Golden Daughter (32 page)

Lady Hariawan stared at nothing upon the floor, unaware of the dog.

“My mistress?” Sairu spoke in a whisper, as though afraid one loud noise would ruin this sight, would shatter this vision and show her the lady dead upon the floor.

Lady Hariawan looked up, her face a still mask. She said: “It is strange, is it not? How these dogs would risk their lives. How they would die for love of me.”

She put out one hand, the fingers long, delicate, and trembling. They closed upon the hilt of the assassin’s knife lying on the ground beside Sticky Bun.

“I would have it for myself,” said Lady Hariawan. “The power of life and death.”

In a flash her arm twisted up, and she drove the blade straight for Sticky Bun’s eye.

The cat found Sairu behind the low wall of the kitchen garden, her shoulders hunched, her body shaking with sobs. Steady rain soaked her garments and ran through her hair. She clutched Sticky Bun close to her heart as she wept.

Ears flattened against the rain, the cat darted up to Sairu’s side, relieved to have located her. As he approached, Sticky Bun caught his scent and began wiggling in his mistress’s grasp, yipping rather uneasily but still determined to ward off the devil.

The cat puffed through his whiskers, glaring at the dog. He raised his voice to be heard above its barking.

“So the beast’s alive. Not even harmed from what I can see. What is all this weeping and wailing for?”

Sairu startled and pressed her wriggling dog closer as she looked down at the cat. Her eyes were wide and full of terror. Several times she tried to speak, but the words stuck in her throat. At last she managed in a hoarse whisper to say: “I struck her.”

“And a good thing too,” said the cat, shaking his head ineffectually against the downpour. “She did, after all, try to kill your hedge-pig.”

“No. You don’t understand.” Sairu’s face was paler than the cat had ever before seen it, and dark circles ringed her eyes. “I
struck
her!”

She buried her face in Sticky Bun’s fur, muffling her sobs. The dog whined and twisted about, snuffling her hair and licking her ear and any other part of her he could reach. Their animosity momentarily forgotten, he even permitted the cat to put a paw on his mistress’s shoulder, purring and rubbing his whiskered cheek against her head.

“There, there,” said the cat through his purr. “There’s a good little mortal. Have your cry, and then we’d better decide what we’re doing with our would-be assassin. He could be discovered at any moment by his fellows. We must dispose of him somehow. Can’t leave him trussed up in the middle chamber.”

This brought Sairu’s head up. For a moment her expression of horror revealed all the tumult of her soul. But only for that instant before her training leapt into play. She smoothed out her features, relaxed the muscles of her cheeks, softened the line of her brow. She assumed the mask of utter calm.

Only her eyes betrayed her.

“Monster,” she said, “you must do something for me. Something I . . . I do not think you will like. But you must promise me to do it.”

He stepped back, his tail swishing against the rain, one white forepaw upraised. “You’ll have to tell me what it is before I make any promises.”

Sairu looked down at Sticky Bun. She’d relaxed her hold, and he sat in the spread of her skirt, bulging eyes fixed on the cat, but submitting to his mistress’s caresses. “I need you to take my dogs back to Lunthea Maly,” Sairu said.

“
What?
”

“Listen to me,” she continued, and her voice was her own again: controlled, dominant, forceful. The cat, immortal devil though he may be, shrank before it, his whiskers tense about his face. “I must get my Lady Hariawan out of this place. I must return with her to the Crown of the Moon and there discover the truth behind all these secrets, all these lies. I must learn exactly why she is being hunted, why the Besur sent her away. I
must
learn these things so that I can protect her. Otherwise I’m marching blind into battle. I will fail her.”

“I understand,” said the cat. “But I don’t understand why—”

“I cannot do it,” Sairu interrupted. “I cannot safely guard her all the way back to Lunthea Maly if . . . if I am afraid.”

A shudder passed through her small frame, threatening to break her mask into pieces. And the cat saw then what she most feared. He saw why she wept, why even now she looked ready to crack into a thousand shards of hopelessness.

He saw that she was not undividedly devoted to her mistress. And that this realization terrified her.

“Please,” Sairu said, though her tone was one of command. “I know you have strange powers. I know you’re not what you appear to be. You can get them home for me. I cannot leave them here. They need me. They trust me. It would break their hearts. But to get Lady Hariawan back to the city, I will need all of my skills, all of my concentration. And I do not . . .” She stumbled over the admission but forced it out. “I do not trust myself.”

The cat’s gaze shifted from her to the dog and back again. “So you want
me
to take them?”

“Yes.”

His lip curled in a disconcerted sneer. “Why do we not all journey together?”

“No. I would be afraid. It’s a three-month journey. I don’t know what she would do to them if I were distracted even for a moment.”

“Well,” said the cat, “it doesn’t
have
to be a three-month journey, you know.”

Sairu studied his face, which she had learned to read frightfully well even in the last few days. He did not doubt that she would wrest many secrets from him if he didn’t take care.

“I know paths,” he said quickly. “Strange paths through strange worlds, but they will cover the distance from here to your city in no time at all by your mortal count. I can take you, your lady, and your dogs.”

Sairu narrowed her eyes, reading his face despite his efforts to control it. Then she said, “Can you promise me that, while using these paths, both I and Lady Hariawan would be safe?”

