looked light enough for something made out of rice paper, was surprisingly heavy, but not half so heavy as a Volstov blade. I thrust it inside the room, which lit up bright as day.
Everything—the strange flat bed, the canopy hung above it from the ceiling, the short tables, the pillows, the screen standing in the far corner—was some shade or another of blue.
Next to me, Caius began to laugh—a gentle, curious sound that reminded me of the whispers that’d followed us all the way there.
“Yours must be the next room over,” he said. “And what is that lovely scent?”
Nothing was going to get done if we kept at it, bandying words around like we were already in talks with the statesmen themselves. From the direction the servant was bowing and scraping in, it seemed as though Caius had guessed right about where my rooms were. Without saying anything about the incense—which was like as not going to turn my eyes as red as my coat by morning and do worse to my throat—I got inside my own quarters, slid the door shut hard, and wished to bastion I was anywhere but where I was.
At least my room wasn’t so much blue as it was turquoise green, but I got the picture clear enough.
I was alone finally, so I could unbutton my collar, and there were lamps in the room at least, thank bastion, which were tricky dangling oil-and-wick affairs that took some coaxing to get themselves lit. But they weren’t going to get the best of me, not when I’d lit fires out of less and trickier besides. I got a couple of them going, shadows dancing across the walls whenever I moved this way or that. Mostly, it was just dark, because apparently the Ke-Han, with all their inventing, hadn’t seen fit to invent windows.
Maybe they just didn’t like looking out at their ruined city. For that, I didn’t blame them.
In the next room over, I could hear the sound of water being run. There were some men who couldn’t stand even a little grit on their skin, and I guessed that Caius Greylace was one of those. I didn’t think there was much time for a bath, and I didn’t much want to wrestle with the tub, either, which was round and half-set into the floor and hidden by a standing screen.
No, as far as I could see, there was nothing for it but to wait.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t anywhere to sit, just a few large, seating pillows grouped together in the corners, and the bed, which wasn’t more than a pallet as far as I could see, complete with the most bastion-awful-looking pillow I’d ever seen. At least, I thought it was a pillow. It might’ve been some weird Ke-Han torture device. Whatever it was, I wasn’t sleeping on it—it was no more than a glorified slab of wood. No doubt royalty got a proper bed and pillow, but this was good enough for us Volstovics. I was sure it was just their way of thumbing their noses at us, a good little dig at the victors. Sneaky all over, that was the Ke-Han for you. Well, I was going to ask for some proper chairs.
Aside from that, there were the bath and the screen, and a low, long table and desk, and then something I guessed had to be a chair for lack of anything else it could be. It looked like a crescent moon, made all of black wood, polished so bright I thought for a minute it might’ve been metal.
It didn’t look like a room to live in. It looked more like a room for getting bowed to in, and if there was one feeling I’d learned to hate in the past few minutes, it was being bowed to.
On top of all that, there was only the one door, which didn’t settle my nerves any. Part of the wood on the wall that joined my room to Caius Greylace’s looked different, so there might have been a sliding panel.
And that was it.
My things were coming up later, but I hadn’t brought with me half as much as some of the others. To my way of thinking, this wasn’t some holiday. It was business, the Esar’s business, and I was there to serve him, not take in the sights or dress myself up like a game bird on the table.
So maybe I was predisposed not to enjoy myself, but this was enemy territory. And would continue