Anden had a hard time speaking. “I miss you,” he said.
“I miss you too. Midterms start next week, but I’ll try to come back for a visit the weekend after that. You’re still free to gang about, right?”
“That’s why I’m calling,” Anden said. “I’m going to be busy for a while.”
“At work?”
“Sort of,” Anden said. “Family things.”
“You mean clan things.” Cory paused to say something in Espenian to someone else in the house before coming back on the line. “All right, well, you can spare at least one evening, right?”
Anden’s palms were sweating. He had no idea how to do this. He forced the words out. “I don’t think we can get together this time, Cory. You’re busy with school and I’m going to be busy too. I think… maybe it would be best if we didn’t see each other for a while.”
There was a long, uncomprehending pause on the other end, and then a sound like Cory picking up the phone and walking—the background noise from the distant sports game grew fainter. “What’s this about, crumb?” Cory demanded in a whisper. “Are you… breaking up with me?” Anden couldn’t answer; his throat felt entirely closed up.
Cory breathed loudly into the phone. Then he said, “My da put you up to this, didn’t he? I know he did. And you gave in. What did he say to you, huh? Did he offer you money?”
“Nothing like that,” Anden muttered.
Cory said, “You know what? Fuck you. You dumb island fuck.” He hung up.
Anden placed the receiver back in the cradle and sat down on the floor, staring at the phone for several minutes. Then he grabbed his jacket and burst out of his apartment, out of the building onto the slushy gray streets of Port Massy. He walked for two hours, aimlessly, and at one point, he realized he was crying. Not loudly, not hard, but his vision was blurry and his cheeks were wet. When he finally arrived back at his apartment, it was past midnight. His shoes were soaked and his feet cold. He ran hot water in the bath to warm them, then put on fresh socks.
Back home, it would be midday, the springtime sun high over the city harbor, people in the streets wishing each other Happy New Year and standing on ladders to take red lights and streamers down from their eaves. Anden picked up his phone and dialed the operator to place a collect call to Janloon, so he could tell his cousins that Dauk Losunyin would help them to kill Zapunyo.
THIRD INTERLUDE
The Cursed Beauty
Eight hundred years ago, a renowned Alusian explorer named Gaubrett sailed across the sea in search of a fabled island with mountains of jewels guarded by giants. Upon successfully landing on the southern peninsula of Kekon, Gaubrett was pleased and relieved to encounter no giants but instead an Abukei village. After a tense but peaceful exchange with the village elders, the natives brought the half-starved travelers food and water, and Gaubrett and his crew set up camp by the shore. As grateful as they were, the sailors could not help but greedily notice the green gemstones hanging over the tribe’s simple dwellings and decorating the bodies of the men and women. Even before the rise of the Kekonese warrior caste of Green Bones, jade was of significant cultural importance to the aboriginals, who viewed it as the divine remains of the First Mother goddess Nimuma and, being genetically immune to its effects, wore it for status and ceremony.
Gaubrett proceeded to barter a considerable amount of his ship’s wares in exchange for the villagers’ jade, which they seemed more than willing to trade in exchange for foreign tools and curiosities. Gaubrett stored the acquired jade in a wooden chest in his tent, which he opened several times a day in order to admire his fortune. Once much-needed ship repairs had been completed, Gaubrett and his crew made ready to set sail. At that point, it occurred to the explorer that there was a great deal more jade to be had, and that he had come an awfully long way across the ocean to be leaving with so little compared to how much these simple savages flaunted so carelessly.
That night, Gaubrett gathered his men and led them into the Abukei village where they massacred the inhabitants and gathered every last bit of jade they could lay their hands on. In good spirits, they departed Kekon. Despite ample stores and good weather, over the following two months, the ship descended into an inexplicable madness. Shortly after Gaubrett hung two officers for treason, the crew mutinied; Gaubrett and several others were killed and their bodies tossed overboard. The storeroom lock was smashed and the jade equally divided among the crew. Two subsequent mutinies resulted in several more deaths. Half a dozen sailors threw themselves into the sea; others fell into a delirious fever and cut themselves with knives. One man was said to have pulled out his own eye and eaten it. A small group of beleaguered survivors, at last convinced that the treasure they carried was cursed, threw every piece of jade on the ship into the ocean and managed to limp their vessel into a port in southeastern Spenius. Their tragic tale quickly spread, cementing the “cursed beauty” as a faraway place of near mythical wealth and mysterious evil fortune.
Seven hundred and fifty years after Gaubrett’s journey, the Shotarian general Damusaro famously disagreed with the national War Cabinet’s decision to occupy Kekon, arguing, “That damned island is like a beautiful woman with a barbed pussy—very tempting, but not to be fucked.” Perhaps as belated punishment for his vulgar objections, his superiors later sent him to command the Garrison House in occupied Janloon during the Many Nations War. His name was whispered by the One Mountain Society, and despite obsessive security precautions, he was ambushed and killed in broad daylight by a young Green Bone assassin named Nau Suenzen.
CHAPTER 54
The Body Doesn’t Lie
Son Tomarho came out of the shower humming a tune and walked into the sitting room of his two-story house in the wealthy neighborhood of Green Plain. He startled to find a tall, older man sitting on his sofa. At first he had no idea who the man was, though his eyes fell immediately upon the jade carried on leather bands around the stranger’s wrists. Only when the intruder said, “Chancellor Son, I’m sorry to surprise you like this,” did Son recognize Nau Suen, the Horn of the Mountain, and he knew that, aisho notwithstanding, there was a better than average chance he would be dead in the next five minutes.
The former chancellor of the Royal Council had been in some tight spots in his many decades of business and political life, and he managed to keep cool and collected now, as he said, “Nau-jen, you’ve caught me at a disadvantage, I’m afraid. I would’ve been happy to meet and speak to you at a time when I wasn’t so… immodest.” He gestured self-deprecatingly at his semi-nudity. A towel covered his lower body, but he was otherwise unclothed. “If you’ll wait, I’d prefer to put on some clothes.”
“By all means,” said Nau. “Take your time.”
Son retreated into his bedroom and put on pants and a shirt. His mind raced. During his years as chancellor, he’d been given a government security detail, but now that he was once again an ordinary councilman on his way to retirement, he’d deemed personal bodyguards to be unnecessary. He had a home security system, and if he triggered an alarm, it would alert the security firm, which would send… what? Some guards who would get here too late and be no match for a superior Green Bone like Nau Suen anyway. No, he would have to survive by talking his way out of this, as he had more than once in his life before. Son smoothed down his wet hair so that it covered the bald spot on the top of his head, put on his slippers, and walked back out to the sitting room. He gave the Horn of the Mountain a polished but cheerless politician’s smile and sat down across from him. “Are you here to threaten me?”