The Assassins of Tamurin (60 page)

“It’s not all lost,” she muttered. “Ashken and he . . . perhaps.” Then her gaze focused on me again. “But why, Lale? Why did you do it?”

“I fell in love with Terem,” I said. “But it wasn’t only that. I saw Ihshan Aviya in Gultekin, and he told me who Merihan was. You knew who she was, too. All those years, you knew she was my real sister, and you kept her from me. You kept us apart, when you could have brought us together. And then you murdered her. You murdered the last of my blood kin. And you
still
wonder why I’ve betrayed you?”

“Ah, I see. Who told you about the Surina?”

“Dilara. She was my best friend once, but then you made her a murderess, and now she’s dead. You destroyed her. You destroy everything you touch.” My voice was shaking now with sorrow and outrage and, yes, fear. I was going to die and I didn’t want to. I tested Tossi’s grip, just a fraction. “Careful, Lale,” she whispered. No hope there.

Mother regarded me thoughtfully. “I did what I needed to do, child. But what I would like to know is this—^how did you wriggle free of the wraiths? Nilang said only she . . .” She trailed off and then said, “Oh, I see. Nilang released you. Yet more treacheries.”

“What did you expect? You enslaved her and kept her from her daughter. All she needed was the chance to tum on you, and I gave it to her. And once you’re dead, she’s free.”

“But I’m not dead,” Mother observed. Her face was stony. “And when I get her back. I’ll make her suffer. By the Moon Lady, I will.”

“You won’t escape even if I’m dead. There are men waiting for you.”

She laughed. “Did you think I wouldn’t foresee such a thing? There’s more than one way out of this house. Tunnels. Even Nilang didn’t know about them. That was wise, wasn’t it?”

“Mother,” Tossi said from behind me, “shouldn’t we go?” “I think we should. Very well, Tossi, kill her.”

“Good-bye, Lale,” Tossi murmured. She yanked at my arm to render me helpless with pain, and the vise around my head tightened.

‘Tossi!” Mother cried, leaping to her feet.

The terrible, neck-snapping wrench didn’t come. I heard two soft quick footsteps, Tossi gasped, the vise loosened, and my throbbing arm dropped free. Still half blinded with pain, I ahnost fell over, then looked behind me.

Tossi lay sprawled on the floor, facedown. A Taweret murder knife jutted from her spine, just where I'd driven my own blade into Ardavan. And beside her stood Nilang, who said, in a cracked voice, “The binding has me. Kill her, Lale.”

She dropped to her knees and toppled sideways; her lips drew back to bare her teeth, and her back arched into a bow. I spun around to face Mother, who was on her feet, wide-eyed and staring.

But it was not me she was looking at, nor Nilang, nor Tossi, but at the doorway. Something shimmered beneath the lintel, and then the air seemed to split like a snake bursting its skin.

A narrow door opened there, a gateway into somewhere else. And I knew that place. It was the Quiet World, and a creature was stalking out of it toward us. It seemed most like the thing that wanted to devour me long ago, but it was worse, and I knew it was coming for Nilang. Only that knowledge saved me from mindless terror.

“Kill her!” Nilang groaned. And then she made a noise, a soft noise, but it was worse than any scream I'd ever heard.

I struggled to my feet. My arm throbbed and my shoulder blazed with pain. Now I had to tum my back on the approaching horror. It was the last thing I wanted to do, but I did it. Then, wincing, I drew my knife.

Mother did not move. She seemed to have no fear of the thing from the Quiet World, for her attention was wholly on me. I hadn’t thought she’d mn, for she had too much pride for that. But I knew she would fight for her hfe somehow, and I was still very dizzy. I must be cautious.

“Wait, Lale,” she said softly. “Can you really do this, child? Can you really kill me?”

“Yes, I can,” I told her. “For my tme sister. For Terem. For Nilang. For everyone you betrayed.”

Mother looked down at the blade in my hand. “Let me go,” she said. “What harm can I do anyone now? I'll go back to Chiran and never trouble you again.”

“Nilang will die if I do, and I owe her my hfe. And if I don’t kill you, Terem will. There’s no way out for you, not now.”

