The Art of Prophecy, page 30
For a guilty instant, a wave of relief washed over Taishi. If this was the work of the underworld, then perhaps she wasn’t to blame for the shop getting burned down. Maybe this tragedy was just a coincidence. Deep down, though, Taishi knew this was a lie. There were no such things as bad coincidences, only bad players. Luck, good and bad, was nothing more than a product of planning, will, and work, or lack thereof. If Chown’s shop had burned to the ground hours after she had visited, Taishi was willing to wager Sanso’s soul that her presence there had had something to do with it.
“Once the brigade and my neighbors saw that, we were dead to them,” explained Zofi. “No one wants to get in trouble.”
“What could you have done to cross the criminal underworld?”
“The yellow means non-payment of policy,” explained Zofi, bitterly. “I know for a fact that is not true. I handle all of my father’s books, and we always paid on time. This is a mistake.”
“Quite an egregious one to make,” muttered Taishi. The black knife that the silk cloth was wrapped around was a shadowkill blade. “Not a mistake, though. Assassins were working with the Silk Hands. I’m sorry about your father, girl. Do you have a place to go?”
Zofi bowed her head. An awkward silence passed. Taishi wanted to offer comforting words, but couldn’t come up with anything. The girl was bright and capable; she could take care of herself. That wasn’t what she needed to hear. Instead, Taishi fished out three silver liang from her purse and dropped them into the girl’s hand. “You were right. I should have paid a fair price for the map. Did it by chance survive the fire?” Taishi felt like a tax collector’s perfumed ass for asking, but Chown had been her only lead.
Zofi shook her head. Fresh fat tears began to stream down the mapmaker’s daughter’s face. “Nothing survived except this.” She huddled a long wooden box close to her body.
“I hope it’s something valuable you can sell. I wish you good fortune, girl.” Taishi turned to leave. She wished she could do more for the girl, but orphans were as abundant as stray dogs in the Enlightened States.
She had just stepped out of the doorway when Zofi ran after her. “Wait, mistress, master…”
Taishi stopped at the doorway. “Master Nai Roha.”
The girl laced her fingers and bowed. Trying to look submissive and deferential was not her strong suit. “Are you still trying to reach the Temple of the Tiandi?”
Taishi nodded. “I am.”
Zofi opened the long wooden box she was clutching close to her chest, revealing the master map inside. “Father kept this in a stone safe. That was the only reason it escaped the fire.”
Taishi’s eyes glinted at the sliver of hope. “How much do you want for it?”
Zofi’s response to that question would have made her father proud. She clutched it close to her. “I couldn’t. This map is his legacy. It’s all I have left of him.”
Taishi felt shame for asking. Images of Sanso flashed through her mind. “It wouldn’t be right for me to take something so precious from you. Good luck, child.”
Zofi grabbed her sleeve as Taishi turned away. “Wait. If you’re leaving Sanba, I can lead you across the Sand Snake.”
The battle with the shadowkills was still fresh on Taishi’s mind. She shook her head. “Where I am going will be dangerous, girl. You don’t want to be near me.”
“I have a sand sleigh and can read shifting maps. I can take you all the way to the temple, not just to Fulkan Forest.”
Taishi grimaced. That almost swayed her. It would be difficult enough to latch on with a caravan heading toward the Manki settlement, let alone find someone who could guide her through Fulkan Forest. But her presence had already brought tragedy to the girl. Taishi didn’t need another child’s blood on her conscience, especially since it was likely she would have to abandon Zofi somewhere like she had Jian.
She turned away. “I’m sorry. You’re safer here in Sanba.”
Zofi clutched her sleeve. “No, you don’t understand. It doesn’t end with killing my father and burning down his shop. Once the Silk Hands place their mark on your family, they don’t rest until it’s finished. That’s how they maintain control. I’m not safe anywhere in the city anymore. That’s why I was hiding in the shop. I have no money and nowhere to go.”
