The Tattered Prince and the Demon Veiled Read online

  Brama, feeling more than foolish, debates whether to follow. What would I tell her? he muses. Hello. I’m Brama. I’ve seen lights around you. We’re fated to meet. He laughs at the very thought, but then notices a man exiting the street the girl had taken here. He wears beaten trousers and a dirty, sweat-stained shirt. He’s short and lithe as a willow, and moves with the gait of a man used to masking the sound of his footfalls. He weaves past two men carrying a dusty, rolled-up carpet, then follows the girl.

  He is the one she fears. Brama and I both know it.

  Another block up, where the traffic grows thicker, the girl glances back. She looks straight past the man following her to Brama, and then ducks into a winding street that will take her toward the heart of the Knot, a maze of narrow alleys where one might easily lose pursuers if one knows the paths to take. No doubt she does, but she doesn’t see the man turn and sprint along the street closest to Brama, an avenue that could easily be used, assuming one moves fast enough, to cut her off.

  After a moment’s indecision, Brama draws his knife from its sheath along his forearm and sprints after him. Brama takes more care than I’ve given him credit for. I forget that he grew up on these streets, that he once prowled the city’s rooftops. He moves deceptively fast, and uses the crowd to his advantage, hugging the edge of the street, so that when the man glances back, Brama slows to a walking pace and angles toward a ramshackle chandler’s shop. He reaches for the candles hanging like sausages from a length of twine as if they were exactly what he’d been after.

  The man moves on, and Brama resumes the chase, moving faster now, nearing the place where the angled avenue the girl took rejoins the street they both now race along. Ahead lies a square where the buildings lean precariously, a tangled courtyard of sorts, formed and held in place by a crisscross of rooms and roofs and makeshift bridges built on the shoulders of the original structures. The man steps into the shadow of a bath house awning as the girl appears ahead, moving briskly but warily.

  Brama creeps along the rough stone of the bathhouse behind the waiting man, his confidence and nervousness mixing to create an intoxicating brew. I, on the other hand, sense something amiss, the sort of worry that buzzes at the base of the skull like a trapped hornet. Had I my proper form I could discern what it was with a moment of concentration, but trapped as I am all I can do is to try to warn Brama.

  One moment I’m pushing Brama to be wary, and the next, Brama’s senses flare as the sound of pounding footfalls nears. Brama dodges to one side as someone barrels into him from behind. Pain bright burns along his side and the back of his ribs.

  Brama loses his knife as he tries to break his fall against the dusty street. He scrabbles away from his attacker, a man with a wild beard, wilder hair, and a ratty thawb—a beggar from the looks of him, but I can already see he’s no beggar. His teeth are clean. His hair and beard, though messy, are anything but grimy. He’d pass for a beggar at ten paces, but to my eye the disguise is plain as a mummer’s mask. Whether Brama senses the same, I do not know, but given the man’s aquiline nose and high brow, I have few doubts he’s the ally of the Malasani who waits in the shadows.

  As Brama and his attacker wrestle across the dusty courtyard, those who’d been loitering or walking along the street back away. Brama takes another cut along his forearm from the slim, straight knife. They roll into a trash heap and his assailant pounces on top of Brama. The man stabs the knife at Brama’s neck. Brama snatches the man’s wrist, holding the knife at bay. Then he rams a knee into the attacker’s ribs, and rolls out from under him, twisting the man’s wrist until he drops the blade on the dirt.

  As the man Brama was following rushes to help his comrade, Brama rises and backs away, spreading his attention between the two men. Wisely, his opponents fan out, and soon it’s plain to see they’re used to fighting with one another. The smaller man darts in. The moment Brama turns to face him, the wild-haired one rushes forward. In one sinuous move, he throws Brama over his hip and slams him to the ground.

  Blood pours from the knife wound along Brama’s back. It flows along his forearm as well. For me it is like a fount from the gods, the very source of the essence of life. I would drink of it if I could, so heady is its scent, but a wall stands between us. Yet it doesn’t have to be so. If Brama would simply accept the power I’ve offered him… I offer it again as the beggar straddles him, as he holds the tip of his slim knife against Brama’s neck. For the first time since being trapped within this gem, I worry. There’s no telling what these men might do when they find the sapphire hidden beneath Brama’s shirt. Please, I beg Brama, take but a sip of my power. Take it, and save yourself.