She seemed to ponder this. I took a step toward her. Would she just stand there and let me drive the knife into her breast? And could I do that, in cold blood? But I had to. She had to die.

“Can you really kill me?” she asked again. “I’m defenseless, Lale. Can you really stand before me and stab me to death?”

From behind me, Nilang groaned,
''Lale!''

It distracted me for a heartbeat, and that was almost our undoing, for Mother seized the dish of beets and vinegar from the table and dashed it into my face. The stinging liquid blinded me; sightless, I threw myself aside and felt a thin pulhng sensation across my forearm. It instantly became a line of searing pain; fool that I was, she’d had a knife of her own. I saw a moving shadow through my tears, dodged, parried, clink of steel, her breath on my cheek, my training with me now, thrust the blade upward and twist. A resistance, then softness, a gasp,
ting
of metal striking tiles. She’d dropped her knife. Her weight slid away from me, tugged at the hilt in my hand. My blade pulled free.

On my left arm I felt the slick wet warmth of blood, but it seemed a shallow cut. I pulled my other sleeve across my burning eyes until the tears had washed the vinegar out. Then I could see her clearly, lying on her back on the floor with a red brook flowing from her bodice. My knife had gone in near the heart but had not struck it, for she was still breathing in husky gasps. But there was so much blood that I knew I must have pierced one of the great veins. She would not live long.

I spared a glance for Nilang and for the portal into the Quiet World. The dreadful creature had halted, and as I watched, the eerie doorway took on a translucent aspect and began to fade. The binding was loosening with the ebb of Mother’s life, and the terror and agony began to slip from Nilang’s contorted face.

I knelt beside the woman who had raised me. Spittle and blood trembled at the comers of her mouth.

“Why?” I asked. “Why couldn’t you have been different? Why couldn’t you have loved me?”

“Useless slut,” she gasped. “Who could love you?”

If she hadn’t been dying, I would have struck her. “I loved you once,” I whispered.

She gave a strangled laugh. “Yes, you did, girl, I saw to that, didn’t I?” She closed her eyes but she still breathed, and it came to me suddenly that the Mother I thought I knew had never existed. And to this woman who lay on the cold tiles before me, I owed nothing.

With a terrible effort she roused herself again, and in that beautiful voice, touched now with the rattle of death, she said, “Girl, I curse you with a mother’s curse. I curse you and all that spring from you. You’re the worst of daughters, and your own daughters will hate you.”

A vast burden slowly began to lift from my heart. I had borne it for so long that only now did I perceive the weight I’d carried.

“You can’t curse me,” I said. “You’re not my mother. My mother died in Istana a long time ago. I’m not your daughter, and I never was.”

“Traitor,” she breathed, and then blood came from her mouth. For a moment I felt her idu-spirit hanging in the air, seething with malice and hatred, and then it was gone like a bead of water on a sun-warmed stone.

Kneeling beside her, my blood mixing with hers on the cold floor, I felt a sudden strange sensation of lightness, as if I had become part of the sunlit air around me. I didn’t understand it at first, and then I did.

I was free.

There’s much between us that we must face,” Terem said. “And there is the question of what to do with you once we’ve faced it.”

We were in the covered veranda of the Reed Pavilion, seated at the table where we had shared so many meals. I’d had my servants set it with cakes and wine, but the cups remained unfilled and the cakes uneaten.

He’d been back from the east for two days now, but until this evening I hadn’t seen him. I’d worried that this delay was a bad sign, but I kept reminding myself that he had a lot to do at the Chancellery and the Ministry of War. His message that he would attend me had come as a relief of sorts, aldiough it was mixed with a great deal of apprehension.

The weather was fine. We were halfway through the month of Rain, but the sky had been clear all day and the air was soft and warm. Spring had arrived in Kuijain, with the sea lavender and basket-of-gold coming into bloom at the margins of the pond, and small black and silver frogs chirring from the shallow places among the reeds. The slash on my arm had healed well, although I’d bear a faint scar to the end of my days.

