her interests and he his, and how he had indulged her in whatever she wished. Times when he had been disappointed that she was not waiting for him when he returned from a particularly harrowing day in the council chamber. Times when she had laughed and joked with other men, who seem attracted like moths to a candle, drawn by the brightness and vivacity of her. He remembered the jealousy then, the seeds of resentment burrowing into a soil made moist by his natural inclination for domination. Among the delusions and venomous slanders that he had persuaded himself to believe in those lonely hours, he had found nuggets of truth.

He had come to realise that he wanted Laranya as two different people, and that she could not be both. On the one hand was the fiery, wilful and entirely insubordinate woman he had fallen in love with; on the other, the dutiful spouse, who would be there when he wanted her and be absent when he did not, who would make him feel like a man because a man should be able to control his wife. One of the reasons he had fallen in love with her – and stayed in love with her – was because she would not bend to his will, would never be meek and submissive; it was because she galled him that she challenged him and kept his interest. His first wife Ononi had been the model of how a woman should be, but he had not loved her. Laranya was impossible, would never be tamed no matter how he tried, and she had both captured his heart and poisoned it.

It was the child that had turned things bad. For years, Mos had forgotten those fleeting moments of mistrust and disappointment, the feelings erased as soon as he saw Laranya’s face again. But now he brought them all back to pick over them like a vulture at a carcass. All that time, and no child; but now, suddenly, she was pregnant.

He remembered when she had told him, what his first reaction had been, an instant of doubt that he had swept away, feeling guilty for ever having thought it.

Just like Durun. Just like my son, and his scheming bitch wife, letting him raise a child that wasn’t even his own
.

History was repeating itself. But this time, Mos was ahead of the game.

It was late as he stalked towards the Imperial chambers. His sleep patterns were erratic and took no account of the sun or the moons, and he had begun to fear the nightmares so much that he would do anything to put them off. He had been awake for more than forty hours now, dosed up with herbal stimulants to counteract the soporific lull of the wine, thinking in tighter and tighter circles until there was nothing left but a white-hot ball of fury that demanded release.

Oh, she had come to him to plead, or to demand, or to shout. Different approaches to the same end: she wanted to know what had possessed him, why he was acting this way. As if she did not know.

There were others, too. Kakre loomed in and out of his memory, croaking reports and meaningless observations. Advisers came and went. In some dim fashion, he had been aware of the other affairs of state which he was supposed to be attending to, but everything had become transparent to him in contrast to the one overwhelming matter of Laranya. Until it was resolved, he could not care about anything else. Reason had failed. The spies he had set to watch his wife had failed.

But there was another way; the only resort he had left.

He threw aside the curtain and stamped into the Imperial bedchamber. The violence of his entrance startled Laranya out of sleep. She sat up with a cry, clutching the sheets to her chest in the warm dark of the autumn night. Something moved in the pale green moonlight, by the archway that led to the balcony beyond: a figure, blurred, gone in an instant. Mos blundered across the room in pursuit, roaring in anger.

‘What is it? Mos,
what is it
?’ Laranya cried.

The Blood Emperor’s hands were clutched on the stone balustrade; he was glaring down the north-eastern side of the Imperial Keep where it sloped away in a clutter of interlocking sculptures and carvings. He cast about, looking up, then to his left and right, then leaning far out as if he might see underneath the balcony. It was no good. There were too many folds and creases in the ornamentation, too many looming effigies and archways where the intruder might have hidden himself. Gods, he was so quick! Mos had barely even seen him.

Laranya was at his elbow, in her nightdress, her touch fearful on his arm. ‘What
is
it?’ she asked again.

‘I saw him, whore!’ Mos bellowed, flinging her arm away. ‘You can’t pretend any more! I saw him with my own eyes!’

Laranya was backing away into the room. Some emotion midway between enragement and fear had taken her, and did not seem to know which way to resolve itself. There was a new edge to Mos tonight, and she was not at all sure what he might do.

‘Who? Who did you see?’

‘Shouldn’t you know? Was it that effeminate poet? Or is there someone else I should know who enjoys my bed?’

‘Mos, I have told you . . . I cannot prove it to you any more than I already have! There is no one!’

‘
I saw him!
’ Mos howled, stumbling after her, his face distorted and haggard. ‘He was just here!’