  Brama, however, remains resolute. I feel the revulsion and hatred he holds for me. For the first time, however, I feel temptation as well.

  The man kneels on Brama’s chest. “Who are you?” he asked, his Malasani accent thick.

  “I am but a relic of a man,” Brama replies. “A ruin.”

  The Malasani grins. “Even ruins can be buried, so I ask you once again—”

  He never finishes those words, for just then a length of wood appears, piercing the man’s neck with a sound like a hook piercing a pig’s neck before it’s hung for slaughter. Yellow fletching graces one end of the shaft of wood, a bloody broadhead the other.

  The man’s eyes go wide. He coughs wetly, spitting warm blood across Brama’s face. He tries to pull the bolt free, but stops when his own blood spurts in a torrent across Brama’s shoulder. His jaw works, as if he’s still trying to ask his question of Brama—who are you?—but then Brama rolls him aside and scrambles to a stand.

  Ten paces away stands a man in a stained nightdress, one foot in the stirrup of a crossbow as he strains to lever the string back. He hardly looks as though he can keep his feet, but he manages to lock the string in place. With shaking arms, he lifts the crossbow and sets a fresh bolt into the channel, but before he can lift it and aim, Brama’s second attacker sprints away, darting and into a tea house that had just opened its doors. As the tea house’s proprietor shouts in surprise after him, the lanky man in his night clothes lifts the tip of the crossbow until it’s aimed at Brama’s chest. The girl stands behind him, a slim knife to hand, looking like she knows how to use it.

  “A question was posed to you,” the man says, crossbow poised and ready. He speaks Sharakhani well, but with noticeable notes of a Malasani nobleman’s upbringing. He glances at Brama’s attacker, who’s fallen still, staring at the sky as blood drains weakly around the shaft of the crossbow bolt sticking out of his neck. “As he seems indisposed, perhaps you would be so kind as to give me the answer in his stead.”

  “I am no one,” Brama replies.

  “You’re a liar,” he spits back, and raises the butt of the crossbow to his shoulder.

  The lights have begun to swirl around the girl once more. Her eyes are round with worry. She keeps looking back over her shoulder, toward the cluttered alley that led to another part of the Shallows. She’s deferring to the crossbowman, a malnourished man with sunken, jaundiced eyes and hollowed cheeks, but she clearly wishes to leave, to run, to hide themselves in the city. As she swallows, perhaps stifling something she was about to say, the lights around her move to encapsulate the man as well, though the effects aren’t nearly as bright as they are around her.

  I can feel Brama’s desire to leave, though he isn’t so desperate as this girl. He wants to return to his room and hide from the outside world, but his curiosity over the lights, the girl, is too strong. “I am a man born and raised in these very streets,” Brama finally says. “I see who comes and who goes. I’ve seen her”—he points to the girl—“come here, bright-eyed, worried. And today I saw that man, the one you just let get away, follow her. I know when there’s trouble about, and I didn’t want it to befall her.”

  After a moment’s pause, the man lowers the crossbow a fraction. “These are your streets then? You’re like to the Silver Spears, beholden to the Kings of Sharakhai?”<
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  Brama spits onto the dirt. “No. But this is my home, and I would protect it.”

  He looks Brama up and down, his eyes lingering on Brama’s scars. “A tattered prince.”

  Brama nods. “A tattered prince.”

  “In the future”—he begins backing away, grabbing the girl’s arm as he goes—“if you happen upon me or my sister, you’ll be sure to walk the other way.”

  “Wait.” Brama takes a step forward, but stops when the man brings the crossbow up. “Who are you?”

  The man merely backs away, crossbow in one hand, the girl’s wrist in the other, then he and the girl turn and jog down the street. Soon they’re lost from sight, and the bystanders, who’d been watching warily, one by one lose interest and return to their day.