Taishi averted her eyes. She did owe a debt to Wu Chown, one she was honor-bound under the lunar court to uphold even if the girl didn’t know it. Leaving Zofi to the mercy of the Silk Hands was not an option, although she was not doing the girl any favors by bringing her along. The less-bad choice won out. “Fine, you can come.”
“Thank you, thank you.” She didn’t hesitate before saying, “I have to gather my things. Please come with me.” Zofi rushed past Taishi and sprinted down the corridor. That last part almost made it seem like she was asking for protection, but Taishi knew better. This was all part of a plan, one Zofi had been able to concoct while hiding in a charred cupboard scared half out of her mind. Taishi was impressed.
They ventured deeper underground, where the walls crowded closer together and the ceilings threatened to bang into your head if you weren’t careful. The air down here was thinner, with barely a current drifting through. Taishi grew wary. Between the cramped space and the listless air, she was at a disadvantage. Taishi pulled her scarf over her mouth and nose. It also stank.
Fortunately, their stay in the warrens was brief. The home Zofi had shared with her father was a hole barely large enough for two beds, a table, and a tiny cooking area. Zofi was able to pack all her belongings within the span of a few minutes while Taishi cleaned out the cupboards and the small stack of spark stones in the hearth. Then Taishi had to suffer the long painful uphill slog back to the surface.
“Where is your sleigh?” Taishi asked between long, labored breaths.
“The Peasant Docks, on the west end, on the other side of the gorge,” answered Zofi, her breathing unchanged as she kept moving at a decent clip.
“We should hurry.” Taishi, who was lagging behind the girl, picked up her pace. It had been a terribly long two days.
Zofi paused at a chart hanging on the wall of a square they were passing through. “It says here the winds are high. We should wait until they calm.”
“When will that be?”
“Do I look like a weather diviner?”
The mouth on this one. “Then we’ll leave now. I don’t want to remain in the city a moment longer than necessary.”
“But—”
“The Silk Hands, remember?” And those blasted shadowkills. “The longer we remain, the likelier that they’ll find you.”
Zofi must have decided that thugs were worse than poor weather. “The docks are this way.”
It was late into the afternoon by the time they got up the hundreds of stairs back to the main floors and crossed to the other side of the gorge. Zofi insisted they pick up supplies at some of the local shops before heading to the Peasant Docks. Taishi had asked if they could use the lifts but Zofi refused, because Silk Hands thugs liked to hang out around the public lifts. Taishi couldn’t argue, although her sore feet wished she would. Instead, the girl led her through more back tunnels, going up and down hundreds of more stairs that circled around large sections of the city. By the time they had reached their destination, her feet were congee and the pain had spread to her back.
The Peasant Docks were as luxurious as their name implied. Whereas the commercial and trading posts were docks where money flowed in and out of Sanba, the docks here were just a large cavern with an awkward mouth shaped like a jolly man’s sneer at the bottom of a very long and not particularly well-lit tunnel leading, presumably, to the Sand Snake.
The sleighs, hundreds of them, were piled loosely on rickety wooden shelves stacked six high all the way to the ceiling, with long ramps leading down to ground level. The entire place looked like a death trap waiting to collapse. Zofi hurried past six shelves and up five levels before they reached what looked like a large oval-shaped wooden bucket with a pole sticking up in the center and a rudder on one end. The bottom half of the hull curved inward toward a shallow keel.
Taishi gawked. “This isn’t a sleigh. It’s a bathtub. How do we even fit in it?”
“This is the Slidewinder.” Zofi beamed proudly. “I built it myself. It’s not much, but it can fit two. One of us will have to hug the pole once we open the sails to catch the wind.”
Taishi’s worst fears were realized. She couldn’t believe they were about to journey on that terrifying ocean of moving dunes in this oversized soup bowl. Her stomach churned just looking at the thing, but she was clean out of options. “Fine. Let’s take this stupid toy for a ride.”
