Tied Up in a Cupboard
Lill opened his eyes and looked around. He had landed on a cushioned seat in the window embrasure.
To the left of the window was a bed, a mattress on the floor like the ones in the infirmary, but luxuriously large, with a colourful patterned blanket flung untidily across it.
Beyond was a carved wooden balustrade and a step down to a lower part of the room with storage chests and a hanging lamp.
A door in the far wall was open onto a gallery or a stair landing with another carved balustrade.
If this was Vanu’s house, it seemed quite normal, in an opulent mountain style. But then, he’d been travelling when he was captured; presumably he’d left most of his possessions behind in the Summer Pass. If he had a collection of severed heads, that was where they would be.
Outside, after shouting at each other for a bit, Padunu and the two brothers seemed to be walking away, still talking.
Who was Padunu, anyway? A shaman, Khatu had called him.
That was a kind of priest, or something like it.
(Another one—why, when he was so careful to avoid going near temples and holy places, did he keep running into these men of religion?)
The strange thing was, the shaman hadn’t been on Khatu’s list of people who were in the stronghold.
Maybe Khatu had forgotten him? Or maybe the explanation for Padunu was the same as the explanation for the logs piled up by the bread oven: that they’d come from outside the fortress.
Which meant maybe there was a way out—one that the king’s soldiers guarding the walls didn’t know about.
That was a lot of speculation, and Lill was lying tied up in the bedchamber of a man who wanted him maimed and thrown over the wall of the fortress.
Why? As an insult to the people who’d sent him?
To shock the soldiers in the guardhouse?
But what would be the point of that? It wasn’t bee-fuckery but something smaller and meaner. Maybe they had a word for it up here.
Vanu sat looking at the letter in his hands. He had meant for it to bring the girls some happiness, news from the outside world like Davanu usually sent, cheerful and light, exhorting them to courage. Instead it had brought the news that Davanu himself was dead.
Vanu had stopped Atari reading it when she got that far, but there was more to it, and he’d read it to the end now that the girls had gone outside to their chores. He’d read it, and he sat there with his rage, because there was nothing else to do.
Davanu had been murdered, poisoned by someone in his own household seemingly, and several others in the household had died the next day when the house caught fire and burned to the ground.
Davanu’s eldest daughter had written to tell Vanu this.
The letter was dated a week ago, and the events it reported were a week older than that.
At a leisurely pace, such as a bride’s entourage might travel, you could take two weeks to get from Torakand to Umtúshta.
This had happened just after the boy bride that Davanu had picked for his friend had set off.
Perhaps if they’d left it a little later, the boy would have been caught in the fire too and died with the others.
Vanu put his hand over his eyes for a moment.
There was no one here, no one to tell him that tears were for women, revenge for men.
But he couldn’t weep. He wanted—not revenge, at least not yet, but an answer.
A solution. Why had his friend died—why Davanu Shawa, of all people, who had gone to the lowlands so that his family could live in peace, who used to write to Vanu and his girls about how much he missed the mountains and how he hoped one day they could all be reunited in the Summer Pass?
If he had been struck down by the will of Heaven, by illness or a fall from a horse—maybe then, Vanu thought, he could have wept.
But Davanu had been poisoned, his house destroyed, and Vanu wanted to know why.
When he knew why, he’d know what to do about it.
He usually delegated writing to Atari, as she had a neat way with her letters and could read and write the Zashian script as well as the Hawada, but he could write Hawada himself, the same way he could read—better than most people expected.
He got up from his seat and went to fetch writing materials.
There was some sort of commotion outside his door: Faru’s boys and the shaman arguing with each other in raised voices.
“What have you done? Expressly disobeying your father! I intend to tell him!”
“I intend to piss on you off the roof, you dangling string of snot!”
That was Barda, who had a way with words sometimes. And was being very careful not to call Padunu anything that he could object to as being blasphemous.
“Good one, brother,” said Khatu approvingly.
Vanu wondered what they had done to offend Padunu. It might have been almost anything. He considered whether he should go open the door and glare at them, but they seemed to be leaving.
