Of Dragons, Feasts and Murders Read online

  It was a long, long list, and he could very easily see why Grandmother had been grumbling: the entries were haphazard, and way too many people were leaving—he hoped they’d been replaced by new civil servants, but so many people leaving usually meant an exodus of the good ones. Insofar as wounds went, he was looking at a hemorrhage.

  He removed everyone who wasn’t of the fourth rank, everyone who wasn’t a dragon, and everyone who didn’t belong to the Court of Imperial Sacrifices. The list, unfortunately, was still large, because he couldn’t be absolutely certain that the victim was actually physically involved with the worship of imperial ancestors, and the cult itself involved quite a bit of logistics beyond the temples.

  The list was still sizeable. What had Van said? Shoulder spurs and not very wealthy. He couldn’t check for spurs, but he looked over the brief career summaries. A lot of fourth-rank posts came with large money appointments or titles that provided strings of cash. He struck those off.

  That left him with five names, all of them working at different locations in the imperial citadel. Rong Van An Nam, from the Palace Medical Service. Rong Thi Oanh Vu, from the Court Storehouses. Tran Thi Khanh Ngoc, from the Court of Seals. Pham Thi Thanh Tam, from the Office of the National Altars. Le Van Huong Thao, from the Imperial Music Office.

  “Hum, my lord?”

  Thuan raised his eyes. It was Madeleine, House Hawthorn’s alchemist, standing limned in the darkness of the door—outside, night had fallen in the usual way of the kingdom of the Seine, the sun plummeting into the water and abruptly stealing away the light. Was it evening already? He must have missed lunch.

  “How did you get past the guards?”

  “Oh,” Madeleine wrung her hands. She was middle-aged, with greying hair, and a perpetual air of worry that only seemed to taper off whenever Asmodeus was in the room. She was also carrying a leather shoulder bag with the arms of Hawthorn, which looked to be heavier than she was. “Véronique had to argue with them quite a bit, but they seemed satisfied we weren’t going to break you out.”

  Thuan snorted. Three not always practically-minded scientists were definitely an unlikely rescue party, though of course appearances could be deceptive. “I hope you’re all right?” he said. “You and the rest of the delegation.”

  “Oh. No, we’re fine. It’s only Lord Asmodeus they’re worried about. They think we’re barbaric and individualist and not much loyalty to superiors can be expected of us.”

  “It is an uncannily accurate description of most House politics,” Thuan said. Including most of House Hawthorn’s, unfortunately. “Did you see him before he disappeared?”

  Madeleine grimaced. “Yes, he and the new dependent—Van? He was headed back to your quarters to pick up something before going into the city to ask tailors.”

  Where instead, he’d met Dang Quang hell-bent on claiming Van back. “I see.”

  “Is he all right?”

  Thuan shrugged. She was disastrous at politics: of course, even if he’d known, he wouldn’t have told her. But she was in luck. If “luck” was the proper name for a rather large-size helping of bad fortune. “I don’t know where he is. But he’s resourceful.”

  And he also had the entire imperial guard after him, which was less comforting.

  Madeleine didn’t look reassured. He couldn’t blame her. “I take it you came here to report on the powder?”

  “Yes,” Madeleine said. She put a cotton bag on the table—Thuan suddenly saw she’d been wearing gloves. He’d been so busy worrying about Asmodeus he’d failed to notice.

  “Bad, I take it. Wait. Asmodeus said it didn’t do anything to food.”

  “No,” Madeleine said. “That’s because it mostly breaks down crystals.”

  Thuan raised an eyebrow. “You’re going to need to unpack this a little more. Like jewelry?”

  “Here,” Madeleine said. She picked the bowl of water on the reception room’s table, and shook some of the powder in it, grimacing. Then she put a small ring in it. Bubbles rose to the surface, along with a familiar flash of magic. She withdrew large tongs from her shoulder bag, and used them to fish out the ring, holding it out so Thuan could see. The stone in it looked oddly wrong, its facets slightly out of alignment—something about the way the light struck it…

  Madeleine shook it, and it just came apart, disintegrating into fine, sandy powder. “Crystals are a lattice,” she said. “If you can weaken the bonds in the proper way…”

  “Hmm,” Thuan said. “I can see that, but we don’t really have a lot of these rings in the imperial city.”