Zofi stepped between Taishi and the Slidewinder and held out her hand. “All we need to do is negotiate my rate and we can leave right away.”
Taishi’s voice turned shrill. “Rate what?”
Zofi smiled sweetly. “You didn’t think you were going to hire a sleigh and a navigator for free, did you?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
FAMILIAL BONDS
Sali rented a room on the fifth floor of a narrow inn near the front gates of the Katuia District. She had found it strange that the penthouse units were the cheapest, but discovered that going up and down four flights of stairs grew tiresome very quickly. The rental was more a large box than a room, with a lone window offering a view of the stone wall that enclosed the district. She could almost touch all four walls if she lay on the floor and spread her arms and legs. If she jumped, her head would smash into the ceiling.
The first thing Sali did was map out her contingencies. Another disadvantage of the top floor was that there were only a few ways to escape. The window was just large enough to squeeze through, and although it was a long drop to the stone tiles below, the wall on the opposite side was close enough for her to jump, catch a foothold, and then leap back and forth until she reached the roof of the inn.
Sali perched on the corner eave and spent the rest of the day observing traffic flow in and out of the district to get the lay of the land. Almost every soul inside the district was Katuia, a mixture of Nezra and Sheetan emigrants by the style of their clan garb.
A row of carts lined one side of the street, hocking everything from potstickers to shovels. Weapons were banned, but entrenching equipment, step hammers, anchor drills, and other tools weren’t. When one lived and labored in the Grass Sea, every tool was by needs a weapon.
Only a few Zhuun wandered through the thick crowds. None of the land-chained’s businesses operated inside the district, and their guards stayed close to the checkpoint at the gates. Not even magistrates, with their tall cone-shaped hats, dared wander too deep into the district.
After a while, Sali caught herself staring more at her own people rather than the enemy. Many of the Katuia here looked without hope, lying on the streets, leaning against walls, sitting next to fires that burned on the ground. In small cruel ways, they were losing themselves in this alien land of stone walls and dead earth. The very fabric of her people had been torn by their defeat in a war that had been waging long before any of them had been born.
Even so, there were glimmers of hope: former comrades coming together solemnly clasping forearms, long-lost friends finding one another, and separated family members reuniting with rough embraces and streaming tears.
A wave of nostalgia passed over her as the day curtained into evening. Back when she had been a little girl, long before she had shaved her sides, Sali used to compete with Jiamin to see who could climb to the top of the lookout nests. Jiamin would always win. She couldn’t be better than him at everything. The two of them spent hours hiding in the nests watching sunsets.
The last time the two had been together as children was in a tower. It was the night before Jiamin participated in the ritual that made him the next host of the Eternal Khan. Sali had held him close while he bawled like a baby, telling him over and over again that things were going to be wonderful, that he would make a great Khan, and that many great victories awaited him.
She ground her teeth. “I was such a fool.”
Maybe she had been. After that ritual, Jiamin had never really been himself again.
Sali climbed back down to her room once the moon appeared, and was in bed and half asleep before she remembered she hadn’t eaten since Sheetan. The price of having to go down and back up all those stairs was too steep for food, so she slept.
* * *
—
No sooner had she drifted off than a knock on the door roused her. She was on her feet immediately. Birds were chirping and morning light was shining through the window.
She pawed for her tongue with one hand and her shirt with the other. “Who is it?”
“Message from the Council of Nezra,” piped a child’s voice.
How had they even known where she was staying? Of course. She was right not to trust them about Mali. She held on to her tongue as she opened the door. A barefoot boy of about ten in ragged clothing looked at her nervously as he held up a piece of folded paper. “From the council, mistress,” he repeated.
Sali unfolded the note. Scribbled on top were the Katuia pictographs for “flower,” “sunrise,” and “morning mist.” Below each pictograph was a list of names with numbers next to them, totaling fifteen in all. Everyone on this list was between four and sixteen. At least the council was making good on their word.
