The Dawn of Yangchen, page 20
He turned to Kavik. “And we’re done. You kind of ended on a losing streak there.”
The value of the wrecked goods was of a size where the numbers didn’t matter anymore, as far as Kavik’s own life was concerned. “They were going to burn everything,” he said. “I didn’t destroy this stuff. I saved half of it.”
“Bold claim. We’ll see if the boss-boss agrees after you explain what happened. Come. I’ve got a ride waiting outside.”
Kavik snapped the tip of his charcoal pencil. The boss-boss? He was going to meet Chaisee? Of course. The larger the mistake, the higher you had to raise the flag of your shame. He followed Tael to the door, his arms and legs suddenly heavy.
Jujinta and the rest of the undersized association squad that had gone in with Kavik waited by the exit. Pang, their nominal leader, sneered at Kavik and nodded as Tael led him out. The new guy would catch the blame, as was tradition.
“Don’t look so smug, Pang,” Tael said. “You’re going to account for this too.”
When Pang sputtered, his tongue poked out through the gap on his teeth. “What?! How is this my fault? Do I look like a Waterbender to you?”
Tael was unmoved. “Doesn’t matter. You were in charge. Your raid, your loss.”
“You sent us in without enough strength and left us hanging! We did the best we could!” Pang was frantic at the prospect of being lumped in with Kavik’s coming punishment. “I’ll explain to Chaisee myself if I have to! It wasn’t my fault!”
Tael halted and grimaced, making the face of a person who stubbed their toe, more annoyed at their own stupidity than anything else. He turned around slowly and then slammed his hand into Pang’s stomach.
Pang’s eyes goggled out, and he made a single, weak cough. At first Kavik thought Tael had merely punched him, a surprise body blow. No shame in keeling over from one of those. But a dark drip spattered on the floor.
“Chaisee?” Tael said loudly, for the benefit of any and all witnesses. “Who’s that? I don’t know a Chaisee.”
Kavik sprang back from the blood pooling on the ground as if it were a living, skittering insect. He shut his eyes and cowered away, but the image of Tael cradling Pang by the neck with one hand and working the point of his knife upward with the other was going to be etched into his nightmares.
No, he whispered in his head. He crouched down as if getting lower, taking cover, would shield him from another death. No no no.
Pang’s bloody wheezes became the loudest sounds in the entire warehouse. Then they stopped. “Wrap him in the wool and wet it down before you nail the crate shut, so the whole thing rots,” Kavik heard Tael say. “It’ll hide the smell until we can throw the goods out.”
Kavik opened his blurry eyes a crack to see two men dragging Pang’s body away. They were much smoother than he had been with Qiu. Practice must have made perfect.
“Get up, Sifu Waterbender,” Tael said to Kavik as he wiped the blade of the murder weapon with a cloth. “The boss-boss doesn’t have time to wait for you to grow a spine.”
Jujinta stepped between them. He’d recovered his wits from the fight and was back to his usual, imperturbable self. Pang’s death had not affected him in the slightest, and neither did Tael. “That’s my partner,” he said.
Tael threw his head back and sighed. “Juji, I only put the two of you together because I thought it would be good for a laugh. And if you don’t back down right now, well, there’s plenty more crates that need to be disposed of.”
Kavik could only think of how Jujinta was out of knives. Tael still had the one. He rose to his full height and put a shaking hand on Jujinta’s shoulder. “It’ll be okay,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady.
He still had one more out, looped around his neck. “I’ll be fine.” He tried a reassuring shake. It took three before Jujinta was convinced enough to step aside.
Kavik followed Tael into the street and got into the carriage that was waiting for them. Together they rode off to see where the evening would end.
The night was still young by Jonduri standards. Tael’s carriage was enclosed, so the passing sounds of revelry were muffled. A sudden burst of laughter from a drunken party made Kavik clutch the logbook tighter. The fact that he’d been told to hang on to it was probably meant to be demeaning at this point. A weight around his neck.