  Wait.

  He went back to the list of people who might be the missing official. There. Tran Thi Khanh Ngoc, an official in the Court of Seals. “Madeleine—”

  “Mm?” Madeleine was shaking the tongs in water, trying to get the powder from them.

  “Is jade a crystal?”

  “Of course. Jadeite or nephrite, depending on the characteristics and the value—it will alter them too, except perhaps with larger cracks…” She stopped, then. “You don’t care.”

  “I do care very much,” Thuan said. The regnal seals. The packed collection of jade and silver seals used by the Empress to sign everything from promotions to national decrees, to answers to memorials. The beating heart, not only of the civil service, but of the entire empire. “Do you know what Phat Thuc is?”

  Madeleine looked panicked. “My lord?”

  “It’s a cleaning ceremony,” Thuan said. “In the last month of the year, on the twentieth day, all the empress’ seals are taken from the cabinets where they’re stored and put into a bath of water with scented flower, and then dried with red cloth before being stored for the New Year’s period. It means that the civil service and the dynasty are resting. And on New Year’s Day the cabinets will be opened, and the seals unveiled again.”

  And what would happen, if they crumbled into dust as they were being put away into the cabinet, in full view of the most senior officials of the court?

  Think think think. “What day are we?”

  “My lord?”

  But he knew, didn’t he? The lunar calendar took some thought to align to most days, but the last month was easy, because all he had to do was countdown to New Year’s Eve. It was the evening of the nineteenth day of the twelfth month. They had one night left, barely: the cabinets would be open at dawn, the water lovingly cleansed by dragons and scented with the flowers the petals of which Asmodeus had found—and the seals would crack and crumble into dust, and the society would have its unsubtle, incontrovertible message: that the dynasty had lost the Mandate of Heaven, for what kind of Empress could still claim to rule, with no seals to pass on her orders?

  Thuan hesitated. He hated playing the game of politics. He hated the court and the faction and everything it stood for. But Asmodeus was right: he’d been miserable at court, but it didn’t change who he was and the power he wielded—and what he chose to be responsible for, in the end. “I want you to do something for me,” he said to Madeleine.

  She looked at him, eyes wide. “My lord.”

  “You’re going to need Véronique’s help. Go see the Empress Dowager, and tell her you’re coming from the bookish one, not the ruthless one.” He fingered his own personal seal, the one he wasn’t supposed to give to anyone for anything. He couldn’t leave it to her, because they’d search her when she came out, foreigner or not. “How good is your memory?”

  Madeleine started. “I don’t know—”

  “Me neither.” Thuan walked to the table, and pressed his own seal into vermillion paste, and then into paper. “If you can reproduce this, it should help you past the eunuchs.”

  “The bookish one. I don’t understand…”

  “You don’t,” Thuan said. “But she will.”

  Madeleine stared, for a while, at the imprint of the seal. “I’m not too sure I can memorise it.”

  Thuan shrugged, with a lightness he didn’t feel. “Of course not. Do your best. Thank you.”r />
  He waited with bated breath when she got out—he heard her say something to the guard, and then Véronique sharply pointing out something—and then silence, and he couldn’t even be sure what had happened.

  It was a lousy, lousy plan. This late at night, the Dowager probably wouldn’t want to receive anyone, let alone a foreigner like Madeleine. She liked Asmodeus, but in a way that an adult liked children: she was fond of him but certainly wouldn’t want to swing her considerable weight on his behalf—and maybe not even on behalf of Thuan. But she was still way, way easier to reach than Second Aunt.

  He could only wait, and hope—and pray that it was, in the end, all going to be enough.