“Then where should we start?” I asked diffidently. I didn’t expect the worst fate possible, but I didn’t expect the best, either. For I could guess how much pain I’d caused him, if only by measuring it against my own. All month I had lived with remorse and anguish; neither had diminished as the days passed, and why should they? I was the author of a hideous drama of deceit, treachery, lies, death, and love betrayed; and not an hour passed wherein I did not think of what had been, and what might have been, and what I had lost forever.

Terem didn’t answer me, but gazed sadly at the young flowers at the margins of the pool. So I said, “But I would ask one thing from you. Will you let Nilang and Master Aa and the others go?”

They were still at Jade Lagoon, living in a pavilion uncomfortably near the Arsenal and its dungeons. The Chancellor had invited them to stay there, and me here, to await the Sun Lord’s retum from the eastem war. It was an invitation he did not intend any of us to refuse.

Nor did he leave us idle. Much of our time we spent being interrogated about the School of Serene Repose, Three Springs, and the web of spies Mother had woven throughout the Despotates and Bethiya. How the Chancellor would deal with that web, he hadn’t indicated, at least not to me. But I reckoned that, with neither Mother nor Nilang to direct its actions, there was no immediate peril to anyone.

I often wondered, as he questioned us in his Chancellery office, with the clerks writing everything down, how my Three Springs sisters would be coping with the news of Mother’s death and Nilang’s disappearance. They’d certainly know about the former, because Mother had been entombed in state here in Kuijain, and Terem had sent condolences to Ashken on her adoptive mother’s death. The new Despotana was no danger, for according to Nilang she knew nothing about the women of Three Springs. Also according to Nilang, with Mother’s death the wraiths would no longer be a threat to my erstwhile sisters; perhaps they did not realize it yet, but they could now babble Mother’s secrets as they liked and be none the worse for it.

As for Nilang, her new freedom had not appeared to change her a jot. When I asked her why she’d come back to help me, at such terrible risk, she’d given her usual Nilang shrug and answered, “If you failed, I was worse than dead. You were loyal to her for a long time, and I thought you might falter at the last moment, so I returned.” The fact that her lack of faith had been justified had done little to improve my mood.

“Why should I let Nilang and her retainers go?” Terem asked. “Or let you go, for that matter?”

From his tone, I couldn’t tell what sort of answer he expected or wanted. But my spirits sank even lower. I’d been hoping for exile, not imprisonment, but the latter seemed to be in the wind.

“Ardavan’s dead and the Exile Kingdoms are doomed,” I reminded him. “I had a hand in that and so did Nilang.”

“Yes, you did. I would say that you very likely assured our victory at Gultekin.” I was glad to hear him admit it. That victory had been great indeed, greater than any of the past two centuries, because Ardavan’s death had not only beheaded the beast that was the Exile army but also thrown it into turmoil. Some of his officers accused the allied Kings of contriving the assassination; then, on the very brink of battle, the King of Suarai demanded the army’s leadership for himself. Ardavan’s generals, beside themselves with grief and fury, refused, and the King ordered his men to withdraw from the field. And at that moment, in the faint light just before dawn, Terem hurled the Army of Durdane at the quarreling enemy ranks.

They were not ready for him, and his triumph was complete. The surviving Exiles fled toward the River Savath, with Terem in grim pursuit. But at the Savath, our brigades from Tanay blocked the fords so the Exiles could not cross, and the Army of Durdane took them from behind. Sixty thousand of their best soldiers died that day, with all three allied Kings and most of Ardavan’s surviving generals. Of the hundred and twenty thousand men who had set out to destroy Bethiya a month ago, scarcely a battalion remained.

After the Battle of the Savath, Terem sent the army ahead into Lindu, and now he had retumed to Kuijain to mobilize new forces and complete the freeing of the eastem lands. It would take time and much fighting, but it would come, for Durdana rebellions now flamed in Jouhar and Seyhan and Suarai, and few Exile troops remained to crash them. Better yet, it was said that Exiles by the thousands—man, woman, and child— were fleeing northeast toward the Juren Gap and the steppes from which they had come. If you listened to an easterly wind, you could hear the death ratde of the Six Kingdoms.