‘There was nobody here!’ Laranya cried. Now she was afraid.

‘Liar!’ Mos accused, advancing, looming in the greentinted shadows.

‘No! Mos, you are drunk, you are tired! You need sleep! You are seeing phantoms!’

‘
Liar!
’

She reached the dresser, knocking into it and tipping bottles of perfume and make-up brushes over. There was no further she could retreat.

‘A man cannot rule an empire when he cannot rule his wife!’ Mos snarled. ‘I will teach you obedience!’

She saw in his eyes what he meant to do, even before he had raised his fist.

‘Mos! No! Our baby!’ she pleaded, her hand going defensively to her belly.

‘
His
baby,’ Mos breathed.

Laranya did not have time to ask who he meant before the first blows fell; nor did she find out afterward, when he left her alone on the floor of the bedchamber with her body aching and her face bruised and blood seeping from between her legs as their child died inside her.

Reki was woken by a servant calling his name outside the curtain of his room. Asara was already awake, watching him. She lay next to him in his bed, and as he saw her it seemed that the pallid green moonlight caught her at an odd angle, and her eyes were two saucers of reflected illumination, like a cat’s. Then she looked to the curtain, and the moment passed.

His gaze lingered on her shadowed face for an instant, unable to draw away from the beauty there. She had indeed, as she had promised, given him an experience unlike any he had had before; but though he had repaid her with a flawless rendition of
The Pearl Of The Water God
, she had not gone away as he had feared, never to see him again. To his delight, she had barely left him since the moment they had met. A sweet recollection of lazy days and passionate nights flitted across his consciousness. And if it seemed too good to be true, then he was loth to shatter his fragile happiness by questioning it.

‘What is it?’ he called, his throat tight from sleep.

‘The Empress!’ the servant replied. ‘The Empress!’

The tone in her voice made him sit up with a jolt of alarm. ‘A moment,’ he said, and slid naked out of bed to put on a robe. Asara did the same. He was too preoccupied to even glance at her sublime form. Though she had shared his bed for several nights now, and he already worshipped her like a goddess, it was all dashed away in that dreadful instant.

‘Enter,’ he called, and the servant hurried in, speaking as she came. It was one of Laranya’s handmaidens, a servant of Blood Tanatsua rather than one of the Keep servants.

‘The Empress is hurt,’ she babbled. ‘I heard her . . . we all heard them fighting. We went in after the Emperor had gone. We—’

‘Where is she?’ Reki demanded.

‘The Imperial chambers,’ the servant said, but she had barely finished before Reki swept past her and out of the room.

He ran barefoot through the corridors of the Keep, the lach floor chill on his soles, heedless of how ridiculous he looked sprinting in a bedrobe.

The Empress is hurt
.

Imperial Guards in their blue and white armour stood aside for him; servants hurried out of his way.

‘Laranya,’ he was murmuring breathlessly to himself, his voice like a whimper. ‘Suran, let her be all right. I will do anything.’

But if the desert goddess heard his plea, she did not answer.

His quarters were not far from his sister’s bedchamber. The life of the Keep went on all around as if nothing had happened. Cleaners were polishing the
lach
and dusting the sculptures, night-time activities carried out unobtrusively when most people were asleep. By the time he reached the door to the Imperial chambers, he knew that all the servants here must have heard what the handmaiden heard; yet they pretended otherwise. Since Saramyr houses rarely ever had interior doors due to the need for breezes in the scorching summers, codes of privacy had arisen in which it was extremely rude to eavesdrop or to pass on anything that was inadvertently learned. That Laranya’s handmaiden had broken that silence was an indication of how serious she felt it was.

He heard Laranya sobbing before he shoved the curtain aside, and though the sound made him feel as if his heart would break, he was desperately relieved that she was still capable of making it.

She was on the bed, on her hands and knees, in amid a tangle of golden sheets stained with thin smears of blood that looked black in the moonlight. She was weeping as she pawed through the sheets as if searching for something.

She looked up at him, framed between the curving ivory horns that were the bedposts, and her eyes were blackened and swollen.

‘I cannot find him,’ she whispered. ‘I cannot find him.’

Reki’s eyes welled. He rushed over to hold her, but she shrieked at him to stay back. He shuddered to a halt in uncomprehending misery.