"Nikos…" Dorza waved weakly. "Let him go. You cannot want any¬thing from him.»
"Ah, but I can and do. I want him beside me while you answer my questions."
The captain's eyes darted away from his captive child, scanning the rooms for other bandits. Daikonas Vo could all but hear the man's thoughts: Surely so confident a criminal as this one must have confederates. There were no confederates, of course, which was how Vo liked it, but it also forced cau¬tion. Dorza was a head taller than him; if Vo hurt the boy the captain would be on him like a mad bear.
Vo wanted to head off the next problem too-anything to keep the man calm as long as possible. Any moment now he would notice the body crumpled on the floor just behind the door. Better simply to tell him.
"I have bad news for you, Captain Dorza. Your wife is dead. She caught me by surprise. I did not know she was in the house. She was a brave one, it must be said. She tried to kill me with that club-a belaying pin, I think you sailors call it? So I had to kill her. I am sorry. I did not wish to do it but it is done, and… ah, ah, careful… if you let anger get the best of you the boy will die, too."
"Tedora…!" Dorza looked around frantically, at last saw the blood-soaked shape behind the door. "You… you demon!" he shouted at Vo. "Nushash burn you, I'll send you to hell!" His eyes, red with tears, widened again. "The other children…!"
"Are under the bed. They are safe." Daikonas Vo prodded gently with his long blade at the boy's gorge, eliciting a squeal of fear. "Now speak to me or this one dies, too. You carried a young woman on your ship. Some say she was Guard Captain Jeddin's mistress. Where is she now?"
"I'll break you…!"
"Where is she?" He pulled the boy's chin back until it seemed the skin of his throat, downy with his first beard, might part without even the touch of the blade.
"I don't know, curse you! She stayed here with us but I threw her out when I found out what she was!"
"Liar." He pinked the boy just enough to make a drop of blood grow, wobble, then slide down into the neck of his shirt.
"It's true! She came to me with a note from Jeddin, saying to bring her here to Hierosol where he would meet us. I did not know she was the autarch's wife!"
"And you didn't know Jeddin was a traitor? You are surprisingly igno¬rant for a veteran captain."
"I didn't know anything until we arrived here. She hid it from me. She came with orders to leave that evening-the very evening when… when Jeddin was arrested."
"I do not think I like your answer. I think I will take one of the boy's eyes out and then we will try again."
"By the gods, I swear I have told you all I know! It was only a few days ago that I threw her out-she is doubtless still in the city! You can find her!"
"Did she know anyone here?"
"I don't think so. That was why she stayed with me-she and the child had nowhere else."
"A child? She had a child?"
"Not hers, he W;IS too old. A little mute boy her servant, I think." The captain ran his thick fingers through his beard. Though it was evening, and eool, his face was running with sweat. "And that is all I know. Here, even if you kill my son I can tell you nothing more, I swear on the blood of Nushash! On the autarch's head!"
"Swearing by the ruler you betrayed? Not a good choice of oaths, I think." Daikonas Vo experimentally lifted his blade until it hovered just a fingernail's breadth from the boy's eye, but the captain only wept. It seemed he truly had nothing more to say.
"Very well…" Vo began, then, with a fluidity learned only through long practice, snapped the knife across the room into Axamis Dorza's throat. A good trick, Vo thought, but bad when you miss. The man's hands flew to his neck, eyes wide with surprise. Gurgling, he sank to his knees.
"It had to be," Vo said. "Be glad I give you a quick death, Captain. You would not have liked to find yourself in the hands of the autarch's special craftsmen."
Shrieking like a much younger child, the boy suddenly began to thrash in Daikonas Vo's arms, trying to break away. Vo cursed his own inattentiveness- he had let his grip loosen when he threw the knife-but quickly managed to get the boy's arm twisted behind his back again. He turned him then, put a boot in his backside, and shoved the youth's head so hard into the table that the whole mass of oak tipped and turned. The boy was stunned but not dead. He lay bloody-headed in the broken crockery, weeping.
An instant later Vo was himself upended and knocked to the ground, a huge, red-smeared thing atop him like an angry mastiff. Dorza had not bled out as fast as Vo had thought he would, a misjudgment he was regretting already. Something smashed hard against his head, a blow he only partially managed to deflect with his forearm, and then the bloody face was right above his, eyes goggling with final rage and madness. Vo rolled so that he was on his side, then his hand went down his leg and another dagger came out of his boot. A moment later it was beneath the captain's ribs, and the man's bulk was jerking and stiffening even as Vo held him fast-as intimate as lovemaking, but somehow less distasteful. When the movement stopped, Vo rolled the corpse off and stood, wondering how he would get all the blood off his jerkin.
The boy was still on the floor, but he had drawn himself up onto his hands and knees, head wagging like an old dog's, blood drizzling down the side of his face.
"Someday…" he said, "someday I'll find you… and kill you."
"Ah… Nikos, was it?" Vo wiped his dagger on the captain's shirt inline returning it to his boot, then tugged the other one loose from the gristle of the dead man's throat. "I doubt it. I don't leave enemies behind me, so there won't be a someday, you see." He took a few steps forward. Before the boy could pull away Daikonas Vo had his hair gripped tight, then slashed him beneath the throat like a pig held for slaughter.
Only now, as the boy wriggled in the spreading pool of red, did Vo hear the muffled sobbing of the children under the mattress, doing their best to be quiet but-understandably, given the circumstances-failing. He heaved up the heavy mass of the table and threw it on top of the pallet, then poured lantern oil on the floor and splashed it on the walls. He took a smoldering stick from the oven and tossed it over his shoulder as he went out the door. Flames had already begun to lick up the walls inside the house as he.walked, swiftly but without obvious hurry, down the steep hill road.
So there's a child with her, he thought. One of the boy-eunuchs had dis¬appeared from the Seclusion on the same night, but that escape had been linked only to the traitorous Favored Luian, not the girl he sought: Vo, like everyone else, assumed the boy had taken advantage of the confusion to run away, and now he was displeased with himself for making such an obvious but unwarranted assumption.
Well, if the child's with her, it will make them that much easier to find. He could see yellow light gleaming fitfully on the roofs of the houses he was passing, which meant that up the hill the captain's house must be burning well. Too bad about the children. He had nothing against children partic¬ularly, but he wanted no one knowing what he had questioned the captain about.
Yes, this might not be too difficult after all, he thought with satisfaction. Hiersol was full of girls and young women, but how many of them were traveling with a mute boy? Tracking down his quarry would be only a matter of time and effort, and Daikonas Vo had never been afraid of a lit¬tle hard work.
12
Two Yisti Knives
When Zhafaris the Prince of Evening came to his manhood he became lord of all the gods. He took many wives, but highest among them were his nieces Ugeni and Shusayem, and I tell truth when I say they were as alike as two tamarind seeds. Soon both were heavy with the children of Zhafaris, but Ugeni was frightened and hid her children away, so that no one knew they had been born. However, Shusayem, her sister, brought forth her own children, Argal, Efiyal, and Xergal, and called them the heirs of Zhafaris.