  * * *

  Thuan did try to convince the guards he needed to see Minh Linh, and that it was urgent. He hadn’t expected much from this, and it didn’t work: the guards laughed and said he was raving, and turned away from him. Maybe he’d see Minh Linh at some point, but he had no doubt she’d tell him the same thing again, that proper protocol was being followed.

  Thuan must have slept: he woke up with a start. The room was suffused with the grey light before dawn, a prelude to a sunrise that would come as fast and as sudden as the sunset had, flooding the room with the dappled light of underwater shallows. Almost time, and he had failed.

  You’re not the one who got them into this bad situation, and you shouldn’t be the one getting them out of it, either.

  I have to see it through.

  He’d failed. Arrogance and unwillingness to face the truth that Asmodeus had seen: that this was all larger than him and that the world wasn’t going to fold itself to accommodate him. That Hong Chi should have had much better ideas than giving something this sensitive to the family outsider, the prince who had married away because no one had really cared about where he went.

  But with that ice-water awareness came another one: every idea, no matter how doomed it might seem, was worth a try.

  He closed his eyes as if he were meditating, and sought out Van’s tracking disk again—got, for the briefest of moments, a vision of rock spurs in the gardens, felt Asmodeus’s magic grab him, ready to squeeze the connection out of existence—and in that one suspended moment he sent through an image of the regnal seals fractured and falling into dust, and the words “Phat Thuc”—and felt Van’s shock of recognition, as she instinctively grabbed Asmodeus’s hand to prevent him from cutting Thuan off—and then her panic as she realised she’d set herself against him—but Asmodeus simply closed his fingers on hers, and shook his head, his face hardening, his mouth opening on words Thuan didn’t need to hear to make out.

  Too risky. Not getting involved. And something rather sharper and angrier that Thuan couldn’t quite make out, about danger to Van if they got arrested.

  It cut off with the finality of an executioner’s garrotte, leaving Thuan shaking on his bed.

  They weren’t going to help; but then why had he thought they ever would? Asmodeus had made his position very clear, and why would Van risk her own freedom and life to save the dynasty, when one of its own celebrated officials had been the one to break her life and hound her?

  It wasn’t fair; and perhaps it had never been.

  Outside, the bi-hour of the cat rang, and the greyness of the sky was getting washed out. Not long before the ceremony now. Not long before it was too late.

  Thuan got up, ready to harangue the guards once more to let him out—but the door opened before he got a chance.

  What?

  It was a eunuch wearing blue robes—his face was vaguely familiar, and then Thuan realised it was the one who’d accompanied him to Grandmother’s apartments. He bowed and gestured, wordlessly, towards the door.

  Thuan walked towards it, to find the guards gone, and the courtyard emptied of every single retainer. Everything was curiously silent and still. He looked up: the sky was gray, the light streaked with pink and trembling on the verge of sunrise.

  “Your grandmother requests your presence,” the eunuch said.

  Thuan shook his head. “There’s no time. The regnal seals, where are they kept?”

  “The Palace of Audiences, your Highness. But—”

  The eunuch opened his mouth to say something more, about filial piety and the duty owed to elders.

  “There’s no time,” Thuan said. “Tell Grandmother—or better yet, Hong Chi—they’re going to destroy the seals.”

  “Your Highness!”

  Thuan didn’t bother to wait, but started running—and then shifting into full dragon shape, flying through the pillars of the courtyard and praying very very hard he wouldn’t knock over any of them while still struggling to adapt to his much larger size.

  In dragon shape, the pillared corridors between the various palace buildings were much harder to navigate: Thuan, swinging wildly, narrowly missed hitting a pillar or an official or both. People scattered, throwing him dark looks. He could imagine the flood of memorials complaining about the failure of the imperial prince to conform to propriety—he was going to have so many explanations to give, and so many of them unpleasant, too. He flew over the wide expanse of the gardens, over a large labyrinth of pebbles—over the Imperial Theatre and the faint sound of zithers and drums from the musicians practising, the dynastic urns, the residences of the various princesses…

  He’d not done this for two years—more, because he’d seldom actually been flying through the citadel. The Palace of Audiences was on the edge of the Purple Forbidden City nearest the main gate: a place for the Empress to work and receive officials, not for her private life or for her harem. It should have been quite close to where Thuan and Asmodeus had been lodged, but he’d got lost somewhere, and the sun was rising over the roofs of the citadel, gilding the longevity tiles and throwing dappled reflections over the algae and mould and cracks.