  #

  The following morning, an insistent pounding shakes the door of Brama’s room above the tannery. The smells in the air are horrible, acrid, like horse piss, but it keeps people away, and that’s all he really cares about. As he rolls out of bed and stares at the door, the memories of the fight in the streets play across his mind. He wears only his trousers and bandages around his wounds. He probes them gently, finds them to be healing faster than he’s expected. A gift from me, though I don’t tell him so.

  When the pounding comes again, it’s more insistent. “Open this sodding door, Brama!” a deep voice shouts.

  Brama pulls on a shirt, takes up his curved kenshar from the bedside table, and unsheathes it. He stares at the sapphire, my sapphire, and a vision of the man he’d fought in the streets flashes through his mind. As he slips the necklace over his head and stuffs it into his shirt, I feel something I’ve been working toward since becoming trapped in this gem. I was beginning to think it would never happen, but the relief in Brama, even if slight, is clear.

  Relief…toward me, the one who’d tortured him mercilessly for months on end. He doesn’t trust me—I doubt he’ll ever truly trust me—but he’s beginning to rely on me, which is just as good. He knows well the power embodied in me. He knows he can use it. Have I not offered it a thousand times and a thousand times more? He has but to say the word. It’s clear he hasn’t yet made up his mind about accepting my offer, but this is a delicious first step. Like a wedge being hammered into wood, I’m certain it won’t be long before his resolve cracks.

  Brama steps lightly toward the door. For all my smug pleasure, I grow worried as he reaches for the latch. I’m vulnerable, beholden to a mortal, a thing that infuriates me when I dwell on it overlong. It makes me wonder what I’ve done to displease my lord Goezhen, but I also know it could grow worse. Well worse. There’s no telling whose hands I might fall into were Brama to lose me or fall to an enemy’s blade. No telling what they might do if my presence within the gem is detected. In Brama, at least, I know the sort of man he is. Thus far, he’s taken the utmost care not to reveal my nature.

  When Brama opens the door, he finds not the assassin, but a towering man with one hunched shoulder and a deep, ragged scar running over his left eye.

  Brama’s voice is gravel and stones as he speaks the man’s name. “Kymbril.”

  One side of the scarred giant’s mouth crooks upward. “Didn’t know if you’d remember me, boy.”

  “I’m not a boy.” Brama looks him up and down. “And you’re a bit hard to forget.”

  Kymbril stares over Brama’s shoulder into the room. One of his eyes is colored shit brown, and the other, the one with the scar, is a grey-blue, like the overcast skies of desert winter. It’s what earned Kymbril his nickname, the Mismatched Man. “You going to invite me in?”

  “I’m busy.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Sleeping.”

  Kymbril grins his toothy grin; his mismatched eyes shine like the edge of a knife. “You’re a joker, you are. Be careful it doesn’t earn you a missing tooth or two. Wouldn’t want that pretty smile of yours ruined.” He bulls forward, daring Brama to stop him. Brama lets him pass, then closes the door behind him. Like a forge’s flame fanned by the bellows, I feel Brama’s worry being stoked by Kymbril’s presence. Surprisingly, though, it’s more about the girl than it is about himself. He knows as well as I do this visit has something to do with her. Sliding the sheath back over the kenshar’s blade, he lofts it toward the tabletop. It clatters across the wood and falls to the floor with a thud.

  Brama sits on the room’s lone chair, leaning into it as if he were some duty-ridden king preparing to suffer through the day’s final petition. Kymbril, meanwhile, takes in the room, examining the table, the pile of clothes in the corner, the space between the bed and the wall.

  “Get on with it,” Brama says.

  Kymbril continues his inspection as if Brama hadn’t spoken. When he seems satisfied, he sits on Brama’s bed as if the room were his, and rests elbows on knees, the way a dear friend might before imparting unfortunate news. “Already warned you once, boy. There’ll be no warning the third time.”

  Brama says nothing, but I can feel the desire in him for Kymbril to do something. Anything. The rage he has for me and the pain he’d endured when he’d been mine is now a deep well Brama draws on when it suits him. Such things would crush most men, but in Brama it has become the fuel he uses to make his own fire burn brighter. It’s saved him more than once, but it’s also landed him into trouble.

  “Yesterday,” Kymbril begins, “you were seen speaking with a man named Nehir.”

