Shadow Magic (14 page)

The way I saw it, the Emperor was clearly hoping for the vote to go toward the former. If he could keep us trapped there even an hour or so longer, he’d probably wear Fiacre down into agreeing on a number. If we started afresh the next day, new stubbornness would have set in after the night, and it would be harder to convince our men of anything.

I already knew which way I was voting.

The other men and women from Volstov must’ve been thinking along the same lines as I was, since the vote came down to retiring for the night. Maybe they were just tired; I didn’t care. I took grim satisfaction in being able to think I’d thwarted the Emperor. Maybe it was petty, but then again I’d never told anyone I was the man for this sort of job. It’d just been decided for me, and I was going to play it the way I saw fit, short of getting into any real trouble.

“Ah, fresh air,” Caius said, standing next to me and breathing in deeply before letting out a fluttery little sigh. I’d heard women make that kind of noise. “Well! What do you think we should do now?”

“What should
we
do?” I spluttered, since I’d been looking forward all day to finally shaking him off once night rolled around.

“I thought,” Caius went on blithely, “that we might request guidance to the menagerie. Of course, it won’t be what it was before the war—so many of the animals were lost or killed, you know, during the final attack of the dragons on the capital—but I still hear it’s uncommonly beautiful. Just the sort of relaxation we need after a hard day deliberating, don’t you agree?”

I didn’t, and I had half a mind to tell him exactly what I
did
agree to. And none of it involved him.

Except he’d turned his back on me almost immediately and, in the midst of the crowd—stony-faced warlords and passive servants and stretching men and women from Volstov, all of whom suddenly looked just as tired and uncomfortable as I felt—he was waving down some hapless creature.

“Menagerie!” he said, gesturing wildly with his arms. I thought he looked like a bird—but that was probably what he was going for. “Animals? We’d like to go there.”

The servant shook his head. No doubt he thought the pale-skinned sprite was mad. He was right.

Caius sighed, and said something I didn’t understand. Half of it sounded like a question and half of it sounded like a command, but all of it sounded like the Ke-Han.

“Seems you’re a little too fluent,” I said.

“Oh, I know the odd elementary phrase here and there,” Caius replied.

“And ‘Would you take us to see the menagerie’ is one of them?”

Caius’s lips twitched unevenly, the left corner lifting higher than the right. He looked like an imp. “I learned what I thought I’d need,” he said. “And as you can see, it’s served us both. This patient young man is going to show us the peacocks.”

“You’re going to see the menagerie?” Josette asked, suddenly beside us. “You know, I think that’s just the thing I need this evening. Is it very far?”

Caius tapped the side of his jaw with one finger. The nail was a perfect oval, manicured like that of a woman at the Fans. “It isn’t too far a walk, from what I recall. Certainly the sort of brisk evening stroll to put color on a lady’s cheeks.”

“You should enjoy it too, then,” Josette said wryly.

I’d never minded Josette, at least. If I was lucky—which I wasn’t, but I still liked to hope—then he’d talk to her all night and leave me right out of it.

“You will pardon my intrusion,” a Ke-Han-accented voice said from just behind me, “but if you are going to the menagerie, then it is only fitting you should be taken there by a guide, and not a servant.”

I turned, not liking the way he spoke—he was too confident at it, for one thing, and a confident man of the Ke-Han set off all kinds of alarms, no matter how much I’d supposedly trained myself out of those old soldier’s reactions.

It was the lord who’d sat to the left of the Emperor. He’d been introduced the night before, and when I tried to remember, the name came back to me as one of the most important in the quick tutorial the ’Versity students had given all the diplomats who didn’t know their asses from their elbows: Lord Temur.

Caius, of course, was ecstatic.

“Would
you
offer your services to us, my lord?” he asked, like a blushing maiden entertaining her suitor. “I’ve been
so
looking forward to seeing the peacocks!”

