19. NINETEEN
NINETEEN
ATTILATIA
Soft rain pattered against compact earth as Attilatia shuffled through the dawn-lightened streets toward home. The drizzle was the most eventful thing that had happened in the past ten-day.
“Spend long enough with dirt in your mouth and everything else tastes like honey,” Dasha had said.
She would have thought that after sixteen years of being threatened by the worst masochists and fiends humanity had to offer, being left alone would have been damn near pleasant.
But it seemed that a life without imminent threats was under-stimulating.
The dark clouds had lightened to grey at the horizon as she stepped through the rear entrance into the garden.
Toronoff padded up to her despite the rain, tail raised, purring like his insides were churning pebbles.
She stooped to greet him, and he made repeated passes against her outstretched hand.
“That’s enough, I think,” she said. “Too much attention and you’ll get spoiled, eah?”
The creature only mewled at her ankles. A tripping hazard, if ever she’d seen one.
“Sesu Mitar?” a man’s voice called from beyond the garden’s front gate. Attilatia stiffened. He must have been taking refuge in the foliage, waiting for her return. He wore the unmistakable burgundy sirwal and tunic of the Red Wing. A courier’s pin sat on his shoulder.
Whatever he was about to tell her, she was sure it would stab her clean through.
“Yes?” she asked, hoping her nerves weren’t showing.
“A message for you.”
He reached over the gate, a sealed scroll in his fingers.
Thedexemore had told her messages were not permitted from recruits—which was why she’d given him a light signal.
All enlistees forewent written communications for ninety days.
This message could have only come from command, and it would have been very expensive to send.
“Thank you.” She felt anything but grateful as she tucked the scroll beneath her arm.
The man nodded curtly and disappeared around the gate.
Attilatia stared at the seal: a shield bearing a white gladiolus over a bear. The mark of the General Prime. Teeth in lip, she moved toward shelter. Toronoff meowed so loudly she was sure the neighbors would think she was skinning him.
“Yes, yes. You’re coming with me.”
She shut her door with a clack that softened the rain to muted tapping against the roof. Setting the scroll on the table, she stripped herself of the shawl over her jumpsuit and moved to the hearth to stoke a fire for tea.
Cream found its way into a bowl on the floor. She found her way into the wooden chair that overlooked the window. The scroll sat like a bird over a serpent’s den.
She had to open it—just open it. There was no other way.
With trembling hands, she peeled away the seal and unfurled the note.
That handwriting was familiar, now—for eighteen months it had annotated their work.
She scanned the first lines, looking for the words that would tell her she’d made the worst mistake.
That something had gone wrong. That Thedexemore was dead.
Her gut uncoiled as she read, and relief hit her with such force it knocked tears from her eyes. She set the scroll down and wiped them away with her forefingers. Then she returned to the top of the message to read through it in earnest.
The note. It was…
It was poetry.
What—with all four Fates as her witness—the fuck?
“Pinto?” Attilatia banged harder on the mahogany door when he didn’t answer. “Pinto!”
A scraping of locks sounded behind the wood and the old man cracked the door, wincing against the light filtering through the stained glass of the building’s stairwell. “Atti… you are early,” he groaned. “It is still nighttime for most of us.”
The sun had traced nearly half its route into the sky, but it was poor grace to throttle an old man in the comfort of his own home.
Especially one she was growing fond of. “Early is for bootlickers and bureaucrats. I’ve been sitting on this for five cups of tea and I need to get it off my chest now, not when your retirement schedule allows. I also need to use your bathroom.”
The crack widened, and Attilatia wedged herself inside.
“I’m going to go make myself presentable,” Pinto grumbled, lavender robes cinched tight as he hobbled from the foyer into a side room. “The wash is to your left.”
Attilatia relieved herself, rinsed her hands in a tortoiseshell washbin, and pressed cool water against her eyes.
It was nearing the time she usually slept.
Not that she could with everything running through her mind: Pinto’s informant on the Shadewalker, and now this—this torture Roskaad was putting her through.
Rather than settling into her usual armchair, she paced. Hundreds of glass eyes followed her from the wall housing Pinto’s doll collection. She wished they wouldn’t. It was hard enough to muddle through this without an audience.
Nearly twenty minutes passed before Pinto emerged in saffron robes, smelling of sandalwood, his white beard braided and beaded beneath his chin. Attilatia bit back any snark and held out the note.
“What’s this?”
