In the Village Where Brightwine Flows Read online

  “Three nights ago.”

  Dardzada moved along the table, examining Gazi’s skin, which had bruising, but… “He’s very clean.”

  Amir looked embarrassed. “I shouldn’t have let them, I know. But his mother… I couldn’t stand to let her see him so filthy.”

  Dardzada looked up. He could see the pain in the man’s eyes. “It’s been three days. You were right to clean him.” Dardzada checked his toenails. The little dirt collected there had a brown tinge to it, which would follow from a boy found among the streets of Sharakhai. His fingernails were short and strangely immaculate. “Help me roll him over.”

  Ezren did, and Dardzada examined his back. There were faint lines across his skin. He leaned in closer and ran his fingers over them—welt marks, nearly healed. “These are from a lashing,” Dardzada said, then he stood and looked Amir in the eye. “What do you know of them?”

  Amir’s gaze flicked between Dardzada and Gazi’s back. “Are you suggesting we whipped him?”

  “I’m merely asking a question.”

  Amir turned to Ezren, puffing himself up. “I will not stand for this in my own home!”

  “Lord Amir,” Dardzada said, “you requested my presence here for a reason. It’s because I’m thorough. I imply nothing with my questions. I ask because I need to know. Now please, if you would be so kind, do you know anything about the whip marks on his back?”

  “Of course I don’t! That was done by the ones who took him!”

  Dardzada nodded, granting him the point. “It’s conceivable. They’re old enough to have healed but fresh enough to have been given shortly after his abduction, if that’s what it was.” Dardzada returned to his inspection. “But why would he have received lashes?”

  “Well, I’m sure I don’t know,” Amir said. “I can only imagine the sort of men he ended up with.”

  “As you say,” Dardzada said, carefully inspecting Gazi’s skin. “Had Gazi been known to smoke lotus?” The boy was young, but he’d seen younger succumb to the draw of that vicious narcotic.

  Amir’s anger seemed to drain. “Not that we were aware of, but he might have been lured in by the older ones. They talk sweetly to boys like him. Even those from the richer quarters of the city can become mesmerized by it, thinking it exotic to be near, even if they haven’t yet tasted it on their tongue.”

  Dardzada couldn’t argue there. Black lotus had drawn many into its dark embrace, and the many deaths around Sharakhai seemed to do little to dull the attraction. If anything, that made it more seductive, not less. It seemed romantic, this drug, whose smoke gave such intensely euphoric dreams. He opened Gazi’s mouth. The boy’s teeth were not yellowed, though if he’d been smoking it only a while it wouldn’t have had a chance to discolor his teeth yet. The smell of his mouth was rank, but that was to be expected. There was no scent of black lotus, though, and Dardzada would have been able to smell it, even on a boy three days dead.

  He glanced up at Ezren. “You believe Gazi was taken by this group, a black lotus gang. He tried to leave, was beaten for it, and died from those wounds.”

  Ezren’s brows pinched as he stared down at Gazi. “Or some other altercation. It takes little for them to come at odds with someone from Sharakhai’s more affluent quarters, and less for someone like Gazi”—Ezren glanced to Amir—“who his father tells me was, despite his recent trouble, a gentle boy.”

  Amir nodded. “When he was young, he was. He’d become more rebellious of late, no doubt from the west end dross he’d been associating with.”

  When Dardzada came to Gazi’s legs, he paused. On the back of his knees, where the skin folded, was a small red mark, circular, only partially healed. He looked at the other leg and found something similar, though fainter.

  “What is it?” Amir asked, stepping closer.

  “I don’t know,” Dardzada said. “Help me turn him over again.”

  Amir and Ezren both helped, then Dardzada looked more carefully at Gazi’s skin. He found two more such marks on the insides of his thighs, to either side of his scrotum, two more in his armpits, and another pair behind his ears.

  “What are they?” Amir asked, now inspecting his son’s skin as closely as Dardzada was.

  “I don’t know, but they’re all in vital points of the body, where the body’s humors are most readily accessible. The Mireans call them nodal points, or qi points.”

