For a moment, his face grew pinched. “I imagine those details exist in a separate addendum, which Nanda Lal thought it would be more merciful not to include in this copy of the report. As if”—almost snarling, here—”I would not understand the inevitable fate of my wife and children in the hands of such creatures.”
The Rajput straightened his back. For all that he was sitting on cushions, and Narses on a chair, he seemed to tower over the old eunuch. “But there is one small detail which puzzles me. And I have now studied this report carefully, reading it from beginning to end over and over again. It involves onions.”
Seeing Narses’ face—onions?—Rana Sanga managed a smile. “You see, included in Nanda Lal’s report is a detailed—exhaustive—list of every thing which was found. Among those items was the remains of a small chest which my wife always used to carry her cooking materials. Nothing fancy, that chest. No reason for bandits to steal the thing, so they didn’t.”
Narses was completely lost. A state of affairs which infuriated him. But he continued to listen to Sanga with no hint of protest, allowing no sign of his anger to show. He was no fool, was Narses. And he realized—though he had no idea from whence it was coming—that a terrible peril was looming over him. Like a tidal wave about to break over a blind man.
“Nor would bandits bother to steal anything in that chest, Narses. Except, perhaps, the small packets of herbs and spices. Those might be of some value to them, I suppose. But, for the most part, that chest contained onions. My wife was very fond of using onions in her cooking.”
Sanga glanced at the documents. “Apparently, judging from the charred remains, the bandits looted the onions also. Nanda Lal’s report was so exhaustive that they measured the ashes and charred pieces which remained. There is no mention of onions. Which would not have burned up completely, after all. And something else is missing which should not have been missing at all, for it couldn’t have burned—the knife which my wife always used to cut onions.”
“Bandits,” husked Narses. “They’ll steal anything.”
Rana Sanga shook his head. “I think I know more about the bandits of mountain and desert than you do, Narses. They’re not likely to steal onions, much less a simple knife. The one thing such men—and their women—do not lack are blades. If they did, they couldn’t be bandits in the first place.”
The Rajput king placed his large and powerful hand atop the documents. “It is not there, Narses. Nanda Lal and his men could not have possibly overlooked it, in the course of such a thorough report. The knife was a small and simple one, to be sure, but not that small—and very sturdy. The blade would have survived the fire, at the very least. The thing was made by a Rajput peasant as a gift to my wife on her wedding. She adored it, despite its simplicity. Refused, time after time, to allow me to replace it with a finer one.” He took a deep breath, as if controlling grief. “She always said that knife—that knife alone—enabled her to laugh at onions.”
Seeing the stiffness of Narses’ posture—the old eunuch looked, for all the water, as if he were carved from stone—Sanga emitted a dry chuckle. “Oh, to be sure, Nanda Lal himself would never have noticed the absence of onions or the knife. How could he or his spies know anything of that? The thing was just a private joke between my wife and me. To everyone else, even our own servants, it was just one of many knives in the kitchen.”
“Undoubtedly, he failed to notice its absence.” Narses’ words were not so much husked, as croaked. “Undoubtedly.” As a frog might pray for deliverance.
“Undoubtedly,” said Sanga firmly. “Nor did I see any reason to raise the matter with him, of course. What would such a great spymaster and dynast as Nanda Lal know about onions, and the knives used to cut them?”
“Nothing,” croaked Narses.
“Indeed.” And now, for the first time, the severe control left Rana Sanga’s face. His eyes, staring at Narses, were like dark pools of sheer agony, begging for relief.