“It’s poetry.” The words came off her tongue like sap—sticky and reminiscent of wanting to be lost in the woods.
His eyes widened. “This is from the man you are seeing?”
“I would hardly call it seeing, unless you are referring to my eyes. In which case the answer is still no.” She thrust it into his hands. “Read it.”
Pinto did, and the further he went, the more one eye squinted.
“What do you make of it?” she urged.
“It’s not very good poetry.”
“You’d be hard-pressed to find worse from patrons of Shrokan Whorehouse.”
“And you are angry?”
“I am…” She was one wrong question short of kicking something. “Frustrated.”
“Not all men can be poets, Atti. But if you are so invested, which it doesn’t seem that you are, there are surely other redeeming—”
“Pinto, why would he send this? It came over a thousand miles through blistering conditions, not to mention reckless purse strings, in less than a moon. For this.”
The old silk trader’s eyes crinkled. “How does one respond to that without offering insult?”
She raised her hands. “Don’t even get me started.”
Pinto seized his middle in a silent fit of laughter.
She lanced him with a glare. “Help me with this, Pinto, because it’s making my hair grow back sideways. Let’s assume for a moment that this is a very intelligent man.”
“With that as evidence”—Pinto nodded at the note, abandoned on his mosaic tea table—“I’d argue we can assume no such thing.”
“Precisely. So what am I missing?”
“Atti… are you sleeping?”
“Yes.”
“Are you getting enough nutrients?”
“Yes, damn you, yes!”
They both looked at the note.
“He relates the silhouette of a crane to the moon,” Attilatia snapped.
“Tea?” Pinto offered.
“Please.” She thumped into a chair and crossed her arms.
Crane…
Attilatia’s mouth popped open. In Azadonia, her mother had been a councilor. She’d had Attilatia tutored in a half-dozen languages with the unrealistic hope that her daughter would one day fill her shoes. There was a Tera’thian homonym for the Nelfinden word “crane” that meant…
Sun?
The flat around her seemed to grow small so suddenly and with such efficiency that her stomach collided with the chair beneath her. She pulled the note closer and squinted. “Get me paper,” she whispered.
Pinto rustled through a cabinet for stationary as she scanned for homonyms.
There were several. First… Third… Puzzle….
A teacup clinked onto the table beside her, and Pinto sat across from her. He smoothed out a sheet of floral stationary between them and handed her a quill.
“Pinto… It’s not a poem. It’s a code.”
In Tera’thian. And that gag-inducing crane line had been the key. How did Roskaad know she understood Tera’thian?
Pinto chuckled again. “Of all the guests I entertain, you are always the most interesting. Back when I was trading in Chori—this was before the Grey Period—I once met…”
His prattle fell on deaf ears as she pieced together what Roskaad was trying to tell her.
Nelfinden had a syllabic alphabet; Tera’thian was phonetic.
Both lacked the cultural complexity and sophistication of Azadonian symbols.
But time and patience allowed her to pen out the real message the General Prime had paid dearly to send her.
‘Ask tesselvelinquash. Stay calm.’
“Tessel Velinquash?” Pinto asked, peering over her shoulder.
“This is a person?”
“Yes. Though I haven’t heard his name since the Grey Period.” Twenty years. “He was just a young lad then. His father and I got together for stackers each quarter. The man had a mind for strategy. This one time—”
“Where can I find him?” She hadn’t the mind for another long-winded yestertale.
“His father fell in the battle of Casowhatan. The mother soon after, I’m afraid. I don’t know about Tessel. Odd, you’d think he would have been an oligarchical contributor, like his father.”
A Skywalk family. Great.
They both squinted at the note and Attilatia’s decryption.
“Ask him what?” Pinto finally murmured. “What time he breaks his fast?”
Apparently Roskaad’s knowledge of Nelfinden-Terathian homonyms didn’t allow for context.
“I suppose I’ll just start with how he takes his tea,” she grumbled, taking a sip of her own.
It was spiced with liquorice and sweetened with honey, but its pleasure died past her tongue.
“Not that I don’t love a good mystery, but I think I might have appreciated a little more in the way of hints from my new prospect.
” Better to call him that than ‘patron’.
She gestured at the poem. “Not this. Cryptic nonsense.”
“He sounds perfect for you,” Pinto chortled.
Attilatia bit at her cheek. “That remains to be seen.” For the time being, their relationship did not extend beyond being a very convenient way for her and Thedexemore to stay alive. “Now, when is your friend coming to tell me about the Shadewalker?”