  “Mireans…” Amir looked at Dardzada as if he were mad. “What would they have to do with any of this?”

  “Perhaps nothing, but no other tradition in the Five Kingdoms uses the nodes of the body in quite this way.”

  “What traditions?” Amir’s voice had gone reedy. Dardzada could see the emotion in his eyes, the fears over the horrors his son might have experienced before he’d died.

  “My Lord.” Dardzada waved to Gazi’s dead form, suddenly more conscious that this man was the boy’s father than he was moments ago. “They use qi for a variety of things, for different purposes. They tap needles into them to restore the body’s balance. It is said the warriors in their mountain temples can press upon them to debilitate. They draw blood to drain the body of ill humors.”

  Amir’s face was growing more angry. “You’re suggesting my son was sick and they were hoping to heal him of his ills?”

  “I’m merely observing that the pattern of Gazi’s wounds seem to follow their practices, and that some of those practices have found a foothold here in Sharakhai.”

  Ezren looked embarrassed by Dardzada’s insights, perhaps thinking he should have seen what Dardzada had seen and come to the same conclusions before now, but really, how could a Silver Spear be expected to know of such things?

  Dardzada returned to Gazi’s head, looking for more marks, perhaps hidden by his thick black hair, finding another on the crown of his head, and one more at the base of his skull. And one last thing. A thing most strange. He reached his pinky finger into Gazi’s ear and scraped away some of the dirt he found there. He rubbed the dark earth between his thumb and forefinger. “When did you say his body was cleaned?”

  “I didn’t say. We washed him last night.”

  “And he’s been here ever since?”

  “Yes.”

  “Take me to the place he was found, please.”

  They went up and into the heat of the day. They left the lush estate and headed across the grounds to the horse paddock, where a pair of golden akhala stallions were being led by their reins in a circle by women in riding clothes. Amir circled to the back of the paddock, where a small wood shed stood—the house for the pump that kept the paddock and the grazing field beyond it so green.

  “Here,” Amir said, motioning to a patch of ground that was unremarkable save for the wiry brown grass that had been flattened.

  Dardzada knelt down and took up a pinch of dirt. It was an ochre color, bordering on yellow.

  “What is it?” Amir asked.

  “I don’t know yet, my Lord. Thank you for your time.”

  “Wait. Is there anything I should know?”

  “Not as yet. Let me and good Ezren search. We’ll return as soon as we know more.”

  Amir nodded, and then Dardzada and Ezren were off.

  ❖ ❖ ❖

  At the center of the Amber City was a roundabout known as the Wheel, a place where the Spear and the Trough and two of the city’s lesser byways all crossed ways, creating a never-ending whorl of men and women and horses and wagons. Within the chaos of the ceaseless traffic was a marble pool filled with water that was pumped daily from an old well that some said was the very first to be dug in Sharakhai. It was a strangely calm place for all that was happening around it—a respite for those moving about the city, much as Sharakhai was a respite for those moving about the desert. Dardzada stood at one edge of this pool, speaking with a man whose face was hidden by turban and veil. Few would be able to see the tattoos on the backs of his hands, the heads of vipers that twined around his forearms.

  On the opposite si
de of the pool, Ezren stood watching, waiting, as Dardzada had requested. The young Spear was inquisitive, Dardzada had found, almost overly so, but he, Dardzada, couldn’t very well have a Spear around while speaking to this particular man, now could he?

  The conversation was short. Dardzada told the man of the boy, Gazi, and what had happened to him over the past several weeks. He described Gazi’s features in detail, and the boy’s final fate, his assumptions about the black dirt and Amir’s estate.

  The man nodded, then accepted a small bag of sylval handed to him with a sly pass of Dardzada’s hand—the bounty for any word of Gazi’s presence in the west end or anywhere else in the city, plus a fee for getting the information out. Dardzada didn’t know if it would pan out, but he suspected it would. This man’s reach in Sharakhai’s poorest quarter was great, and there was little doubt that Gazi had been running those streets.

