“Spoken like a politician instead of a Green Bone.” Hilo replied with rough contempt. “I didn’t have the full support of my clan when I became Pillar. And if Ayt had had the full support of her clan, she wouldn’t have had to kill her father’s Horn and her own brother. If you want to lead, you can’t wait for everyone to line up behind you.” The Pillar stalked over to stand at the railing beside Ven. “It’s possible that I didn’t make myself completely clear the first time around. I offered you the support and friendship of No Peak because we shared a desire to see Ayt Mada out of power and in the ground. If that’s no longer the case, if our wishes are no longer aligned, then there’s no reason for us to talk further.” Hilo tilted his head in a musing way, his voice softening ominously. “If there’s no one I can count on to challenge Ayt, then I might as well resign myself to turning over a new leaf with my old enemy and informing her of the traitors in her clan.”
Ven’s face went still. “You would place a death sentence on my family?”
“Your family’s fate is up to you, not me,” Hilo said. “Maybe if you cut off your ear and throw yourself at Ayt’s feet, she’ll spare your children, but I think it’s safe to assume that your sailing days would be over. You picked a path that you can’t turn away from. You have to follow it all the way now, or I’ll push you off.” Hilo set the glass he’d taken from the minibar down on the ledge of the boat’s railing and leaned in close to Ven, whose shoulders stiffened as the Pillar spoke near his ear. “My patience is running out. By this time next year, Ayt Mada had better be feeding the worms. Or you’ll answer to us both.”
Hilo put a hand on the railing and vaulted Lightly over it, landing on the dock and walking back along the pier to where Maik Tar waited for him next to the Duchesse.
CHAPTER 51
The Unlucky Ones
When Kaul Maik Wen went through Espenian customs and immigration, she put her folded jacket and the locked steel briefcase she carried through the X-ray machine and walked through the metal detector. A security guard at Port Massy International Airport took her briefcase from the other end of the conveyor and asked her to come with him. The guard led Wen into a secondary screening area—a gray room with a couple of chairs against the wall, a metal table, and the flag of the Republic of Espenia hanging on the wall. Another guard joined them. They asked Wen for her passport, which they examined. “You’re coming from Kekon?” one asked. She nodded. “Ma’am, please open the briefcase.”
Wen turned the combination on the suitcase lock and pushed open the hinges to pop the latches. She opened the briefcase to reveal a crushed velvet-lined interior filled with polished green gemstones, some of them loose, others as jewelry—strung necklaces, bracelets, heavy rings set in gold. The lustrous green gleamed yellowish under the airport room’s fluorescent lights. One of the customs officers took a slight step backward; the other a slight step forward. “Is this—” the one with the gloves began to ask, but Wen interrupted him. “No, no, of course not,” she assured the guards quickly. She laughed, as if embarrassed to have startled them. “It looks like jade, no? It’s just nephrite. Very pretty, though, isn’t it?” She took one of the specimens out of the case—a nephrite necklace—and held it out to one of the guards. He hesitated, but she smiled reassuringly and said, “I’m a gemstone dealer. Nephrite is our fastest-growing business. These days everyone knows about jade, and it’s all the rage to look as fierce as a Kekonese Green Bone. In Shotar, they call it ‘barukan style’ but in Espenia, it’s ‘military chic.’ See?” She loosened the scarf around her neck to show off the three-tier choker she wore on her neck and touched the bracelets at her wrists. “I’m traveling to Port Massy, to meet with buyers.”
The guard took the necklace and examined it. “I really did think it was bioenergetic jade at first,” he admitted. He passed it to the other guard. “Can you tell the difference?”
Wen could tell from the expressions on their faces that they could not. With a loupe and a trained eye, a person could see the difference between the grain structures of nephrite and true jade. Of course, contact with the latter would provoke a physiological reaction, but even without touching the jewelry, any Green Bone would be able to tell at a glance that the gemstones in the briefcase were indeed, nothing but bluffer’s jade—they were not as hard or lustrous, and the hue was different, milkier and duller than real jade. These customs officials, however, were Espenians who had not grown up around the real substance. They could not tell that the gems in the briefcase were different from the gems she wore around her neck and wrists—real jade, worth countless times more than the pile of inert stones—and though they picked up and examined several of the items in the case, they didn’t look closely at her choker and bracelets. Wen was counting on misdirection and ignorance—the guards’ natural inclination was to pay attention to the large suitcase of gemstones, not to the few worn on her person. Some larger airports, including Port Massy International, had dogs trained to detect jade auras, but Wen had walked past with no trouble. Non-Abukei stone-eyes were rare enough that the Espenians did not account for them in their security measures. Even so, precautions had been taken: The jade that Wen wore had been treated with a slightly opaque coating to dull the color and shine and make it appear like bluffer’s jade even to the experienced eye. It could later be cleaned off with nail polish remover.
The guard said, “Do you have paperwork?” Wen did; she handed them several pieces of paper on the letterhead of a jewelry company called Divinity Gems based in Janloon, with a listing of the sample items and their estimated value. She gave them her business card. One of the guards took a few of the stones and the paperwork and left the room. The other guard said, “Thanks for your patience. We have to make sure everything checks out, you understand. I thought it was real jade myself.”
Wen chuckled. “If it was, I’d have to be the world’s most powerful Green Bone, and I’d be traveling with a dozen bodyguards to guard a case worth millions of thalirs. My samples are worth quite a bit, but not nearly that much. I completely understand the need to check, though. Jade smuggling is a real problem, I’m told.” She sat down in one of the chairs to wait. She knew they were examining the grain structure of the samples under magnification and likely phoning Divinity Gems to ascertain that she was, indeed, an employee. The call would go to an undisclosed phone line in the Weather Man’s office. The person who answered the call would assure the customs officials that Wen was, indeed, a senior sales director who’d been with the company for four years.
Wen and Shae had discussed and discarded half a dozen different options for covertly transporting cut jade into Espenia—all of them required a combination of shipping the gems through means subject to inspection or theft, or passing them through other hands: agents who might be unreliable, who might betray them or who could not handle jade without being detected. Having been privy to Kehn’s relentless campaign against Zapunyo’s operations, they knew all too well the tricks of smuggling, but also the many ways they could fail. At last, Wen had declared impatiently, “This is foolish, Shae-jen. I’m a stone-eye. Sometimes the most obvious and direct answer is the best one.” The Weather Man had balked awhile longer, but Wen knew her sister-in-law couldn’t argue with logic.