The Ascendancy Veil

THREE

The triad of moons hung in a sky thick with stars. Two of them had matched orbits low in the west, descending towards the crooked teeth of the Tchamil Mountains, the flawless green pearl of Neryn peeping out from behind the huge blotched disc of her sister Aurus. Iridima glowered at them from the east, her white skin marbled with blue. Beneath, from horizon to horizon, lay the desert of Tchom Rin, an eternity of languid waves desiccated on the point of breaking. A cool wind brushed across the smooth, shadowy humps, dusting their crests. It was the only sound that could be heard in all the vastness.

Saramyr was riven north to south by the spine of the Tchamil Mountains, dividing the more populous and developed lands to the west from the wilder places in the east. The south-eastern quadrant of Saramyr was dominated by the continent's only desert, stretching over six hundred miles from the foot of the mountains to peter out a little short of the eastern coast. It was here that the settlers had come over seven hundred years ago, to begin the colonisation of the eastern territories.

Stories of those pioneer days were rife in Tchom Rin legend: tales of those who chose to stay while others went on to the more fertile Newlands to the north, those who made a pact with the bastard goddess Suran to live in her realm and worship her in return for being taught the ways of this cruel new world. Suran was kind to her followers, and she showed them how to thrive. In the wasteland of the desert, they built sprawling cities and gargantuan temples, and they chased out the Ugati and their old and impotent gods. The settlers took the desert as their own, and the desert changed them, until they had become like a people unto themselves, and the ways of the west seemed distant.

One of the greatest of the cities that the early settlers founded was Muia. It lay serene and peaceful in the green-tinged moonlight, in the lee of an escarpment that stretched for miles along its western edge. Tchom Rin architecture, so popular history told, had been invented by a man named Iyatimo, who had based his constructions on the bladed leaves of the hardy chia shrub, one of the few plants capable of surviving in the desert. Whatever the truth of it, the style proliferated, and the buildings of the Tchom Rin became renowned for their smooth edges and sharp tips. Bulbous bases flowed into needle-like spires; windows were teardrop-shaped, tapering upward; the walls that surrounded the city were made impressive and forbidding with rows of knife-like ornamentation. Though the lower levels of the complex, twining streets rose in orderly stepped rows of broad dwellings, the upper reaches were a dense forest of spikes, a multitude of stilettos thrust at the sky. Everything was drawn into the air as if the gravity of the moons overhead had sucked the cities of Tchom Rin out of shape and made them into something new and strangely beautiful to the eye.

Muia slept beneath the fearsome auspices of a statue of Suran some two hundred feet high. She was seated in an alcove carved out of the cliff face, a lizard coiled in her lap and a snake wrapped around her shoulders to symbolise the creatures that fed her in the desert cave where she was abandoned by her mother Aspinis. The belief in western Saramyr that it was arrogant to depict deities in any way other than through oblique icons or animal aspects had never taken in Tchom Rin, and so Suran was portrayed as the legends told her to be: as a sullen and angry adolescent, her hair long and tangled, with one green and one blue eye picked out in coloured slate. She was dressed in rags and holding a gnarled staff around which the snake had partially wrapped itself.

Suran did not have the grandeur of the majority of the Saramyr pantheon, nor the benevolence. The people of Tchom Rin had chosen a goddess that needed to be appeased rather than simply praised, a tough and bitter deity who would overcome any adversity and believed vengeance to be the purest of emotional ends. It suited their temperament, and they worshipped her with great fervour and to the exclusion of all others, scorning the passive and elastic religious beliefs of their ancestors. Though those outside the desert saw her as a dark goddess, the bringer of drought and pestilence, those within adored her because she kept those evils from their door. She was the guardian of the sands, and in Tchom Rin she reigned supreme.

Tonight, the city slept peacefully in the blessed respite from the heat of the day. But here, as anywhere else, there were those who needed the darkness of night for their business, and one such was on his way to assassinate the most important man in Tchom Rin.