  It was a strange phenomenon of late, rich boys and girls from Goldenhill or Blackfire Gate or other affluent sections of the city slumming in the west end. What they got from it, Dardzada had no idea, but what a foolish thing indeed, to turn your back on your upbringing, to pretend you’d never been raised with bands of gold about your wrists, all to run with the scum of Sharakhai. Strange as it was, it was likely the reason Gazi had been taken. It wasn’t the first time the poorest in Sharakhai—or those that seemed poor—had been scooped up by slavers or worse, and it surely wouldn’t be the last.

  “You mind telling me what that was all about?” Ezren asked when Dardzada summoned him over.

  “I have business I’ve set aside, Ezren. I trust neither you nor Layth will begrudge me a moment or two to deal with it.”

  Ezren didn’t seem particularly pleased by this, but he nodded. “And now?”

  “Now we head for the rice terraces.”

  Ezren’s face screwed up in confusion. “Why by the grace of the gods are we going there?”

  “The soil in Gazi’s ear.” Dardzada set off with Ezren in tow, the two of them merging with the ceaseless traffic until they could head north along the Trough. “It’s pointing us there, or I’m a beetle-brained fool.”

  ❖ ❖ ❖

  Using a rope tied to stakes to help him, Dardzada hefted his bulk up the steep trail. Ezren led the way, checking behind every so often, perhaps to make sure he wasn’t outstripping Dardzada too badly, or that the much older and much heftier man wasn’t ready to fall over, clutching his heart.

  “Go on,” Dardzada groused the next time Ezren looked back. “I daresay I can still climb a gods-damned hill.”

  To Dardzada’s left, hugging the northern slopes of Tauriyat, lay row upon row of terraced rice paddies. They were staggered like the stairs of the gods below the imposing stone wall that ran around the mountain’s circumference. Were one to follow that wall, it would continue to the east and round the great Royal Harbor, then snake its way south and wrap around the House of Kings and its twelve palaces, reaching past the House of Maidens with its stout gate, before returning here. The wall protected much, but from this vantage it looked useless, an edifice guarding stark slopes and dry shrubs for the assemblage of amberlarks that nested along those higher climes.

  The paddies and the glimmering water along the terraces made this place look like the verdant skin of some sleeping leviathan. Below, fanning like petals around the mirror surface of Sharakhai’s vast reservoir, were plantations of trees and crops, a cornucopia that stemmed the tide of hunger in Sharakhai, a welcome addition to the endless food brought in from all corners of the Five Kingdoms. There were pastures here too, penning oxen and goats and lambs. It was a place unique in the desert, something rich and vibrant when so much else was dry and sandy and barren. It felt fragile too, as if one sweep of the gods’ hands would take it all away, allowing the desert to consume it once more.

  “It would help if you told me what you were looking for,” Ezren called back.

  “I don’t know. Anything strange.”

  “Dardzada, this is mad. I don’t care what the boy had in his ear. What could we possibly find in a rice paddy that could lead to Gazi’s killer?”

  “Perhaps nothing,” Dardzada said, “but we’re almost done, so quit grousing.”

  The foreman hadn’t been happy about allowing them onto his fields, but he’d bowed to Ezren’s authority as a Silver Spear. He’d returned afterward to the men and women, breeches rolled up past their knees, planting the new rice stalks in the empty paddies below, and Dardzada and Ezren had begun their hours-long trek, wandering the rows, searching for something, anything, strange.

  They’d wandered the paddies, crossing along the rows. Ezren, young and spry, had navigated them easily, but Dardzada had slipped into the water more than once, a thing that displeased him, not merely for how it soaked his sandals, but for the pungent smell of the ox dung they’d used as fertilizer. For all their searching, they’d found nothing, and they’d nearly reached the end of this place. Indeed, in the time it took Dardzada to silently mouth a handful of—if he were being honest—some of the least creative epithets to the gods he’d ever bothered to craft, they reached the top of the last row, the one that gave the best view of these uppermost paddies.

  “Blood and balls,” Dardzada said under his breath.