He was laying it on a little bit thick, I thought, but Lord Temur proffered a faint, unreadable smile. A civility, as far as I could tell, but at least he was trying. His hair boasted more braids than the young prince’s had, but fewer than his formidable bodyguard’s. I was starting to judge men by the quality of their hair—a peculiarity I didn’t altogether enjoy noting in myself, but it was useful there. Lord Temur looked fierce, but fewer braids meant that he was more of a diplomat than he was a soldier. Or maybe he had men to do all his soldiering for him. I didn’t know, and I didn’t plan on making polite conversation with the man until I could find out.

“That’s very kind of you to offer,” Josette added, ever the diplomat. I thought that the lord hadn’t so much offered himself as given a shrewd counsel, but that was the danger in coming too close to the swirling tornado of conversation that was Caius Greylace. Even an important Ke-Han warlord wasn’t immune to getting swept up, turned all about, and spat back out again whenever the storm grew tired of its latest plaything.

But Lord Temur didn’t seem too concerned about that though he couldn’t have realized the danger yet. Instead of running for the hills, he extended to Josette the same thin smile he’d given Caius and offered his arm. There was just enough time for Josette to look surprised then flattered before Caius launched himself into the gap between them like a small, very well-groomed dog doing a trick with a hoop.

“You are
too
kind,” he murmured, beaming that grin that made him look more like a jack-o’-lantern than a person. He laid his hand delicately on Lord Temur’s arm like he was used to getting that sort of treatment. “Oh! What a lovely fabric.”

I didn’t think that Lord Temur was the sort of man who concerned himself with what fabric his robes were made out of though there was no way of telling that from the expression on his face. Disregarding that smile, I hadn’t ever seen his face lose its calm, blank stare. Not even during the talks.

“The menagerie is this way,” he said, and bowed, before turning around and starting off. Caius looked pleased as punch.

“Now, you mustn’t think me rude, but are you quite certain that
all
the lions are safely within their cages?” he asked.

Like Caius Greylace didn’t know already he was perfectly capable of handling a lion or two. If I could trust the stories—and I was more and more sure than ever that I could—then he’d already handled his fair share of them.

Lord Temur said something in a low undertone that I didn’t quite catch, but I gathered from Caius’s tinkling laughter that it was the height of Ke-Han wit.

Josette gave me a baffled look, which was as clear an indication as I was going to get that she thought Caius as nutty as I did. Maybe it was best to let our fine Lord Temur deal with him all night, though it’d give him a really odd cross section of the diplomats.

If anytime, that was my chance to escape.

“Oh, no you don’t,” said Josette, a suspicious look in her eye. “You’re not bolting and leaving me here with Greylace and one of the seven Ke-Han warlords.”

“I think he likes you,” I said.

Caius and Lord Temur were walking up the white sand path, and coming to the garden that contained all the strange stone statues. We were going to have to run to catch up to them. Surprisingly, I didn’t mind the idea. I’d been waiting all day to stretch my legs.

Josette gave me a look that suggested if she hadn’t been such a diplomat, she’d have punched me square in the jaw for that last remark. Then she started off down the pathway, leaving me to catch up with her. I didn’t offer her my arm when I did, but she took it anyway.

I didn’t really see the purpose in going to a zoo at night, especially when it was nearing dark already, the sky stained a mottled blue-purple, like the ribbon Caius was wearing in his hair. (Knowing him, he’d probably calculated what night looked like, and picked out a ribbon that morning to match.) At least the air didn’t get a chill in it as soon as the sun went down, the way it did in Volstov. That was one positive thing I could say for the Ke-Han and their country though I wasn’t going to be making a habit of it or anything.

Up ahead of us, I could hear Caius’s fluttering laughter as they discussed the price of tea, or the artwork in the diplomats’ rooms, or the quality of silk, or all the trivial what-have-yous that Caius liked to talk
about. I couldn’t tell from Lord Temur’s voice whether he was bored out of his mind or just plain bemused. From what I’d heard of the Ke-Han language, it was common to speak all in monotone. I guessed it went along nicely with not having any expression on your face, so that nobody could ever tell what the hell you were actually thinking. I couldn’t even imagine what he thought of Caius’s theatrical Volstovic.

Josette pointed to a distant hill, some ways outside the garden where a bunch of fat, colorful flowers was growing. “Oh, look!” she cried, sounding more like Caius than I’d ever heard her. “Chrysanthemums!”