Keroki flowed like quicksilver along the rope that stretched taut between two adjacent spires, heedless of the fatal drop onto the flagged and dusty streets below. Vertigo was a weakness he could not afford to have, and like the other minor frailties that he had possessed as a child, it had been beaten out of him during his cruel apprenticeship in the art of murder.

He reached the end of the rope, where it looped around the pointed parapet of a balcony, and slipped onto solid ground again. He allowed himself a flicker of humour: Tchom Rin architecture was pretty enough, but it did provide a lot of places to snag a rope. He left it where it was, strung between the two thin towers and invisible against the night sky. If all went well, he would be returning this way. If not, then he would be dead.

He was a short and thickset man, his appearance at odds with the grace with which he carried himself. His features were swarthy and his skin tanned dark by the desert sun. He was dressed in light green silks which hung loosely against his skin, tied with a purple sash: the attire of one of the servants of Blood Tanatsua. Often the simplest disguises were the best. He marvelled at how often he had heard of assassins masked and dressed in black, advertising their profession to anyone who saw them. His life had been saved more than once by the simple expedience of an appropriate costume for his task.

There were three guards inside the tower, but all were dead at their posts. His employer had promised it would be so. He had another man on the inside, for whom poisons were something of a speciality.

Blood Tanatsua's Muia residence was not an easy place to get into. In fact, had it not been for the virtually limitless resources of Keroki's employer and the amount of time they had had to prepare, it would have been impossible. He had already evaded or despatched at least a dozen sentries and avoided numerous traps on his way up the tower from which he had reached this one. The only way he had a hope of getting to his target was via this most circuitous route, and even then he was relying on the removal of some of the obstacles in his path.

But he was not a man to consider the possibility of failure. No matter what the difficulties and dangers that Keroki had to face, Barak Reki tu Tanatsua would meet his end tonight.

He slipped into the tower, through the rooms where the guards were slumped, victims of a slow-release venom that was so subtle they had not even realised what was happening to them, much less connected it with the meal they had eaten hours before. In contrast to the unadorned exterior of the tower, the chambers he passed through were lavish and ornate, with lacquered walls, lintels of coiled bronze, and wide mirrors duplicating everything. Globular lanterns of gold-leaf mesh hung from the ceiling, casting intriguing shadows.

Keroki did not appreciate the subtleties of the decor. His sense of aesthetic appreciation had gone the way of his vertigo. Instead, he listened for sounds, and his eyes roved for clues that things were not entirely as they should be: a pulse at a guard's temple to indicate he was only faking death; a screen positioned to conceal an attacker; evidence of the bodies being disturbed by someone who had happened upon them and gone to raise the alarm. As an afterthought, he considered cutting the throats of the three men so that suspicion would not fall upon the poisoner, but he reasoned that they would not bleed enough to fool anyone with their hearts long stopped, and he dismissed the idea. Let the poisoner take his chances. He would undoubtedly have covered his own trail well enough.

Keroki headed down the stairs. The tower was made up of a succession of circular chambers, apparently innocuous, decorated as small libraries, studies, rooms for relaxing in and enjoying entertainment and music. Keroki's practised eye saw through the disguise immediately. These were false rooms, which nobody used except those guards who had spent weeks learning where the multitude of lethal barbs and alarms were hidden. They were placed here to protect the heart of the residence from thieves entering the way he did. Embroidered boxes on elaborate dressing-tables promised jewellery within, but anyone opening them would have their fingers scored with a poisoned blade or caustic powder puffed into their face to eat their eyes away. Valuable tapestries were attached by threads to incendiary devices. Stout doors – much more common here than in the west, where screens and curtains were used instead – were rigged to explode if they were not opened in a certain fashion. Even the stairs between the rooms were constructed with occasional breakaway steps, where the stone was a crust as thin as a biscuit and concealed spring-loaded mantraps beneath.

