“Make sure you say the escoa was delivered by Zarq!” I shouted after him. “Zarq, you hear?”
He disappeared between legs and ankles and cart wheels.
We waited, the dragonmaster and I, alternately pacing the wharves in the drizzling rain and taking shelter within the office, and the entire time I rode the sharp peaks of amaze ment at the strangeness of my surroundings, and the dark valleys of fear that our mission would be unsuccessful and that Malaban Bri wouldn’t come, or if he did, he would dis miss us at best or come with Temple soldiers at worst.
Come dusk, two gaunt young men, one the dark brown of a wild boar, the other the toasted brown of a biscuit, de scended from the upper floor of the office. They walked by without looking at where I stood against a wall of floor-to ceiling hexagonal scroll cells, dripping rainwater onto the creaking wooden floor. I wondered how many descendants and immigrants from the Archipelagic isle of Lud y Auk lived in Lireh. Plenty, it seemed.
As the young men shoved the door shut behind them, the brawny deskman gave me a baleful look, wordlessly lit a smoking lantern, and continued to paw and scribble through the paperwork on his desk. Now and then he paused to lift the carcass of the boiled renimgar to his mouth and rip off a chunk of meat.
My stomach growled outrageously. I ducked outside and joined the dragonmaster and our escoa.
With twilight, the wharves had been emptied of work ing stevedores. Seamen and whores strolled and staggered through the gloaming, and urchins ran about, sometimes alone, sometimes in pairs, combing the docks for dropped fruit. Compared to the frantic activity of the day, the empty dockyards looked eerie, as if the dark waters lap ping rhythmically against the barnacle-encrusted pylons had claimed all life to support its own. The silhouettes of the ships moored alongside the piers looked like hulking carcasses, the rigging, furled sails, and masts like great ribs and fingers. Beyond the bay, the ocean was visible as a rip pling, restless black, stretching far into the distance and merging with the twilight sky.
I shivered. Malaban Bri wasn’t coming.
What now? I had failed, monumentally. Perhaps we could try to locate Malaban Bri’s villa, force an interview upon him—
My escoa snorted and shifted restlessly.
“Easy, now, easy,” I murmured. She cocked her head toward the ghostly white blocks and blurs of Liru on the mountainside and stared intently into the dark sky.
“About time,” the dragonmaster muttered. He peeled himself away from where he’d been crouched on his haunches, back against the dilapidated office building, staring moodily at the bay. His knee joints popped as he straightened.
I saw it, then: A winged dragon was approaching, flying low, coming fast. An intense rush of hot relief flushed my throat, set my ears to ringing. Somehow the legless beggar had delivered his message to Malaban Bri, and Malaban Bri had come. Alone.
The approaching dragon landed, great wings slapping the wet air like sails in a gust. The door to the office be hind me shoved open with a squeal of water-swollen wood. Light spilled in a glaucous circle around me as the brawny deskman looked out, lantern held high.
The dragonflier was lithe and dressed in warm leathers, and he raised a hand in greeting to the brawny deskman behind me.
“Thank you, Shendar.” The voice was high and womanly. “Lock up and return home now.”
I squinted through the gloom and my heart fish-flipped in my breast. “Jotan? Jotan Bri?”
A grin from the flier. “We meet again, Zarq.”
It
was
Jotan, a woman I’d last seen unconscious and near death after months of being imprisoned in Temple’s most secret and nefarious of jails.
“You can
fly
?” I said, incredulous.
She shrugged expansively. “I demanded to learn how. Malaban says I’ve become difficult and reckless since my return. I believe he’s correct. Mount up and follow me.”
The dragonmaster opened and shut his mouth several times, then stalked over to my side and jerked the reins from my hands. On an impulse, I walked away from him and stood in front of Jotan’s bright-eyed, feisty mount. The wind from her dragon’s wings smelled as sweet and pep pery as new orchids.
“Can I ride with you?” I asked.
Again a grin, and Jotan scooted back in her saddle and gestured in front of her. “Only if you lie underneath me.”
Heat bloomed between my thighs. “You always did pre fer being on top.”
She threw back her head and laughed, and I swung up in front of her.
In her rain-speckled leathers she was as cool and slippery as a wet dragon’s wings, and her breath was warm against my nape as she assumed the flying position and lowered her weight atop me. She smelled like clove-roasted plums and red wine.
“I’m glad you’ve come,” she murmured, her lips brushing my ear.
