Page 16 of Queen Demon
Bashat must have had some inkling that his plan wasn’t favored. “That’s why he wanted to use the Nient-Blessed conspiracy to promote himself.”
“Yes.” Tahren met Kai’s gaze. “I know you were once charged with Bashat’s protection, but I would like to strangle the little shit.”
At that opportune moment, Ziede walked in, her brow furrowed in confusion. Her hair was wrapped up in a towel and she wore a bathing robe. She looked as if she might have just flung herself into the bath basin and climbed out again. Sanja trailed out after her, yawning. Ziede demanded, “Did we leave it like this? I thought everything was packed or stored.”
Tahren frowned down at the divan she was sitting on as if she had just noticed it.
“Sanja and some of the Cloister Witches unpacked,” Kai told her.
“Good.” Ziede smiled down at Sanja, then did a double take. “Take off that hair piece, I’ll find you a better one.”
As they were sharing out the food that the Cloister Witches had brought, Ziede made everyone take real baths, with soap and the fragrant oils for hair and skin, not that they needed much persuading.
By the time Kai finished his, the twilight sky had darkened and the breeze turned cool, and someone had lit the old stone candlelamps. Once he had wrangled the still damp curling mass of hishair into some sort of order with a couple of bronze pins from the assortment Sanja had unpacked, he walked back out to the retiring room. Sanja had gorged on fried cakes and fallen asleep on a divan, with an old silk court coat for a blanket. Ziede and Tahren sat on the other divan, leaning into each other, and Tenes curled on a stone window seat looking out onto the moonlit canal. She was wrapped up in an Enalin-style painted caftan, which Kai also had no memory of seeing before, let alone packing it away when they left this place. Kai took the opposite side of the window seat and signed to her,feeling better?
With the dirt washed away, the bruises stood out against her pale skin, but she signed an assent.This place is lovely. Will we stay here long?
For tonight at least,Kai told her.Why? Did you want to stay?
I spoke to some of the Cloister Witches. One called Adenhar thinks I look like someone she knows in the stone hill country of Palm. She said that there are others there who can speak to the earth like I do, and some have my eyes.
“That’s good news,” Kai said aloud, but she seemed a little troubled by it. He signed,Isn’t it?
She hesitated, and signed,I also wish to stay with you and Ziede and Sanja.
If you can find your family, you should,he told her. There had to be people missing her. Unless Aclines had killed them all, but he wasn’t going to say it. There was no way that hadn’t already occurred to her.Even if you decide to leave with us again afterward.
She still looked uneasy.What if they don’t want me back? I was an expositor’s familiar. I’m afraid of what they might think of me.
Families are terrifying,Kai agreed. He couldn’t reassure her on that score.Think about it, there’s no hurry.
“I don’t want to move, possibly for the next century.” Ziede yawned. She nudged Tahren. “Do you think you’ll need to return to the council?”
“They may still have questions. I’m not sure I have muchintention of answering them,” Tahren admitted. “The situation seems stable now, from what I was told and what I observed. Before Saadrin and I interrupted, the council was in the process of finally admitting the Cloud Islands as a full member of the coalition.”
Ziede told Kai, “There was no attempt to suggest any replacement for Bashat. Apparently getting yourself voted in as emperor and then decisively voted out again was not a journey any of the other speakers are eager to embark on. Not that they’d be able to. If the Grale speaker tried something like that the whole southern region would simultaneously burst into riot.”
Kai wasn’t so sure of that. “In the old days, maybe.” The Arike Prince-heirs were in the best position to pull off a power grab, as evidenced by how far Bashat had gotten. The members of the Rising World coalition were governed in many different ways, and many of the speakers didn’t have that kind of inherited power and support. “Too many of them don’t remember anything but the Rising World. They’ve gotten complacent.”
The clever thing Bashat had done in his tenure as emperor was that he hadn’t fundamentally changed the way the Rising World coalition worked. Bashasa’s post-war food distribution schemes were still in place, coalition resources still went to all the various ministrant guilds, to teaching archives and libraries, to safeholds and hospitals. The rules governing trade and criminal punishments and forbidding indenture and slavery were the same. The coalition still settled disputes by arbitration in assemblies and not by force. Anyone could still go to a Rising World council hall and appeal for help or redress. But Bashat, through means subtle and blatant, had made himself seem the source of all that. That these things were gifts instead of something that had been fought for, as they had taken the world back from the Hierarchs step by blood-soaked step. Instead of something built by years of work by Bashasa and the Tescai-lin and Prince-heir Hiranan and all the others across the Arik and Enalin and Palmand Belith and Ilveri and Grale and beyond who had made the coalition into something that could last.
Kai said, “Do you want to leave tomorrow?” He could make that happen. He knew where to go to find someone willing to lend or rent them a boat that could take them to Bardes-arik on the canal, and from there they could buy their own transport under less scrutiny. “There’s something I need to do tonight, but we could start off in the morning.”
Tahren glanced at Ziede, smiled, and said, “Let’s decide that when we wake up.”
Ziede eyed Kai. She had obviously noted that he hadn’t said what he needed to do. “What did Dahin give you so surreptitiously?” Tahren lifted her brows in surprise. She hadn’t seen Dahin pass the package to Kai.
“It’s a journal of what he’s been working on.” Kai explained, “He was at the Summer Halls trying to uncover a wall carving in one of the Hierarchs’ sanctuaries. There was a map there. He thought it might show the Hierarchs’ home, or the route they took to get here.”
Tenes was listening alertly. Kai wasn’t sure how much of her education Aclines had left her when he took her memories. Much of this might be new information to her. She signed,Didn’t they land in the Arkai, at the deserted city we saw?
“That was one of the places, yes.” The Hierarchs had first landed in the Arkai, then spread out north and west overland, while hitting multiple cities along the east and south coast. Dahin had theories about that too. “And we know they came through the south continent. But before that, it’s all speculation.”
Ziede watched him thoughtfully. “From your expression, this isn’t just another history.”
“Wait.” Tahren’s brow furrowed. “When you say uncovering—”
“He was diving in the flooded rooms. Not under the weed mat, but still. He obviously thought it was important.” As a Lesser Blessed, Dahin wouldn’t be infected by any of the numberof waterborne diseases that caused mortals to vomit or shit themselves to death without proper treatment. He could still have drowned, though.