One of the wheels took a hard dip into a pothole. Kavik’s ears perked for a splash, water he might have used to protect himself with. But there was none.
“Something on your mind?” Tael said.
A great deal. “Pang was your man, through and through. He fought for the association and that’s how you repay him?”
“Where Pang chose to place his faith is none of my business. He had a problem keeping his mouth shut, and he botched the raid. People who become more trouble than they’re worth in Jonduri tend to vanish.”
Bile rose in Kavik’s throat. Any claim this city was better than Bin-Er was load of crock. It was just more organized. “What’s going to happen to the workers?”
“Well, they have families, so we can’t make them disappear easily. And it’s going to be hard for us to pin blame for the cargo losses on them because none of them were Waterbenders. For now, they’ll sit in a harbormaster’s brig, safe and sound.” Tael thumped the wall of the carriage with his knuckles. “If I remember correctly, you don’t have family in the city. Do you?”
Kavik shrunk in his seat. He was a fresh face, just like he and Yangchen had discussed. Completely clean. The association didn’t have to worry about anyone coming to look for him.
He avoided touching the bison whistle under his kuspuk. Not yet. His mind was in as many pieces as the inventory. Despite the fact that he’d come up blank on two different inspections of the warehouse, there was something in the logbook that felt like the missing piece to his mission. He just couldn’t put his finger on it yet. If he survived the night and made contact with the others, he could try recreating its contents from memory. If.
The carriage came to a stop. Kavik heard the driver outside jump down and open the door. Tael motioned for him to get out first.
Kavik stepped onto a pathway leading to a luxurious, two-story cottage. The windows, real glass windows, were bright. The chirping of cicada-crickets over the lawn and the gentle clucking of the ostrich-horses made him think of a farm. Animals got slaughtered in farms.
“In there,” Tael said. “And keep the book with you.”
They walked up to the entrance, which Tael opened for him like a guest of honor. Kavik paused to consider whether the bison whistle could be heard from inside a building. He weighed the option of jumping on the other man right now and fighting for his life. His first step into the house would be an opportune time to slide a knife between his ribs. “Are you not coming?” he asked.
“I was ordered to stay behind,” Tael said. “I’m just your humble courier. The boss-boss says you’re to go find a seat and wait.”
It was now or never. Kavik took a deep breath and crossed the threshold. The door slammed shut behind him.
He found himself in a narrow maze of luxury. Boxed in by a sweet-smelling wooden hallway, his feet sinking into carpet as lush as a bog, an expensive glowing crystal cut with dozens of facets hanging overhead. “Hello?” he tried. No answer.
He moved slowly, as if each piece of furniture he encountered might be a trap. A trunk would open its jaws and swallow him whole, or he’d fall through the squeaking floorboards into a spiked pit. There was only one door open, and it led to a small study.
He took one of the chairs in the corner and waited as he was told. His pulse became the thrum of a dragonfly-hummingbird’s wings. His one solace was that this was far too nice a place to kill him. His corpse would make too much of a mess.
The sound of footsteps, coming from the ceiling. The master of the house descended the stairs above the study. Kavik’s spine straightened. His lips parted. He froze in a tilted, halfway state, poised to get up but unable to leave his chair.
Between his wooden home and his old workbench on the lowest floor of Nuqingaq’s, Kavik had learned it was possible, extremely possible when you were familiar with the person, to tell who was going up and down a flight of stairs just by the sound. His father was a slow thud-thud-thud, always catching and settling his weight fully before the next step. His mother’s telltale noise was a sliding swishhh, since she always held onto a banister if available. If not, she ran her hand along the wall.
And the trail of light thumps that slalomed from one side of the stairs to the other, as if the maker of the noise were slowing their descent down a mountain by following a path of switch-backs, belonged to a single person in Kavik’s life. The door to the study opened, and in walked the boss-boss of the association.
“Hi, Kavik,” said his older brother, Kalyaan.
CLOSING THE DEAL
No.
That was all Chaisee had cared to say to Henshe about delivering Unanimity to Bin-Er. Through a hawk, not a human messenger. Sidao hadn’t returned. It didn’t take a genius to figure out why.