With that, we launched into the sky.
dragonmaster and me along a corridor. Mosaics flashed by us, lustrous indigo and white tiles bright under the lantern carried by the young serving girl who scurried before us.
“Away for the night or away from Lireh?” I asked tensely.
“He’s doing business with an inland Clutch, selling off containers of fur and sea elephant ivory from up north.”
I cursed roundly, using one of the more colorful phrases in my vocabulary of invective—something involving the Infinite Winged and a pig. Beside me, the dragonmaster muttered vehemently to himself.
Jotan shot me a cool look. “Malaban will be back within a clawful of days.”
“You need to summon him back
now
,” I said. “Events are unfolding that require his immediate attention—”
“And you think I’m incapable of handling them?” Again, the cool sideways look from under her dripping leather skullcap.
I hesitated. “I don’t know if you’re aware of . . . certain things.”
“Anything Malaban is aware of, I’m aware of.”
“But . . . you were imprisoned for a long time. I don’t know if you’re aware of everything that transpired outside our prison walls during that time.”
“And you are?” she said archly. “How well connected you’ve become.”
I flushed. “Not so well connected, or I wouldn’t be here.”
“Good that you remembered that. As for me, let’s say that I’ve made it a hobby of mine to keep very well-informed. Thank Temple for sparking such curiosity in me.”
Ahead of us, the serving girl inserted a key into a door, pushed it open, and slipped inside. Jotan stopped before the open door and turned to face me. “You’ll want to change and eat before we speak. I take it discussion shouldn’t wait until morning.”
When we’d been imprisoned together, ill health, lack of sunlight, and overexposure to venom had turned her the color of tallow; now her skin was a healthy dark tan, and I could see she had little of the Emperor’s blood in her, but plenty from the Archipelagic isle of Lud y Auk. Truly, she was not fa-pim; she was not landed gentry.
Her lips were fuller and redder than I’d remembered, too, and her eyes, black as a jaguar’s pelt, inflamed and addled me, despite the rivulets of blood cobwebbed in her sclera and the shards of white sparkling in her pupils. Or maybe because of those venom markings.
I remembered how she used to lie on a divan, in the quarters in which we’d been jailed, with one leg lazily hang ing down to the ground and exposed to the thigh, one arm draped over the cushions above her head, her diaphanous gown sloping off a shoulder.
I remembered, too, how both of us had been so brutally, routinely violated in that jail, how our bruised and broken limbs had been heavy with lassitude, our spirits submersed under an ocean of passivity. Seeing her now, a free, healthy confident woman, brought back frightening memories of all we’d suffered.
I could see her examining me, wrestling with the same emotions, trying to reconcile the image of the woman be fore her with memories of the Zarq she’d known in prison. “Zarq?” she prompted. “Can discussion wait until morn?”
“What?” Did she smell faintly of venom? “No, we should talk tonight. I have to return as soon as possible.”
Beside me, the dragonmaster growled in his throat. “We can eat later. We talk now.”
“Then you talk to the walls,” Jotan said, turning her gaze on him. “I intend on bathing and dressing first.”
A fire crackled in the hearth of the room beyond. Can dles had been lit. The serving girl ducked out of the room and stood, eyes downcast, at Jotan’s side. I was dismayed to see that she was Djimbi. I wondered if any Djimbi held posts of status or owned any property in Lireh.
“This way,” Jotan said to the dragonmaster. “I’ll show you to
your
quarters.”
I went into the room and closed the door after me, then stood there, stunned by the magnificence of my surround ings.
A massive bed was the focal point of the room. Raised off the tiled floor by clawed teak dragon legs, covered by thick quilts and a profusion of pillows, the bed was a masterwork of carving. The crown of the bed was carved in the likeness of two dragons, necks arched and mouths agape, fangs bared and tongues entwined. The dewlaps of one were inflated, and as smooth and round as breasts, and beneath the scaled belly of the other was a forked phal lus that penetrated the humanlike vulva of its partner. Two long teak tails trailed from the dragons and ran on either side of the mattress beneath the spill of quilts. Their tails joined and entwined at the foot of the bed.
The footboard of the bed had been carved in the like ness of two diamond-shaped tail membranes, only much larger, and the way the membranes arched against each other, pressing together like the bellies of joined lovers, was somehow more provocative than the headboard itself.
A yellow gown had been draped over the profusion of quilts. It was elegant in its simple cut and was far finer than anything I’d ever touched, let alone worn, in my life. I knew at once the neck of it would ride so low as to just cover my nipples, and that the thin material would cinch my waist and cup my hips like the hands of a greedy lover—if I were bold enough to put the gown on.