Lord Temur turned around at that, his eyebrows raised. I didn’t like how he understood everything we were saying so easily. Some might have looked at it like a gesture of goodwill, but to me it just felt like spying. The ’Versity scholars had explained that the Ke-Han language was one that took years to perfect, and that speaking it halfway was loads worse than not speaking it at all, but I couldn’t help feeling like we were at a disadvantage, since the Ke-Han could retreat behind their soft, hurried consonants, and we had nowhere to hide at all.

“They are a symbol of the Emperor’s reign,” said Lord Temur, shielding his eyes from the setting sun to look up at the chrysanthemum garden. “No one else is permitted to cut them.”

“Ah, I see,” said Josette, and she looked more disappointed than I’d have thought, over a handful of too-big flowers.

“He’s better than a guidebook,” I muttered under my breath.

Caius shot me a reproving look. It figured that he would have freakish hearing on top of his freakish everything else.

“We have nearly reached the menagerie,” said Lord Temur. “As I have assured your companion, all the lions are safely within their cages tonight.”

It wasn’t so much the lions that gave me cause to doubt, but then I supposed there wasn’t much harm in going to look at a bunch of animals, of all things. Besides, there were three of us and one of him, so if things got ugly, we could just feed him to something that liked fresh meat and hope for the best.

The gates of the menagerie were wrought-iron bars, shaped into a graceful and purposeless design, the way the Ke-Han seemed to like best. The stone walls were a clean white—the sort that only
stays
clean for a year or so, maybe, before the elements get to it.

Then I remembered how Caius had been prattling on about the menagerie being destroyed in the dragons’ last attack on the city—at least I thought that was what he’d been talking about, since I’d been trying to get to sleep at the time. The reason everything looked so new and shiny was because they’d only just rebuilt it.

They’d done a decent job, I supposed. There was white gravel all along the pathways, and bright, spidery-thin vines that draped down the white walls on the inside. There were dainty orange flowers blooming here and there, and a white sign at a fork in the path that said which animals were in which direction. At least, that was what I assumed it said, since the thing was written in the Ke-Han language, which meant that it looked like a game of noughts and crosses to me, but there were shadow-pictures of animals next to the foreign words, so my guess couldn’t be too far off the mark.

In the distance, I heard the sharp call of a bird that wasn’t a peacock.

Caius looked thrilled.

“Which should we see first, my dears? The lions? I see there are
leopards
also, how fearsome!”

“Yes, terrible,” said Josette. “I’m sure we’ll find ourselves all aquiver.”

“What sort of bird was that, do you suppose?” I asked, since it didn’t matter to me one way or another which animals we saw first. Though it wasn’t the sort of thing a person could say outright—for the sake of diplomacy and all—I would rather have seen the menagerie just after it’d been destroyed, with the animals running every which way, loose and fierce and proud. They wouldn’t look the same in cages, and, as much as I didn’t like the idea of lions roaming free all around me, I liked the idea of them behind bars even worse.

“There is a section devoted entirely to the songbirds,” Lord Temur explained, patient as anything, like he hadn’t just been sitting through the same bastion-damned long day as the rest of us. “They were the young prince’s favorite. Ah.” He paused, apparently remembering what the talks that day had been all about in the first place, and turned toward the other fork in the pathway. “Perhaps my companions would like to see the cats of prey? I regret to say that we have not yet replaced the white tigers that were lost to us earlier this year, but we have all the rest.”

Things were changing pretty fast there within the Ke-Han, you had to admit, and it was a miracle most of them were able to get up in the morning and go about their business properly, much less keep those blank looks on their faces and hold their heads up high. I didn’t envy them their position one bit, but we’d given them what they deserved. They’d taken enough land, conquered too many people, and got greedy. All we’d done was make sure they didn’t get any farther than the Cobalts. Took us long enough, too.

“The black panther was once considered a god,” Lord Temur continued, to the sound of Caius’s delighted “oohs” and Josette’s sharp “ah!” “A long time ago, though he is still respected in deference to the old ways. You can still read of his mighty place in some of the historical scrolls.”