“I do?”
“Rasha kidnapped a queen. That’s meddling in politics.” Of course! Brilliant! Inos clapped her hands and almost wished she could spot a very warn kiss on this big djinn. Quite the best-educated barbarian she had ever met!
Except . . . “But of course we don’t know what verdict they will come to,” she said.
“No. You have no guarantee at all. But it is a little like Zartha’s ox, this morning.” He sensed her incomprehension. “I don’t give a turd for a peasant’s ox. My gold bought respect.”
“You mean the Four don’t care for Krasnegar . . .”
“Arbitrary rule frightens people. Power tempered with justice is well loved.” He shrugged. “It is a gamble, but I would much sooner trust the Four together, and in public, than any one of them alone, in private.”
Oh, he was a clever one, this sultan! Now that he had spelled it out, she understood the thinking. “Yes! Will you help me?”
“I shall do better.” He held out an arm. The green cotton was silver in the moonlight. “Touch me.”
“What?”
“Gently, touch my sleeve. And be careful! Think of me as a hot stove. ”
She tapped his arm cautiously with a fingertip.
“A little harder, “ he said, and pulled the cloth taut.
She tapped harder. Still nothing. She poked, and it was like poking a rock in there, and—ouch!
She tucked her finger in her mouth and stared at him. There was a faint scorch mark on his sleeve, although he seemed to have felt nothing. She would have a blister. Gods! It hurt.
“I was telling the truth.”
“I never said—”
“There is an old saying about the honesty of djinns. But you see you can trust me, at least in that way. You want to go to Hub. You have convinced me that I should go, also. I shall escort you, and we shall appeal to the Four together. We shall both demand justice.”
“You! What of your kingdom?”
“My kingdom?” he repeated harshly. “You said it yourself—the slut has gelded me. How long can a eunuch hold a kingdom in Zark?”
She had won! “You are joking!”
“I do not joke.”
Won! Won! Won! “And what did I say to persuade you?” He scrambled to his feet, a huge black shape among the windstroked dunes, dark against the moonlight. “That you would stay away if your duty required it. That hurt. Duties can usually be recognized by pain.”
“And your duty?”
He laughed harshly. “To rescue my people from the rule of a woman, of course. Enjoy your swim now. I will send Zana.”
Slave and sultan:
With me along some Strip of Herbage strown
That just divides the desert from the sown,
Where name of Slave and Sultan scarce is known,
And pity Sultan Mahmud on his throne.
— Fitzgerald, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (§10, 1859)
SIX
Beset the road
1
A bath in warm surf was a new experience for Inos, but it soon impressed her as a facility much needed back home in Krasnegar, where the Winter Ocean stayed homicidal all year long. She had partied on beaches often enough in her youth, with friends—with Rap, especially—but the sea had been no more than something to look at. Just this once, she would admit that Zark held the advantage.
Occupied with learning how not to drown or be skinned against the sand, she could not dwell on the prospect of the coming escape, or what Kade would say, or how Azak thought he could arrange that miracle. Under the pumpkin moon, she romped and rolled like a kitten, barely conscious of time passing. Suddenly Zana’s tall blackness stood on the beach, waiting for her, and she was exhausted and almost numb with the pounding—
“That was marvelous!” Inos said, toweling her tingling skin. “I wish I could carry the Spring Sea around in a bag, for use when needed.”
Zana chuckled. “A large bag.”
“Yes. But sea is much more fun to be in than on. I’m a rotten sailor. ” There were two ways from Arakkaran to the Impire—west to Qoble, or north to the Morning Sea and the Winnipango River. Which way would Azak choose? And Inos had let slip a careless remark in front of Zana—she must guard her tongue.
“I am sure your Majesty is a very capable traveler, well able to withstand the rigors of a long journey.”
Inos had just wriggled into a clean robe. She sat down to wipe sand off her feet, and then Zana’s odd comment registered. “Oh?”
The tall woman knelt to fumble in the bag she had brought. “I have some paper here, ma’am. You need to write to your aunt—that is, if you wish her to accompany you.”
Drying ceased at the third toe. When in doubt, be stupid—that was one of Kade’s rules, although she would never have admitted it.
“What?” Inos wished faces were easier to read in moonlight; Zana was smiling, but no more was visible; the dusky, wrinkled complexion was an enigma under the smile.
“You do wish your aunt to go with you to Hub? That was what I told the Big Man. He argued against it, but I said you would insist. Was I wrong?”
“No . . . No, of course not. I couldn’t abandon her.” Kade was a good sailor, and she had always yearned to visit Hub. “But . . . tonight?”
“Very soon. Cubslayer never wastes time.”
Cubslayer? Inos tried to imagine a much younger Zana with a little brother, a very much younger little brother—precocious, ferocious, ungovernable. She had never heard the name before, but it sounded so genuine and so obviously appropriate that it somehow banished the small suspicions starting to sprout in her mind.
“I am the only man he trusts,” Kar had boasted. He hadn’t mentioned women. Zana was loyal. That was why she had been put in charge of the suspect royal visitors in the first place.
And Inos knew Azak was a man of instant decisions; his deadly archery alone proved that. Escape from the palace might be tricky, and here they were leagues from it already, a chance not to be missed. He might just haul her onto a passing ship with him and be gone before the sorceress could find out what was happening. And Kade was still back home in the palace . . . it was astonishing that Azak would ever agree to include Kade.
“What do I write?”
“Just that she must trust the bearer.”
It was an added risk, obviously. Rasha might well be holding Kade as hostage for Inos’s return and be keeping close watch on her, or might perhaps have cast some sort of spell to raise an alarm if she tried to leave, or . . . but how could one outwit a sorceress at all? Kade would be horrified, but she was much less inclined to put her trust in the sorceress since she had heard about the meeting with Olybino.
Inos leaned the paper on a knee and wrote, hoping the words would be legible.
“What now?” she asked, giving both feet a quick dust and then stuffing them into sandals.
“We carry on as if nothing had changed,” Zana said, gathering up clothes and towels.
Hunch suddenly became certainty. “He was planning this all the time! That was why he wouldn’t talk to me sooner’?” Zana straightened, jiggling her bundle into a comfortable position under her arm. She turned an unreadable gaze on Inos. “A wise sultan always has a variety of plans in store, and rarely tells anyone what they are. I suggest we go to the meal now, ma’am, and talk of other things.”
Full moon hung over the Spring Sea, so bright that even the distant snowy peaks of the Agonistes glimmered. From the bustling encampment drifted smoke and mouth-watering scents and much laughter. Half of the people there were women, many of them sounding very young, all paired off with the brown-clad family men.
Neither Kar nor Azak was in sight. Inos, as befitted her rank, was served her meal in solitary magnificence on a rug under a canopy, although everyone else was sprawled on the sand at the edge of the firelight. Undoubtedly there were guards posted, but she could detect no activity more sinister than merrymaking and good humor.
Gradually eating gave way to singing and the uncanny twanging of cithems. Palace women would rarely have the chance for an outing such as this and they were making the most of it. Inos could not help wondering how many of them had been gifts from the sultan, girls snatched from poverty in childhood to stock the royal seraglio. It was, of course, none of her business.
Nor was it her business if the sultan chose to provide a holiday for his guards, and his disappearance was probably a tactful way of letting the company relax. He had unpredictable corners, did Azak. She was confident now that an escape from Arakkaran had been in his mind even before she spoke to him. Her arguments might have convinced him to put his plans into effect, or perhaps just to include her in them . . . or she might have had no influence on him at all. He might be already gone, and she was merely part of the camouflage. Time would tell.