  “I don’t know anyone named Nehir.”

  “Thin. Handsome bloke, but has the look of the reek about him. I believe he was holding a crossbow on you?”

  “I don’t know anything about him.”

  Kymbril nods as if Brama is being perfectly reasonable. “Then why were you talking with him?”

  “A few men were following him. Didn’t like the look of them, so…we had words.”

  Kymbril smiles genuinely. “Had words… I like that.” The big man frowns, lost in thought. “You seen them around before? Nehir and his little sister, Jax?”

  Brama brightens upon learning her name. He savors it a moment. Jax. “Never saw Nehir before that day. Didn’t even know his name until you said it just now. But I’ve seen the girl here and there.”

  Kymbril waits for more, then frowns when Brama doesn’t continue. “That’s your story?”

  “That’s my story.”

  Kymbril nods. “Very well. Now I’m going to tell you a story, Brama. And when I’m done I’m going to ask you a question, and you’re going to answer it for me.” He pauses, licks his lips while staring at the ceiling, as if ordering the events in his mind. “A few months back our young man, Nehir, shows up in one of my parlors. Smokes a while. Some expensive tabbaq, I’m told. Then he gets raging drunk on our finest wine, which, I readily admit, is not all that fine to begin with. He starts telling everyone who’ll listen how he’s a lord of Malasan, how his holding had been stolen from him by a neighboring duke, how he’d been chased from his homeland here to Sharakhai. Vowed revenge, he did. On the lord who killed his family. On those who stood by and let it happen. Even swore he’d kill the king of Malasan himself if he wasn’t restored to his family seat. Everyone humors him because he’s buying araq, wine, whatever they want, but they’re all grinning behind their cups, and when he leaves, they’re laughing before the door even slams home.

  “A few days pass, and Nehir stumbles in through that same door, already two sheets gone, saying much the same thing. He buys more for the house, starts waxing on about knives in the night and revenge against the mountain lords of Malasan, but this time, a little girl shows up and leads him stumbling back into the streets. And here we come to the interesting part, Brama, so pay attention. Not a week passes before a man from Malasan darkens the doorway of that very same parlor. Thin man. Calm. As likely to knife you as smile. You know the type. He asks a few questions. Drops a coin or two in the process. He wants to know about Nehir—what he looks like, whether the parlor maid had seen him since, where he might be found now. This
news drifts to me, as you might imagine. Didn’t think much of it at the time, but I had my best man, Maru, check into it.”

  Brama knew Maru. Everyone in the Shallows did. He was a pit fighter once, but he’d found the competition too equitable, so he left and joined Kymbril’s gang in search of friendlier sands over which to sail. He’d since built a reputation for being as vicious as he was skilled with a blade.

  “Maru found neither Nehir nor the girl, so I put it from my mind. Figured they’d moved on. But then, lo and behold, not two weeks later word comes that a few of my regular patrons aren’t looking for reek with the same sort of fervor they once had. Some stop buying altogether. Makes a man wonder, that does. Makes him worry. So I send Maru out sniffing, and what does he find? That someone’s been funneling Malasani black into the Shallows without my leave.”

  Brama’s curiosity is piqued, as is mine. Until this point he thought Kymbril had sent those men after Nehir. He thought he’d be dealing with a loss of one of Kymbril’s own men at Brama’s hands. But now it’s clear there’s a third player. He might just come out and ask it—Who was the man? You must know something!—but mortals have a curious way of filling silences and revealing more than they mean to, so Brama silently waits.

  “You can imagine”—Kymbril reaches down and scuffs bits of dirt off the tops of his worn leather boots—“the sort of black cloud hanging over me when I found out. You can imagine the sort of imaginative phrases that came out of my demure fucking mouth. I’ve been looking for Nehir ever since. I’m not too much of a man that I can’t admit I’ve been thwarted thus far. Maru’s normally quite good at rooting such men out, but Nehir’s a tricky one. Then I hear something strange. Do you know what it was, Brama?”

  Brama shakes his head.

  “I hear that some man riddled with enough scars to make a soldier blush gets into it with two men chasing Nehir and Jax like hounds on a brace of wounded hares. That true, Brama? You following those men?”