If it was intended for me. Maybe I was mistaken; maybe I would find something beneath it that was more befitting one of my status.
A knock at the door and, after a pause, two serving girls slipped in, carrying a large tin tub.
“Your bath, lady,” one murmured as they set the tub on the tiles in front of the fire.
Five more women came in, ranging in age from thirteen to thirty, each carrying behind her neck two steaming pails of water at either end of a pole. While I stood there drip ping on the tiles, unsure what to do, they efficiently emptied their buckets into the metal tub and departed.
The two young serving girls remained behind.
We stood in silence a good while, me at a loss as to what to do next and they waiting patiently for I knew not what. Neither would look up from the floor.
Both were Djimbi. Senemeis, I thought, recalling Savga’s honey-colored skin embellished by faint whorls that looked the color of sunbleached grass.
A hue much more pleasing than the starkly mottled shades that result from coarse pie bald pairings.
I wondered if our revolution—Nashe, as the dragonmas ter called it—would affect Malaban and Jotan Bri in ways I’d not anticipated. I wondered if they were even aware of the racial bias inherent in their choice of servants. I won dered if Jotan would treat me differently if she knew I was Djimbi.
“Climb in while it’s hot?” one of the serving girls finally asked.
“Can either of you read?” I asked.
Their eyes whipped up to mine, surprised, then returned to their former meek study of the tiled floor.
“No, lady,” answered one.
“Are you required to submit to the wants of male guests?”
Again, startled eyes met mine. “Bayen Hacros Bri gives his guests his ebanis, lady. Do you . . . want one brought to you?”
“Certainly not.” I was shamed by the flare of heat in my groin at the prospect. “Are you indentured serfs?”
Frowns. “We earn our keep, hey-o.”
“You’re allowed to look elsewhere for work?”
“Bayen Hacros Bri runs a good house.” The one who’d answered all my questions met my eyes and gestured, pleadingly, at the bath. “You’ll get in now, hey?”
“I’ll scrub myself,” I said. “You can leave.”
I waited till they shut the door after them before strip ping off and immersing myself in the steaming water. I wondered what my belly and breasts would look like with green whorls upon them.
By the time the serving girls returned with silver bowls and platters of food, I was scrubbed and dry and sheathed, uncomfortably, in the magnificent yellow gown. My hair, which I’d dried with a nutmeg-scented towel, felt light as down against my shoulders, and yes, just as I’d suspected, the scooped neck of the gown plunged so low that the edge rode just above my nipples. The serving girls set their ewers of wine and platters of food on a small table near the fire. I gawped. One of the girls announced each dish as she lifted the lid from it.
“Candied breadfruit flowers. Bananas boiled with ghar ial meat. Spicy roasted parrots in yolk sauce. Flying fish and roasted coranuts baked in pastry.”
I was awed at the strangeness and the abundance of the food in front of me. The girls stood back, and, after a mo ment, I cautiously tasted a bit of the spicy parrot in yolk sauce. The spice brought tears to my eyes—but was exqui sitely delicious. I attacked the rest of the meal with great vigor.
When I was done and my limbs glowed pleasantly from the wine and food I’d consumed, one girl brushed my hair while the other rubbed cream in my hands and polished my nails with beeswax. I couldn’t fully enjoy either, for their at tentions were too strange for me, and I was actually relieved when they finished and I was given slippers that matched the yellow of my gown and a fine shawl as black as venom. I inexpertly wrapped the shawl about me, grateful for some sort of cover for my revealing gown, and, feeling as grace less as a boar in my unfamiliar and fine surroundings, I fol lowed one of the girls to where Jotan and the dragonmaster awaited, in a library of parchment scrolls.
Just seeing the dragonmaster’s ugly, hostile face made me forget my awkwardness concerning my splendid en virons and reminded me of the coarse reality behind my presence in Jotan’s villa.
Jotan listened intently while I recounted everything— though I kept back, of course, the details of why bulls never hatched in captivity. I paced around the library we were ensconced in so as to avoid her distracting eyes, the look of her stunning red lips, the artful way her long black hair was held up with a dragon clip, revealing her neck. Her gown was white and sleeveless; the neckline plunged in a sharp vee to her navel, and was laced up by an indigo silk rib bon. The indigo silk against the shocking white of the gown against her dark golden brown skin, topped by her jet hair, made a stunning combination.
