ALCIBIADES

There were seventeen ways to bow to a Ke-Han statesman, and I didn’t know a single one of them. Which, by my way of thinking, was just fine, because I wasn’t bowing to any Ke-Han, statesman or no.

The Esar had his reasons for sending me along with the rest of the diplomats, no doubt because I knew Ke-Han ground pretty well, and I suppose I was there as backup in case a sticky situation got stickier and there wasn’t anything to do about it besides reach for the sword. I guessed it was also to do with my Talent, more like a disease to my thinking, but there wasn’t really much I could do about it now. The Esar’d said that it was more likely to be useful than not, having a magician no one knew about in along with the rest of the diplomats, and I couldn’t exactly argue with him on that—much as I hated thinking of myself as a magician. There were enough of those already, and I didn’t exactly see how sending me was a big secret when more than half the people along with us had been stuck in the Basquiat right alongside me during the magician’s plague. Caius Greylace, Marcy, and Marius had even been in on the little group we’d put together to try and figure it all out—before Margrave Royston’s child-bride farm boy had gone and done it for us, that was.

Anyway, point was, it was no big secret that I had a Talent, except to the Ke-Han, and I guessed that was probably the point.

There were other military men there besides me, at least—Lieutenants Casimiro and Valery—who’d somehow got roped into this sorry state of affairs the same as I had. Casimiro was a big fellow who talked too much, and Valery was a little man who didn’t talk ever, but we respected each other well enough to stay out of each other’s hair, and that was good enough for me.

That didn’t mean I had to like this arrangement, though. It was uncomfortable days of riding in a carriage to come to a place I didn’t want to set foot in, to put on a smile I didn’t want to wear on my face, and to bow to men who’d just as soon have cut me down if everything had worked out a little differently.

It was too short a period of time to go forgiving an entire country for fighting so underhanded that they almost won. There were some tactics you never forgave.

I didn’t like their blank expressions, or the way their women hopped-to quick as soldiers might’ve, just to serve the enemy. That was the sort of behavior that made a man wonder what the women he knew back home would’ve done if the coin had fallen to the other side. Everyone in the Ke-Han palace was too fucking polite.

At least I hadn’t slapped on enemy colors just to keep them happy. I could feel every last one of them staring at me, but I wasn’t playing any games or crawling into bed with an enemy I’d only just got the better of. This was Volstov’s victory. It was bad enough being sent there to hammer out the terms of a more lasting treaty; I didn’t have to make it worse by dressing like them and pretending I didn’t hate it just as much as they did.

Their whole palace was a tricky affair designed to be treacherous, its narrow hallways winding around each other like the individual threads of a spider’s web and its walls made of paper so thin you could see shadows passing before them, in the rooms hidden just on the other side. Whispers chased us when we got too close, and now and then the sound of a woman’s ghostly laughter followed close behind. On top of that, with all of us feeling like exhibits at the zoo, there were mirrors slanted against the ceiling, fitted into every corner where simple lamps should have been. Any sort of light you wanted came from your own personal tight-mouthed Ke-Han groveling bastard, who followed you around like he’d stab you in the back as soon as light the way for you.

We were esteemed guests, all right—so esteemed we wouldn’t be able to go anywhere or do anything without having someone watching us. Well, I told myself, if they wanted to assign some poor fool the job of listening to me snore and being privy to when and where and how much I shat, that was fine by me. Chances were it’d be worse for him than it would be for me. It was a waste of everyone’s time, and I wasn’t bothering myself any by thinking about it.

“Do you know,” said Caius Greylace, coming up on me unannounced like some kind of winter ailment, “that the mirrors show you everything happening all along the halls? How clever!”

I wasn’t in the mood to praise Ke-Han ingenuity like some fat country noble might praise his favorite spaniel. Chances were, this Caius creature would get bored soon enough and find someone else to bother; it didn’t matter who, so long as it wasn’t me. I didn’t like spaniels.

“Looks like,” I said.

“I suppose they must have an awful lot of trouble with assassination,” Caius went on. He was dressed half like a woman and half like a lunatic, breezing through the halls behind our lamp-bearer, the fabric of whatever it was he was wearing swishing all the way. “Or perhaps they’re simply inbred. I hear it causes paranoia in noble bloodlines as old and as carefully guarded as theirs.”

I didn’t say anything to that at all.

We were all split up by where we slept—a fact I didn’t enjoy for a second. And I would have made it clear at the time I realized it, too, if Caius hadn’t exclaimed over a peacock wandering across the courtyard, effectively ending all conversation on the matter of lodgings.