Keroki spent the best part of two hours descending the tower. Even with the information provided by the insider, detailing the location and operation of the traps, he was forced to be excessively cautious. He had not lived to thirty-five harvests by trusting anyone with his life, and he double-checked everything to his satisfaction before risking it. Additionally, there were some secrets which the insider had not been able to obtain, and certain traps which could not be simply avoided but had to be puzzled out and deactivated with his collection of exquisite tools.

He thought on his mission during that time, picking it over in the back of his mind as he had done for weeks now, examining it for anything which might compromise him. But no, it was as straightforward now as it had been when he first received the assignment. The morning would bring the great meeting of the desert Baraks, the culmination of many days of negotiations, treaties signed and agreements made. Presiding over all would be the young Barak Reki tu Tanatsua. It would be a unification of the Baraks of Tchom Rin; and with it, the cementing of Blood Tanatsua's position as the dominant family among them.

But if Keroki succeeded tonight, then the figurehead of the unification would be dead, and the meeting would collapse into chaos. His employer – the son of a rival Barak – believed that it shamed the family for his father to submit to Blood Tanatsua in this matter. And that was where Keroki entered the equation.

He had just made his way clear of the last of the false rooms when he heard voices.

His senses were immediately on alert. There should not have been guards here at the foot of the tower: the ones at the top and the gauntlet of lethal chambers in between were more than enough protection. A last-minute doubling of security? A failure on the part of his informant? No matter now; he was committed.

The men were beyond the door that he listened against. They were static, and judging by the tone of their voices and their conversation they were not particularly alert. But still, they presented something of an inconvenient obstacle.

He lay down with his eye close to the floor and drew out two tiny, flat mirrors attached to long, thin handles. By sliding them under the door and angling them in sequence he was able to obtain a view of the room. It was a large atrium with a domed and frescoed ceiling and a floor of clouded coral marble, overhung by a balcony which created a colonnade all around its edge. In the day, they would be lit by the light shining through the teardrop apertures in the walls, but at night they were cool and dark. Perfect cover.

Now that he had judged it was safe to dare, Keroki was able to ease open the door without a sound, lifting it on its hinges so that they would not whine. Once there was enough space to fit his head through, he peered out. Three guards, talking amongst themselves in the centre of the atrium, dressed in baggy silks of crimson and with nakata blades at their belts. The lanterns that hung from slender golden chains in the central space cast a dim and intimate illumination. The edges of the room were brightened with free-standing lamps of coiled brass, but it was not enough to dispel the patches of shadow.

Deciding that the guards could not see the doorway well enough to notice that it was slightly ajar, he slipped out and behind one of the broad pillars of the colonnade. His heartbeat had barely sped up at all with the proximity of danger; he trod with the calm ease of a jungle cat. The guards' voices echoed about the atrium as he glided from pillar to pillar, timing his crossings to when their talk would become particularly animated, or one of them would laugh, so as to cover even the slightest noise he might make. He knew how to move in such a way that he could evade the eye's natural tendency to be drawn to an object in motion, so that unless they were looking directly at him they would not detect him passing along the dim recesses of the cloisters.

His intention was to skirt the room and leave undetected through the door on the other side, which would bring him near to Barak Reki's bedchamber. In all probability he would have managed it had he not triggered the pressure plate that was hidden behind one of the pillars.

He felt the infinitesimal give in the stone beneath his foot, the fractional slide and click as he depressed it. His body froze, his pulse and breath going still.

Nothing happened.

He exhaled slowly. He was not foolish enough to think that trap had malfunctioned, but it appeared to be designed in such a way that it triggered when it was released. Standing on it merely primed the mechanism. Stepping off would activate it. Most people would not even have noticed the tiny shift that betrayed its presence; but Keroki was sharper than most people.

He cursed silently to himself. The colonnade had been left dark to tempt an intruder, and at its most inviting point a trap had been laid. Keroki's informer had known nothing about it. He should have realised that it was too easy.

