Page 79 of The Ragpicker King
“My country’s spywork is excellent,” Anjelica conceded. “But I say no more than this until after you”—she glanced at Andreyen—“have made contact with Aden for me.”
Andreyen’s eyes were chips of green ice. Ji-An rose to her feet. She had not touched her spiced tea. “I’ll go to the Key now. Check the warehouse.”
“That seems trivial work for such a skilled assassin,” said Anjelica.
“I don’t believe I introduced my associate,” said Andreyen. The words were calm, but he had about him the aura of a waiting cat, its eyes narrowed, its tail swishing.
“You are Kang Ji-An, are you not?” Anjelica said. “Because of you, a whole family in Geumseong lies dead.”
Ji-An and Andreyen exchanged a look.You had better be careful, Anjelica,Kel thought. He knew she was trying to show that she was a force to be reckoned with; that she knew far more than they guessed. But there was such a thing as knowing too much. “A whole family, you say?” said Ji-An, drawing on her gloves. She flexed her fingers. “That does not sound like assassination. That is a slaughter.”
“But you did it for the girl you loved,” said Anjelica. “And it is noble to do such things for love.”
Ji-An stared; her face was very pale. The Ragpicker King rose to his feet. “There is no need for any more discussion,” he said. “If your story about the warehouse proves true,Ayakemi,you can expect to hear from me regarding Aden. Until then, tread carefully. A man who blackmails for money is one thing. A man who blackmails for love is far more dangerous.”
Lin sat cross-legged at the small table in her kitchen, her books and papers spread out before her. She had taken her books back from Mariam that afternoon, and to her amusement, she discovered that she now had Mariam’s notes, which were scribbled in the margins of the ancient tomes in differently colored pencil.
Mariam, it seemed, had chiefly been interested in the great doings of the Sorcerer-Kings, ranging from the impossibly grandiose (one Sorcerer-King had been irritated that a mountain range blocked his view of the sea, so had relocated the entire range to what was now Marakand) to the slightly ridiculous (a Sorcerer-Queen who had magicked up ten thousand cats to be the attendants at her wedding). But Mariam had made other, more useful notes as well. She had found a section in a book that Lin had nearly discarded out of hand that described how Source-Stones were sealed to their owners.The magician and the stone must then travel together to the caves of Sulemon, where, having passed the Halls of Hewn Stone, the gem must be cleansed in the Place of Bitter Water before it being bound unto the Sorcerer whose power it will hold.
Perhaps that was the problem, she thought. Perhaps it was that her stone had not been bound to her. But how to accomplish such a binding? Surely all these places had been lost in the Sundering.
Lin was pulled from her grim thoughts by a knock on the door. Surely Mayesh or Mariam, she thought, but when she threw thefront door open, she found Aron Benjudah standing on her doorstep. It was dark outside, the moon half hidden behind clouds. Even in the dimness, though, she could see that he looked weary. He wore his Rhadanite trader clothes of coarse linen, and the shadows were plain below his eyes.
“Exilarch,” Lin said, “I did not expect to see you again so soon.”
“You asked me to do a favor for you, and I have done it.” He drew a piece of paper from his jacket. “Here is the translation you asked for.”
Lin took the paper from him. “Thank you.”
He looked at her with a half smile. “Aren’t you going to read it?”
Lin gritted her teeth. She had hoped that if she did not open the paper immediately, Aron would take the hint and go away, but apparently Exilarchs were not ones to take hints. Slowly, she unfolded the paper. It was, as she’d expected, a list of ingredients, printed in neat and careful handwriting. As she scanned the list, she felt a sense of relief. There was nothing here she’d never heard of, nothing that would be impossible to get.
“It seems to be some sort of remedy,” said Aron, “but not an Ashkar one. I am not a healer, but”—he tapped his finger on the page—“I do know yellow poppy is a sedative. On the Gold Roads, healers give it to the injured in the hope that they will remain unconscious through their treatment, regardless of how painful it may be. But it is a clumsy drug, and easy to give too much. We Askhar have access to better sedatives than this.”
A clumsy drug.He was right, but what could she say, besides assuring him she had no intention of giving this medicine to anyone? But that, of course, was not true. “Might I ask you a question?” she said instead.
“You are a prospective Goddess,” he said dryly. “Ask what you like.”
“Have you heard of something called the Place of Bitter Water?”
The effect of her words shocked her. His eyes went wide, and he took a half step back, almost as if she had pushed him. “Who told you to ask me that?” he asked harshly. “Was it Mayesh?”
“Of course not,” Lin said. “The name appeared in a book I took from the Shulamat. It was in a history of the Sorcerer-Kings. But I thought perhaps”—she looked at him closely—“it was just a story. Not real.”
He seemed to relax minutely. “There is nothing you are not curious about, is there?” he said. “Yes, there was such a place, once. It lay on the border of what was once Aram, deep underground.”
“Was it destroyed in the Sundering?”
He shrugged. “Much was destroyed in those days. Much was lost and much was hidden, but some things stay hidden for good reason.”
“You speak in riddles,” she complained. He was already turning to go, but now he paused on the lowest step of her house and glanced back over his shoulder.
“Then puzzle me out,” he said, and was gone, into the shadows.
“That is not at all what I thought the Ragpicker King would be like,” Anjelica said as the carriage rattled away from Castle Street. She sat across from Kel with her hands folded in her lap like a young girl’s. Her eyes were bright, her cheeks flushed. It had been an exciting meeting, Kel supposed, looked at from a certain perspective. He had not found it exciting himself; he had spent most of the time wanting to throw up.
“Prosper Beck,” Kel said sharply. “How do you know so much about Prosper Beck?”