What really set all the warning bells off in my head was the way we were put here and there, and most of us halfway across the palace from one another, with real careful regard paid to status and nothing else. Josette, Fiacre, and Wildgrave Ozanne were all quartered together in the West Wing of the palace, for example, whereas Casi and Val were somewhere in the south nearer to the stables and the menagerie. I hadn’t even seen Marcy and Marius since we’d arrived, which tickled me the wrong way. I didn’t like a second of it. I didn’t like it especially because the whole East Wing of the palace, which was where I’d be spending bastion-only-knew how much time, stank of some particular incense that burned my throat and my eyes. It was real distracting, and I didn’t doubt that they were doing it on purpose. Ke-Han was made up of tricky bastards.

“In any case,” Caius continued, moving neatly around a corner, then pausing to wait for me to join him, “I believe we’re staying above the… eastern gardens? Is it the eastern gardens? The peacock certainly was a distraction. I wonder if we can have one brought in especially for entertainment. They’re very rare, but I would so like a closer look.”

“Heard the Ke-Han eat them,” I ground out.

The servant leading us paused for a moment, but it was only because we’d fallen behind and it was his duty to wait for us. I picked up my pace, and this time it was Caius who hurried to keep alongside me, rustling all the way.

“Eat peacocks?” he asked. One of his eyes was queerly discolored, and being looked at by him felt like you were having a conversation with two different people, and both of them equally insane.

“Right,” I said. “Eat peacocks.”

I’d heard the rumors about Caius Greylace, the same as any. Kept as the Esar’s pet lapdog practically since birth, for his Talent in visions and his lack of qualms about using them to get information. He tortured anyone who possessed information and quite a few people who didn’t, if the rumors were anything to go by. Then, because he was young and wild, he went after some other poor bastard at court—the reason changed depending on who you asked, but the result was always the same—and drove him mad without blinking an eye. Well, not even the Esar could overlook that sort of thing, so he was banished quicker than a flash, exiled at fourteen and not brought back until three years later, when everyone’d been recalled for the final push. Just before we’d all gone and got slammed by that blasted plague.

He didn’t look so mad as they made him out to be, though—in fact, he just looked small and very pale, with an odd habit of pursing his lips between sentences—but I set no store by appearances. They didn’t mean as much as the deeds a man did.

His were a little queerer than most, but then we’d all done worse than we might’ve wanted, during the war.

“I doubt that’s true,” Caius rallied swiftly, adjusting one of his sleeves. “I believe you’re being truculent.”

The servant stopped a second time, saving me from having to make any kind of reply, and hooked the lamp in a sconce by another of the Ke-Han’s many useless paper-square doors. They didn’t have any locks, and for the servant to let us in, he had to go through a complicated dance of kneeling, sliding the door open, and finishing off, for no reason I could see, by bowing so low his forehead was pressed to the ground.

The whole thing made me uncomfortable.

Caius, on the other hand, seemed right at home. I guessed it had something to do with how he was used to being exiled—and maybe being sent to nanny a conquered nation was a step up from where he’d been last time. It wasn’t my place to judge.

The servant didn’t budge.

“Well,” Caius said, “either they have grossly underestimated our number, or we’re in the same room.”

“Maybe he’s waiting for us to do something,” I replied.

There was no telling if the servant spoke our language or not, and I was pretty sure neither of us spoke his. Chances were we could stand there all night doing nothing while he got intimate with the floor or maybe started kissing our boots for good measure, and I’d never get my chance to sit alone for even a fucking minute, just piecing things together inside my own head and figuring out how it was I’d landed here, when all I’d wanted was to go home.

The war was over, but I was still surrounded by Ke-Han. The world was too funny like that sometimes, only I couldn’t see my way toward laughing along with it.

“Ridiculous,” I snapped, and reached for the lamp myself.

The servant looked up as if to protest, but then scrambled quickly away, bowing his head like his life depended on it. Maybe it did; I didn’t know. The lamp, even though it looked light enough for something made out of rice paper, was surprisingly heavy, but not half so heavy as a Volstov blade. I thrust it inside the room, which lit up bright as day.

Everything—the strange flat bed, the canopy hung above it from the ceiling, the short tables, the pillows, the screen standing in the far corner—was some shade or another of blue.

Next to me, Caius began to laugh—a gentle, curious sound that reminded me of the whispers that’d followed us all the way there.

“Yours must be the next room over,” he said. “And what is that lovely scent?”

Nothing was going to get done if we kept at it, bandying words around like we were already in talks with the statesmen themselves. From the direction the servant was bowing and scraping in, it seemed as though Caius had guessed right about where my rooms were. Without saying anything about the incense—which was like as not going to turn my eyes as red as my coat by morning and do worse to my throat—I got inside my own quarters, slid the door shut hard, and wished to bastion I was anywhere but where I was.

At least my room wasn’t so much blue as it was turquoise green, but I got the picture clear enough.

I was alone finally, so I could unbutton my collar, and there were lamps in the room at least, thank bastion, which were tricky dangling oil-and-wick affairs that took some coaxing to get themselves lit. But they weren’t going to get the best of me, not when I’d lit fires out of less and trickier besides. I got a couple of them going, shadows dancing across the walls whenever I moved this way or that. Mostly, it was just dark, because apparently the Ke-Han, with all their inventing, hadn’t seen fit to invent windows.