Dragons blast her! The cat lashed his tail irritably. But he admitted, “I could guarantee your safety, little mortal. I could not guarantee hers.”

“Then no,” said Sairu. “I will not risk it. I
know
I can get her safely to the city if I take her alone. I will not risk her life by another, less sure method.”

The cat growled. “I was sent to watch over you,” he said. “I was sent to protect you.”

She shook her head dismissively. “I do not need protection. I can take care of myself.”

“Are you intending to rescue Jovann?”

The bluntness of the question momentarily took Sairu aback. But she controlled her face even now, betraying nothing by so much as the barest flicker of an eyebrow. “I am not,” she said. “I will not be divided. I will guard my mistress.”

“Even if that means he will die?”

“I will guard my mistress,” she repeated, and closed her mouth tight.

Sticky Bun whined again, testing Sairu’s hold on him as he feinted a lunge at the cat. Her hands restrained him, but the cat startled back, the fur on his spine rising.

“Please, Monster,” Sairu said. “Please promise me you’ll see them back safely.”

“Very well,” said the cat, still growling. “We have a deal. And Lumé love me, I hope I don’t live to regret it.”

Sairu rose then, bending to set Sticky Bun down on the ground beside the cat. Sticky Bun snarled, preparing to give chase, but his mistress said sternly, “No. No kitty for you. You stay, Sticky Bun.”

The dog put his ears back, his eyebrows puckering pathetically, and the cat rolled his eyes and shivered. Sairu, however, nodded with satisfaction and turned to go.

“Wait!” said the cat. “Where will I meet you in Lunthea Maly? And when?”

“I will see you,” said Sairu, “three months from today in my former chambers within the Masayi. Look for me then but no sooner.” With that, she gathered her skirts and her long sleeves and hastened across the rain-filled grounds, back to the East House, where her mistress sat in near-comatose serenity upon her bed, awaiting her return.

The cat, his ears back like horns, looked at Sticky Bun. Sticky Bun looked back at him, his tongue lolling.

“Oh, Lumé give me strength!” said the cat.

In the dark of the evening, Brother Tenuk knelt in his private prayer chamber before an altar to Hulan. The altar was covered in a faded, moth-eaten cloth that once had been blue and fine. The threads of elegant embroidered work had withered away with time, leaving puncture holes behind, a ghostly testimony to the images once so carefully depicted.

Upon that cloth and altar stood a stone Moon Gate arch, no more than a foot tall. It looked no different from any other dotting the landscape of Noorhitam, save that from the center of this arch hung a silver gong. The gong shimmered where it hung, though there was no breeze to stir it.

Brother Tenuk lay before this altar, prostrate upon his knees, upon his face, his hands extended before him. Any who gazed into the chamber would have seen a man in an attitude of most abject and worshipful prayer. But no one could see that his face was twisted, his mouth open in a silent scream.

Possibly there existed somewhere a world where that scream was heard, causing all the denizens therein to shiver and offer prayers for protection. But here in his own world he dared not make a sound. So his mouth opened, and his throat constricted, and nothing but deep, deep silence poured forth.

Fear wrapped around his heart like a constricting snake, squeezing the life from his soul.

“Did I do right?” he whispered, his mouth scarcely able to form words, his lungs scarcely able to find breath to speak them. “Did I guess correctly? Have I indeed found the Dream Walker?”

Or was there something he was missing? Was there something he was not seeing, not understanding? A twisting, dark path spread before him, a demon’s path, and he must walk it. He had no choice. But he could not see where the darkness might lead. He knew only where it must eventually end.

Once more his mouth opened and his throat constricted with the strangling silence of a scream he dared not utter.

In his mind’s eye he saw Lady Hariawan bleeding from a poisoned talon embedded in her heart. And she was Kulap, his dove, his innocent dove. He could not distinguish the one from the other, for the two were made one in his vision.

A pounding on his door brought him bolt upright. The movement was too swift for his aged body, and pain shot through every limb. He masked it behind anger in his voice when he shouted, “What do you want? Why do you disturb me in my hour of prayer?”

“Brother Tenuk!” cried the voice of one of the priests. “Brother Tenuk, Lady Hariawan has disappeared!”

The abbot did not answer. He was silent for so long that at last the priest outside his door worked up the courage to knock again, saying only just loud enough to be heard through the panels, “One of the lady’s slaves discovered his fellow slave bound and gagged in the middle chamber of Lady Hariawan’s rooms. Of the lady herself there is no sign. She and her handmaiden are gone. Gone! We’ve searched the whole of Daramuti, I swear on Hulan’s crown. She is not within our walls.”

The door to the prayer chamber slid open with a crash. The priest standing without huddled back into his robes before the face of his abbot. His abbot who was so bent with age, he stood not even as high as the priest’s shoulder, but whose wrath was as great as the mountain upon which they stood.

“Find her,” the abbot said. “Search the whole of this forest. Now! At once!”

“Brother, night is falling, and beyond these walls it is—”

“I don’t care if half your number are devoured by wolves!” the abbot cried, his voice ringing through the whole of the Seat of Prayer. “All of you, spread out. Into the woods, up the slopes, down the Khir Road. Send runners to the caravan bound for Lunthea Maly, and make certain the slave has not been rescued or somehow managed to escape.
Go!
”