at Chien’s bedside, and the surprise made him start violently. A black shape, made fuzzy by the drug in his system, standing next to him.
‘You’ve caused my employer a great deal of trouble,’ the man hissed, and as he did so Chien felt a gloved hand smothering him, holding his nose, and a wooden phial shoved between his lips before he could close them. He thrashed, tried to cry out and gagged on the liquid in his mouth a moment before another hand clamped over his face, preventing him from spitting it up. He swallowed reflexively to clear his airway; and only then did he realise what he had done.
‘Good boy,’ the shadow said. ‘Drink it down.’
He stopped thrashing, his eyes wide in mute terror. A new drowsiness was spreading through him, turning his muscles to lead. His limbs become too heavy to lift; his head lolled back onto the pillow. A dreadful sleep descended on him, too fast for him to resist.
In seconds, he was still, his eyes open, pupils saucers of black staring at the roof of the darkened infirmary tent. The intruder took his hands away from Chien’s face, watched as his breathing became shallow gasps and finally stopped altogether.
‘I commend you to Omecha and Noctu, Chien os Mumaka,’ the assassin murmured, closing the merchant’s eyes with his fingers. ‘May you have more luck in the Golden Realm.’
With that, the shadow was gone, slipping out into the camp to resume his guise as a soldier in Barak Moshito’s army. Barak Avun tu Koli may have been far to the north, but his reach was long.
Chien lay cooling in the darkness, a death that would be attributed to fever in the morning, and his message remained undelivered at the last.
Reki tu Tanatsua, brother-by-marriage to the Emperor of Saramyr, huddled in the corner of an abandoned shack and wept into his sister’s hair.
He had crossed the Rahn at sunset, having ridden headlong from Axekami all through the previous night. The bridge on the East Way had been far too dangerous, but he had found a ferryman without any trouble: a small mercy, for which he should have been grateful, if he had been capable of feeling so. But there was no room in him for anything but grief, and so he sobbed in the shadows of the old field-worker’s hut that he had found to shelter in, amid the smell of mouldy hay from the pallet bed and rusted sickles leaning against the thin plank wall. The horses whickered nearby, uncomfortable at being kept in such close quarters; but he had not dared leave them outside, and they were too exhausted to be restless. They munched oats from their feed-bags, and ignored him.
He had ridden all day and most of the night, but sleep could not have been further from his mind. He did not care if he never slept again. He did not believe that this overwhelming sorrow and bitterness and pain would ever go away. How cruel the world could be, that just when he had found a searing happiness in Asara, it was all torn away and he was flung into the night, forced to abandon his sister and charged with a terrible responsibility. He could not bring himself to recall the pitiful state Laranya had been in when he had found her. It was a blasphemy against the person she had been, had always been until Mos had beaten her like that. The agony seemed too great to allow him to draw breath; the physical ache in his chest and stomach doubled him over.
Then, he had no idea that his sister was already dead.
They would be looking for him, she had said. They would try and stop him. Mos had crossed a line, and there was no telling what he might do now. Reki did not really understand: he had not known what his sister intended to do, how she had exposed her humiliation to the servants of the Keep so that rumour would be unquenchable, how she had meant to take her own life to ensure that vengeance would come from the desert. He did not think Mos would dare capture him and keep him against his will. As abhorrent as his actions were, kidnap was another order of magnitude.
None of that mattered though. He had his sister’s black hair twisted around his fist. She had charged him with delivering it to their father. Honour bound him, as it would bind Blood Tanatsua. And