Maybe they just didn’t like looking out at their ruined city. For that, I didn’t blame them.

In the next room over, I could hear the sound of water being run. There were some men who couldn’t stand even a little grit on their skin, and I guessed that Caius Greylace was one of those. I didn’t think there was much time for a bath, and I didn’t much want to wrestle with the tub, either, which was round and half-set into the floor and hidden by a standing screen.

No, as far as I could see, there was nothing for it but to wait.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t anywhere to sit, just a few large, seating pillows grouped together in the corners, and the bed, which wasn’t more than a pallet as far as I could see, complete with the most bastion-awful-looking pillow I’d ever seen. At least, I thought it was a pillow. It might’ve been some weird Ke-Han torture device. Whatever it was, I wasn’t sleeping on it—it was no more than a glorified slab of wood. No doubt royalty got a proper bed and pillow, but this was good enough for us Volstovics. I was sure it was just their way of thumbing their noses at us, a good little dig at the victors. Sneaky all over, that was the Ke-Han for you. Well, I was going to ask for some proper chairs.

Aside from that, there were the bath and the screen, and a low, long table and desk, and then something I guessed had to be a chair for lack of anything else it could be. It looked like a crescent moon, made all of black wood, polished so bright I thought for a minute it might’ve been metal.

It didn’t look like a room to live in. It looked more like a room for getting bowed to in, and if there was one feeling I’d learned to hate in the past few minutes, it was being bowed to.

On top of all that, there was only the one door, which didn’t settle my nerves any. Part of the wood on the wall that joined my room to Caius Greylace’s looked different, so there might have been a sliding panel.

And that was it.

My things were coming up later, but I hadn’t brought with me half as much as some of the others. To my way of thinking, this wasn’t some holiday. It was business, the Esar’s business, and I was there to serve him, not take in the sights or dress myself up like a game bird on the table.

So maybe I was predisposed not to enjoy myself, but this was enemy territory. And would continue to be until we signed more than a few provisionary treaties about islands hundreds of miles from here and dragon parts that were barely more than scrap metal now.

I was just about to break my chair down into something more comfortable when the strange panel of wood I’d noticed before slid open, nice and smooth. The Ke-Han kept their doors well oiled, which was something to note, in the service of a silence that got under my skin and stayed there.

“What in bastion are you doing?” I demanded, ready to use my chair as a weapon. It was better suited for that, just the right amount of heavy, and fitted with sharp corners at the ends.

“Are you going to hit me with that?” Caius Greylace, fresh out of a bath and smelling like roses, was standing in the open space; light from behind him poured through into my dimly lit room, and steam, too. “I don’t know whether to be flattered or terrified.”

I put the chair down. “Is something the matter?”

“Yes,” Caius said. “Something dire. Something dreadful.”

“Well?”

“I’ve no idea what you’re going to be wearing tonight,” he went on smoothly, brushing damp, pale hair out of his eyes.

“Red,” I snapped, eyeing him warily. “Why in bastion d’you want to know that?”

“No, no,” he said, waving his hand about. “Of course you’ll be wearing red; I ascertained that earlier, in the carriage. I meant what style of garment.”

“Style?” I repeated.

He gave me a look like he thought I was the insane idiot of us two, which made me wonder if I hadn’t been right in the first place when I was still thinking he was a Ke-Han assassin. I should have hit him with the chair. “Style,” he said. “Of garment. That you will be wearing. Tonight. During the festivities. In our honor. Are you suffering from some sort of postwar mental deficiency? I hear it plagues old soldiers something dreadful.”

“I’m going to be wearing red,” I repeated.

“Are you going to be wearing that?” he asked.

I figured he meant my jacket, which was fine as far as I could see, and I bristled. “Served me well enough during the war,” I ground out.

“Yes, I’m sure it did, by the look of it,” he said. “Well, if you insist. I’m not entirely sure I have anything that will match even remotely, but I suppose I shall have to do the best I can under the circumstances.”

“Best you can,” I said.

“Under the circumstances,” he concluded.

“Right,” I said. “Except—we’re matching?”

I was starting to realize that all the stories about Caius Greylace I’d heard from disreputable and reputable sources alike—about how he was seventeen different kinds of cracked, about how his parents had just as good as let wolves raise him, about how you couldn’t be near him without getting the queer feeling that you were riding the center of some wild fucking storm—had been truths, all of them. Mostly I got that from the way he was looking at me, all uneven, because of the unevenness of his eyes.

As if he could read my thoughts—and maybe he could; I didn’t know much about that kind of thorny Talent—he pushed some hair over the bad eye, the left one, and set to examining his nails.

“Of course we’re matching,” he said. “If we’re to arrive together.”

“This isn’t dolls and houses,” I muttered.

“Oh, no,” he said, offering me a sharp-toothed smile. “It’s so much better.”