The dragonmaster, dressed in a plain brown tunic belted by braided leather, remained silent through most of my narrative, interrupting only occasionally with a passionate outburst when he felt more detail, or less, was required.
“I know whom to contact,” Jotan said quietly when I’d finished. “I’ll send a herald now.”
She leaned from her chair and pulled a silken cord, then turned back to me. “You’re right; Malaban needs to return immediately. I’ll have him summoned. Of course, you’ll stay until he returns.”
“How long will that take?”
“A day for my herald to reach him, a day for Malaban to reach us.”
The idea of remaining for two days in the Bri villa held much appeal. I nodded, even as the dragonmaster sput tered outrage.
Jotan turned coolly to him. “It won’t be wasted time. Preparations will begin without my brother’s presence: the gathering of arms and people and monies that you’ll re quire to fortify Xxamer Zu, the scheming and planning that Zarq talks about concerning attacks on Archipelagic ships and certain Clutches. The men I’ll contact will arrange all this.”
“As will we,” I said.
Her venom-blooded eyes turned on me. “Don’t expect to be a central part of this, Zarq. Once the key players I’ve summoned receive my herald, they’ll send their represen tatives to other contacts, who’ll alert their operatives. There are networks and networks of people involved. . . . You heard of the Wai-Fa Paak factory skirmish? No? Of course not. You are rishi, a Clutch serf.”
I bridled; she continued, aware of my indignation and enjoying it.
“It was an uprising started by a group that calls itself the Kindlers. Perhaps some of our men are involved with them, perhaps not. It doesn’t matter. What matters is the unrest of the working class, the willingness of laborers to burn to the ground a factory that employed them, rather than continue to line the pockets of the Archipelagic pro prietor. Many shops and tenements burned that night; the looting continued for days. There have been other upris ings, of course, always quashed by Temple soldiers. At least once a month a bridge is barricaded by the Kindler ikap fen.” Her eyes glinted wickedly. “That’s Lireh’s equivalent of you rishi: the laborers, the working class, the ikap-fen: the spinning spiders.”
I refused to tense at her barb.
The dragonmaster, who’d been twitching and mutter ing and scratching at his shanks in agitation, could remain seated no longer. It must have been costing him a powerful amount of self-control to hold his tongue concerning his dream of liberating the Djimbi from years of oppression. He started pacing around the perimeter of the library, like a wildcat pacing inside the perimeter of a cage. I immedi ately stopped
my
pacing and dropped onto a divan, afraid we looked too much alike.
“The Wai-Fa Paak factory skirmish is the most famous uprising to date,” Jotan continued, a smile playing on her crimson lips. “The Archipelagic proprietor was torn limb from limb in broad daylight, in public, by the ikap-fen who’d dragged him into the street. The proprietor’s women and children were torn apart too, apparently. I wasn’t there. Who can say for certain? Doesn’t matter. Some of the Kindlers who were involved were later found and publicly decapitated by Auditors. Or maybe it wasn’t the Kindlers who were found. Temple wasn’t picky. As long as heads rolled, any heads that weren’t ludu bayen, the Ashgon was satisfied.”
She shrugged, stretched a little. Movement of belly and breasts beneath her indigo silk lacing.
“My point is this: All these skirmishes, whether they’re spontaneous workers’ affairs or assaults clandestinely or chestrated by influential men, and all the beheadings and curfews that follow, always fail to spark the Great Uprising. Now
you
arrive with the news that you can breed bulls in captivity. You, Zarq, will be the catalyst that will unleash the Great Uprising. But you are not the uprising itself.”
I held my tongue—barely. If I voiced my ambition of bringing bull dragons to all Malacarite rishi and what she called the ikap-fen, I might alienate her. She was bayen; the men she intended on contacting would be bayen, too. Yes, some would be foreigners and yes, some may have risen through the social ranks from humble beginnings, and yes, all of them were driven by their own reasons toward the same goal: ending the Emperor’s theocratic dictatorship of Malacar.
But few of them would wish to give their servants breed ing dragons. If a servant owned either a bull or a female dragon, what need would he or she have for being a ser vant? This was a caste war I was fighting, too, and once my neonate bulls broke free of their cocoons . . .
If
they’d break free, damn it.
The feeling nagged that no bulls would come forth, that all the efforts of the rishi who were toiling in Xxamer Zu even as I glared at the fine parquetry floors of the Bri li brary would come to naught. Because I was missing some thing.