Sitting in his office in Bin-Er, Henshe crumpled the tiny scroll with its one-word response and hurled it at the hawk that had brought it, scaring the bird into flying off before a return message could be stuffed into the tube on its leg. He hated Chaisee’s blatant hypocrisy about the animals, the way she sent outbound letters when it suited her but still demanded in-person visits.
He was going to have to play by her rules one more time. Immediately he packed his bags. He reassured the panicking shangs that everything was fine, and he’d be back soon with the solution to all their problems.
Fine? had been their reaction. Fine?! Did he not see the barricades going up? Whole sections of town blocked off? Traffic had been cut in half! There were rumors the Earth King was getting ready to step in!
This was exactly why they needed Unanimity, Henshe told the shangs. To blow out the fires they insisted on setting underneath their own chairs. The anger in the streets wasn’t the Avatar’s doing. Neither was the Earth King’s growing suspicion. This was a harvest sown of greed and idiocy. Now, if they could let him do his job, please.
It was the most he’d ever told his bosses off. Which was fine. Either he was going to come back from Jonduri a dead man walking, or with more power in his hands than he knew what to do with.
A perk of his position was that he was allowed unrestricted personal travel between shang cities. He was one of the few people who could enjoy a passenger’s status without questioning by harbormasters. Once he was on board, he spent most of the trip lying in his bunk, staring at the ceiling of his solitary quarters, pondering the irony.
Who would have thought that cutting back on the illicit shipments would be the tipping point for the residents of Bin-Er? After the Avatar left, Henshe and the shangs had attempted to erase all traces of the unreported traffic she’d held over their heads, a move that was just common sense. They’d turned junks away, canceled contracts, dumped the workers who would have processed those goods.
That last bit had set everything over the edge. Why? Henshe had to ask. So many other past deals under past zongdus had ended in similar fashion. Why did the city have to lose its mind over this one?
He wasn’t a man who asked for much. He didn’t need the whole world dancing to his tune. All he wished for was fairness. For the cogs to fit together and turn in the direction they were supposed to.
The title of zongdu offered the holder an opportunity to make astounding amounts of money from kickbacks, budget-skimming, and guiding the flow of deals and contracts. That was how it worked. That was why it cost so much money to bribe the people necessary to get appointed to the role in the first place.
The procedure, standardized by the office holders before Henshe, was to go into massive amounts of debt to scrape the bribes together, make even more massive profits during your term as zongdu, and then pay back the original loans. The difference that could be pocketed was potentially so large you’d need every pair of trousers in the Middle Ring to hold it.
Previous “generations” of zongdus had successfully extracted their rewards and moved on. Dooshim had gotten in and out with his money. That was how the process worked.
But apparently now, during Henshe’s turn, was when the gears had to fall off their pinnings. The Avatar had decided to make a name for herself using him as a stepping-stone. Forget a profit. If his term didn’t end the way he needed it to, he’d be ruined. Lower-than-Lower Ring ruined.
He just wanted what similar people in his position had received. To get in and out. Was that so much to ask? Couldn’t the Avatar have delayed her efforts by a few years, until after he’d left Bin-Er and disappeared from the annals of the Four Nations? He didn’t love the fundamental idea behind Unanimity, honestly, didn’t have the same grand hopes for it as Chaisee. But it was the only tool at his disposal that had the chance of staving off disaster.
When they arrived in Jonduri and he disembarked from the boat, feeling mugged by the humidity and heat, he found a woman waiting for him on the dock among the coils of rope and barrels of pitch. She was pretty, with a smile wide enough to engulf a mango. He knew she was one of Chaisee’s attendants. He asked her name.
It didn’t matter, she said. If the Zongdu of Bin-Er would be so kind as to accompany her, her mistress was waiting.
Henshe had been to Chaisee’s house before, and he suffered the climb through the damp, insidious jungle. Once he was inside, he saw it was still the same plain little training hall, aspiring to a guru’s austerity. Nothing had changed since his last visit except for its owner, sitting in her chair.