He sat down to write his letter, offering Davanu’s daughter the words of condolence that she would expect and nothing about revenge, which she might expect but wouldn’t want.
Or which she would not allow herself to want, because she was a shaman; maybe she would find that in the face of this crime she did think about vengeance.
He wasn’t going to be the one to tempt her away from her vows.
He just added that he hoped she would tell him if she found out who was responsible for her father’s death.
The letter was short and quickly written even though he weighed every word.
When he was done, he gathered up the folded bedclothes that needed to be put away.
He found himself whistling a sad tune that used to be a favourite of Davanu’s, and instead of going upstairs to put the blankets away, he stood for a long time lost in thought.
Lill could hear subtle sounds from downstairs in the house: someone moving around, not noisily but not with stealth either.
The master of the house, possibly. Not the shadowy figure he’d pictured facing White Viper in the Tawa Valley, not an ageless monster, but that tall, gold-haired man in the prime of his life.
Very cautiously, Lill rolled over on the window seat and swung his feet off the edge.
They didn’t reach the floor; the window seat had been constructed for people with much longer legs.
That might include everyone else in the stronghold of Umtúshta.
He slid down to the floor, using his hands as best he could with his arms tied to his sides.
He needed to find a knife, or some sharp object at least. Then he could get rid of the rope and climb back out the window. Provided Vanu didn’t come upstairs to his bedchamber. If he did …
Well, if he did, Lill would have to try Khatu and Barda’s plan.
He’d have to try to convince Vanu to let him stay, by appealing to the Lion’s lust. The thought made his stomach turn over horribly.
It was one thing to imagine the prospect far away at Shawa House in Torakand, but he was tied up, bruised, aching, and his strength hadn’t fully returned after falling off the wall. He could not face it. He could not.
He crept around the perimeter of the sleeping platform, avoiding the bed as if it might put out a tendril and catch him by the ankle if he got too close.
As soon as he had that thought, he felt a suicidal impulse to laugh out loud at the image.
He shook with the effort of suppressing it as he inched along.
What was the matter with him? It wasn’t even that funny. Not as funny as Barda and Khatu trying to heave him in the window while the shaman ran after them shouting that he would tell their father. That, in retrospect, was funny.
This wasn’t helpful. He had to focus. He needed a knife. Surely the Lion of the Summer Pass kept a knife or two by his bed somewhere.
On the far side of the bed was a shallow basket with a few items in it. There was a rolled-up, Western-style book, a small glass bottle with a stopper, and a couple of leather thongs, much stretched and worn, that Vanu had probably used to tie back his hair. But no knife.
Perhaps he slept with one under his pillow.
Lill eyed the bed warily, willing himself not to start giggling again.
There were two pillows at the head. If he knelt on the bed, he should be able to grasp one with his fingertips and move it enough to check underneath.
He let himself down as gently as he could onto one knee on the edge of the mattress and caught the first pillow on the second try.
There was nothing under it. He pushed it laboriously back into place and shuffled forward on his knees to try the other pillow.
This one was harder to grasp, and when he had ascertained that there was nothing under it either and was replacing it, he lost his balance and fell forward across the bed.
At the same moment there was a noise from downstairs: someone whistling. Lill lay frozen on the bed, face down, listening to the sad, haunting tune unspooling below.
But there were no other sounds. No shouts of “Who’s there?” or pounding feet on the stairs. After all, he had made very little noise falling on the bed. A shiver chased down his back. Was it not ill-omened to whistle in the house up here in the mountains, as it was in Akramarra?
He gathered himself up and slid off the bed, trying not to disarrange the blanket noticeably—though it was already untidy. He got back to his feet.
If there was no knife by the bed, maybe there was a razor somewhere that Vanu used to shave his beard.
Like most of the Mountain Pass men, he had been clean-shaven when Lill saw him.
A razor might be down the steps in the lower part of the room with its cupboards and storage chest. Lill padded over to the steps and went down carefully.