  Come on come on come on.

  There.

  Another corridor and another garden, and he’d be in the right place—he could hear the zithers accompanying the return procession of officials, with the water from the well at the centre of the city, and he only had to fly a little further—

  Something hard and unshakeable rose out of nowhere, and he hit it head-on. He fell on the floor, everything spinning and wobbling; tried to rise again, found himself entangled in the meshes of a net of khi-water—tightening with every attempt he made at freeing himself.

  What—what had happened? No. No.

  Footsteps, low and measured. “Ah, child.” Kim Diep’s voice was regretful. “I did warn you. Told you to go home.”

  “This is my home,” Thuan said, twisting to try and throw the net off, but it didn’t work. His claws kept sliding off the net. Think. Khi-water. He needed to be using magic, but he kept convulsing.

  Laughter that wasn’t so much gloating as wistful. Someone was pushing him and the net away: all he could see was glimpses of the floor, and then stunted, dry algae. The music was receding. Someone asked Kim Diep a question that was so fast and so accented Thuan didn’t hear it.

  She said, “Just keep him away from the Palace of Audiences. There’s no need for bloodshed.”

  “There will be bloodshed!” He tried to weave khi-water, and it kept sliding off just like his claws had. What had they used for the net? “Do you really think this is going to be a friendly discussion and a handing off of power to a new dynasty?”

  “Oh, I meant specifically your blood,” Kim Diep said. She knelt by his side, head cocked—he could barely see her because of the net, but her eyes shone in the darkness. “You’re a hindrance and impossibly annoying, but I like you. Never giving up.”

  Thuan wasn’t feeling like giving up, but he was running out of options. The net was tight around his whole body now, a chokehold holding him with spine curved and head sunk between his own scales, and his limbs flat against his body. It wasn’t uncomfortable, but equally he couldn’t move. He was on tiles now, in what sounded like a suspiciously deserted part of the citadel—which meant the society had cleared it.
This close to the palace of audiences, there wouldn’t be a deserted area in sight. What time was it now? The light wasn’t grey or pink anymore, and the music had stopped. The officials would be back at the palace, opening the cabinet and revealing row after row of seals, about to plunge them into poisoned water…

  He tried shifting back to his human shape, which was much smaller—and the net followed him, shrinking so fast he didn’t even have time to start untangling himself. So not only was he stuck inside, but now he didn’t have claws or fangs anymore.

  Not good.

  Think think think. He couldn’t appeal to her goodness. But perhaps he could play on her fears. “It’s still going to take time,” he said, twisting against the net with the forlorn hope it would work.

  “Oh, I’d say the citadel is a powder keg ready to blow.”

  Thuan grimaced. “I’ve spent too much time in the library. Dynasties don’t fall in one fell swoop. Order doesn’t just vanish. Even if all the regnal seals disintegrate, even if someone in a province rises up tomorrow—even if they’re an official in this city, in this citadel, order will prevail. If only for a time. And in that time, they’re going to make arresting and condemning you a priority.”

  Please please, ancestors.

  Laughter from Kim Diep. “So you’re suggesting I should stop now so they can arrest me better?” A frown. “Or alternatively, you’re making a very good case for me to simply kill you.”

  And burn the bones, the way they’d done with Khanh Ngoc’s in the garden? “No,” Thuan said, sharply. “I’m sure I’m not the only witness.”

  A shrug. “Leaving the six chambers isn’t a crime anymore, and gently suggesting an area of the palace needs to be deserted is a mild disturbance of the peace.”

  “My point,” Thuan said, choking on silt. “Please, elder aunt. If you stop this now we can still both pretend it never happened.”

  Kim Diep looked at him, for a while. “You mean it, don’t you?” A sigh.