“You look ready to pop,” he said to Chaisee. “What happened to your old servant? The man with the scar over his eye?”
“What didn’t happen to him?” she said calmly. “I hired someone else. It was a matter of security.”
Henshe waited until the new attendant finished pouring their tea and left. The girl didn’t need to know about the grisly fates her employer liked to deal out for disloyalty. “It would be nice if you didn’t have the same response every time your paranoia flares up. You literally killed my messenger.”
“You chose a poor messenger. Sidao was a member of the Avatar’s retinue and could have easily passed on your information to her. Did you ever stop to think he might have been happily collecting payments from you and the shangs of Bin-Er while remaining loyal to her? The best of both worlds.”
No, Henshe hadn’t considered that Sidao had ever gotten the better of him, but he wasn’t going to admit it. “All I’m saying is that you don’t have to jump straight to permanent solutions.”
“Sidao wasn’t the only potential spy I had to deal with,” Chaisee went on, ignoring his advice. “There was a boy from Bin-Er, an obvious plant attempt. And then the Avatar herself shows up on my island. You were sloppy, Henshe. Painfully so.”
She dropped the words he’d been fearing the whole boat ride. “My answer is still no. Unanimity came to fruition with my research and I have borne its costs. We’re not deploying it simply because you’ve bungled the situation in your own city.”
Henshe stood up from his chair. He was a tall man, and he loomed over Chaisee like a shade palm. “Do you know what the difference is between you and me?” he asked. He dropped his gaze. “Unlike you, I’m not interested in building a dynasty.”
He had her attention now. Chaisee shifted, folded in her chair an inch. “I know you’ve got plans,” Henshe said. “Grand plans for the future. Your bloodline etched into history. Admirable. Really. But if I don’t get to see tomorrow, neither will you. I know too much about you, and your little experiments that you’re hoping might keep you in power forever. It wouldn’t take much for me to convince the Fire Lord he should put Jonduri in the hands of a less ambitious functionary.”
He picked up the steaming teapot, still mostly full. “If you don’t help me put out the fire in my house, then I will make sure it spreads to yours,” he said to his fellow zongdu. He hurled the vessel at the wall above her shelf. The porcelain burst, sending hot water cascading over her precious books and scrolls.
She made no movement, other than to eye him up and down. He let her. The more spiteful and reckless she thought him, the better. Chaisee was the one with the long-term outlook. She wanted to keep her title forever and for all time. She wanted this little island to become her own clan holding, this city the jewel in her crown. In her eyes, she had generations to lose.
She came to a conclusion. “I relent. You’ve convinced me that the best place for Unanimity is Bin-Er. But I need more time.”
Henshe nodded, rocking his head over and over. So that’s how it is. He knew Chaisee well enough that when she was done talking to you, truly had no intention of humoring a single word coming out of your mouth, she started feeding you promises, details. She would politely delay until you withered on the vine.
“Of course,” Henshe said, getting up to leave. “This is an important decision. It shouldn’t be rushed.”
He walked out of her house knowing exactly what to do. He was going to call in the one person who could get Unanimity from Jonduri to Bin-Er quickly, right out from under Chaisee’s nose. Once the assets left her shores, her reaction wouldn’t matter in the least.
Chaisee might have thought him incapable of long-term planning, but that wasn’t the case. For all her smugness about catching spies, she’d missed a very deep plant Henshe had successfully put inside her organization, someone who had been in his pocket from the day he first stepped onto Jonduri soil.
He just hoped Kalyaan still remembered the signal for linking up. It had been a while since they last spoke.
FOLLOWING THROUGH
“Well?” Kalyaan said. “Aren’t you going to say anything?”
Kavik screamed and launched himself at his brother.
Kalyaan happened to be the one person who could trounce him at wrestling every time. So when he managed to tackle Kalyaan to the carpet and start throwing punches, some part of him knew this was an apology gift. Kalyaan letting it happen.