“May you rise to greatness.” Sali tossed the boy a coin. “Wait,” she added, grabbing his sleeve before he could escape. Since he was already here, she might as well test him. She dragged the nervous boy to the bed and sat him down. “This will only take a moment. Close your eyes. Relax. Take a deep breath. Let your mind wander.”
He shied away. “Will it hurt?”
“Not at all, but you may leave this room the next Khan of Katuia.”
His eyes widened. “Really, me?”
“Better hope not,” she muttered under her breath. She spoke slowly in a clear voice. “Now, think of the Grass Sea. Can you see it? Do you hear the chitter of skarn beetles eating rocks, the gasflies hissing above your head in the early evening? Can you smell the scent of burst orchids and black sunflowers?”
He fidgeted and shook his head.
“Hold your arms forward. Imagine you’re holding a spear in your right hand and smoke in your left. The spear grows longer and thicker. The smoke drifts into the air. What do you sense?”
The boy stammered. “How do you hold smoke?”
“Never mind that. How does the rising smoke make you feel?” Sali bit her tongue, having erred. Her training as a Soul Seeker had been rushed, and her skill giving these tests suspect. Considering their plight, the spirit shamans had far greater concerns than providing her adequate instruction.
“Can I touch the smoke? Will it burn me?”
Sali struggled to mask her annoyance and keep the test on track. This was her first time performing it unsupervised. She felt a tinge of uncertainty as she dangled a light green crystal off a rope. “Let’s move on. Open your eyes. Stare at this crystal. Watch it spin. Focus, focus, focus.”
The boy tried his best. His face tensed and his breathing sped up as his pupils darted side to side, eyeing everything except what he was supposed to. And just like that the test was over. Sali had expected nothing from giving her first test, but still felt a pinch of disappointment that he did not pass. She glanced down at the paper in her hand. There would be many more failures to process.
“I’m sorry,” the boy said, confused and downtrodden. “I must have done something wrong, mistress.”
“On the contrary,” she replied, “you did very well, lad.”
He brightened. “Did I win?”
“In a way.” If Jiamin’s experience was any indication, he absolutely did.
The boy crossed his arms and stood his ground. “What do I win?”
Sali appreciated the hustle and handed him another coin, though if she had to pay every child she gave the test to, she would end up in the poorhouse by the end of the week.
Sali walked with the boy down the stairs and then sent him on his way. The stench of the street hit her the moment she stepped out of the inn. She had been here for two days now and still couldn’t get used to the smell of manure, filth, and poverty permeating the air. Unlike the air back in the Grass Sea, which always blew, in Jiayi it felt stagnant, trapped within these walls like the people who lived here. She looked around and began walking deeper into the district. It wasn’t long before she stumbled upon a yellow wooden beam jutting from the ground. Painted eloquently down all four sides were several Zhingzi words. Etched roughly with a blade at the top of the post was the Katuia pictograph for “scale.”
Sali continued down the main street searching for more pictographs, finding the one for “flower” on a side street just before the main street ended. A small wedding party with three hearts—two young men, an adorable elderly man and woman in obviously their second or third marriages surrounded by their many grandchildren, and three women—danced down the street to the beat of half a dozen tuur drums. Sali stopped along with everyone else close by and slow-clapped a hand to her heart in the rhythm of the drums as the procession passed. The crowds were thinner and the mood more somber, but Sali appreciated that their traditions were still being kept alive. She was mildly surprised and thankful the land-chained allowed this, considering their sometimes more rigid beliefs. The only things missing were the wedding dresses and robes, and the processional of horses, which was understandable considering the circumstances.
Sali checked the note again and began her search, knocking from door to door. She tested her next child, a toddler, a few doors later in a second-floor unit that housed three families. The third was a girl working in the horse shop selling sinew, hair, and meat. The fourth was a teenager working in a brickyard. Sali took one look at the manure caked all over his hands, face, and body, and immediately rescheduled to return later that evening, preferably after he had washed up.