  He gazed among the vibrant green rice plants, finding row upon row of perfectly ordered stalks. But the boy, Gazi… He’d had dried dirt in his ear. Black dirt. Dark earth that was found nowhere in Sharakhai except right here. It was a unique project, these paddies, created after an extensive treaty between Mirea and Sharakhai had been signed generations ago. Dirt had been hauled in wagons over the course of a decade to create these paddies, and the owners, hand chosen by Mirea’s queen herself, had run it ever since, they and their descendants. The earth worked well indeed for the rice, but was unnecessary for other crops grown in the plantations near the reservoir, so no one had ever bothered to use it for anything else.

  When Dardzada had seen it, he’d been certain Gazi’s body had lain here at one point or another. Killed here, then taken to the estate of his father for some reason yet to be fathomed.

  The notion seemed ludicrous now.

  “Satisfied?” Ezren asked. The look on his face wasn’t pleased exactly. It was more like relief, surely over the fact that he wouldn’t have to trudge along these slopes in this infernal heat any longer.

  “Very well,” Dardzada said, and began walking back down the hill.

  He’d not gone five steps, however, when he saw something off to his right. His heart sped up as he left the winding, makeshift stairs and walked along the dry rim of the water-filled terrace. “What is it?” Ezren asked, following, but Dardzada merely continued his steady plodding, eventually reaching a place where the rice plants had been matted down. There were footprints of varying sizes along the moist earth bordering the water, some from sandals or boots, but one set from naked feet—Gazi’s, he was sure.

  Dardzada knelt down, inspecting the matted plants. “Here,” he said. “This is where Gazi died.”

  Ezren leapt over to the opposite bank and inspected the area. “Here?”

  “Here.” Dardzada stood and looked among the fields below. Black lotus was grown in Mirea and parts of Malasan and imported to Sharakhai, but that didn’t mean someone wasn’t trying to grow it right here under the noses of the Kings. “But why had Gazi run up this bloody hill instead of returning to the relative safety of Sharakhai? Why not try to return home?”

  “Perhaps he hoped to hide here for a time,” Ezren said, “throw them off his scent and return home later when it was safe.”

  Perhaps, Dardzada thought, sweeping his hands over the matted stalks of rice, but it doesn’t feel right. He imagined Gazi running along the bank of the terrace, falling here, though who knew why? Tackled by his pursuers? Exhaustion? Succumbing to a soporific that had, perhaps, been forced upon him? Goezhen’s sweet kiss, how was Dardzada supposed to determine the cause of this boy’s death?

  King’s business
, Layth had said. It was a thing he’d held above Dardzada’s head before. It implied the Kings’ interests were involved, or that the Kings themselves had taken note and would be apprised of the outcome. Normally it was as empty a threat as the biting winds that blew over the desert, but a wind could turn to a storm, couldn’t it? There had been something about the way Layth had gone about this. He always blustered, but this time it felt as though it were forced, as if this meant much to him but he didn’t wish Dardzada to know it. It made Dardzada wonder if it truly was King’s business.

  But if that were so, why bring Dardzada into it, a man who, admittedly, might be trusted by the boy’s father, but who had so little experience in this sort of thing? Amir may have demanded it, but it was hard to imagine Layth giving in. Perhaps there was more to it. Perhaps this had some sort of bearing on Amir’s dealings with the Kings or others in Sharakhai.

  “Best we return to Layth,” Ezren said, “tell him what we’ve found.”

  “Mmmm…” But Dardzada wasn’t really listening. His attention had been caught by the flutter of wings higher up. A golden amberlark was flitting about the plants, landing here, then there. Then it speared its beak in among slim leaves near the stem and pulled out a wriggling green caterpillar. The bird blinked once, twice, then flew up and over the nearby ridge.

  “Something interesting?” Ezren asked.

  Dardzada shrugged, the wriggling caterpillar fixed firmly in his mind, tickling a memory. “Perhaps.” Then he lumbered past Ezren and headed toward the trail back down to level ground. When they’d reached the streets of city center at last, Dardzada stopped and turned to Ezren. “Be a good man and give me some time. There are several appointments I’ve missed because of this, and I need to speak to them.”

  A lie, but a necessary one.

  “I’ll go with you.”

  “I fear your presence will only slow things down.” Dardzada began backing away. “Meet me at the Wheel at sundown.”