Despite himself, a chill sweat began to form on his brow. He assessed his predicament. He was safely concealed from the guards, but he was also stuck here. Taking the weight of his foot from the pressure plate would undoubtedly not be pleasant for him. But what kind of trap was it? He could not imagine it would be anything fatal or overly dangerous, since this was a functional room and hence visited by people who would not know about the trap. Perhaps it was only rigged at night? Even so, he found it hard to believe that anyone would run the risk of accidentally killing a guest. An alarm, then; most probably a loud chime struck by a hammer that was cocked by putting weight on the pressure plate. But an alarm was just as fatal to him, for he had little chance of escaping alive if his presence was discovered.

The sweat inched down his cheek, and minutes crawled by against the background murmur of the guards. He had already wasted enough time negotiating the deadly false rooms in the tower; he could not afford to lose any more. Too soon the dawn would be upon them, and he had best be gone by then if he wanted to see another one.

He was still searching for an answer when the tone of the guards' voices warned him that they were ending their conversation. Then they fell silent, and he heard their soft footsteps heading away in different directions. It took him an instant to realise what they were doing.

They were splitting up and patrolling the colonnade.

He felt a dreadful flood of adrenaline, and mastered it. Years of brutal training had made him ruthlessly discliplined, and he knew when to take advantage of his body's reflexes and when to suppress them. Now was not the time for excitement. He needed to be calm, to think. And he had only seconds in which to do it.

When the guard found him, he was lying flat on his back and in such a way that the shadow of the pillar and the dim light combined to make him hard to see. The guard did not spot him until he was several feet away, and then he had to squint to be sure. It appeared to be a house servant by the garb, unconscious at the base of the pillar as if laid low by an intruder. And if the servant's foot happened to be still pressing down hard on the invisible pressure plate, then the guard was too surprised to notice.

He gave a peremptory whistle to his companions and leaned closer to investigate. Foolishly, he did not imagine any threat from the prone figure. He assumed that the threat had already passed on and left this poor servant in its wake. The assumption cost him his life.

Keroki twisted his body, bringing the small blowpipe to his mouth and firing the dart into the guard's throat. The poison was so fast-acting as to be nearly instantaneous, but even so, the man had a moment to let out a grunt of surprise before his vocal cords locked tight. By the time he had thought to draw his sword, the strength had left his body, and he was slumping. Keroki shifted to catch the falling guard's arm, pivoting on the foot which was still holding down the pressure plate. He pulled the man's weight so that he fell towards his killer, and Keroki muffled the sound of the impact with his own body. The guard was dead by the time Keroki pulled him onto the pressure plate. He sent a silent prayer to his deity Omecha that the mechanism was not especially sensitive, and then slipped his own foot off the plate.

There were no alarms.

The other two guards were calling in response to their companion's whistle now. Keroki slipped another dart into his blowpipe. Looking round the edge of the pillar, he saw one man starting across the atrium from the colonnade, and another in the shadows who had not reacted quite so decisively. Keroki aimed an expert shot and fired across the width of the chamber. The dart flitted invisibly past the first guard in the gloom and hit the man behind him, who slid to the floor with a groan. The sound was loud enough to make the remaining guard turn around. He saw his collapsed companion, swung back with his sword drawn, and took Keroki's third dart just below his eye. He managed a few seconds of defiant staggering before he, too, went limp and thumped to the ground hard enough to crack his skull.

Keroki stepped out from behind the pillar, glanced around the room, and clucked his tongue. The inside man who had provided the poison for his darts really did have a remarkable talent.

He dragged the corpse of the last guard behind the colonnade and used a piece of fabric to wipe away the smeared trail of blood and hair that he left behind him. Then, satisfied that the bodies would not be seen if anyone should casually enter the room, he headed onward. Dawn was pressing on him, and he still had to get back out through the trap-laden false rooms before the household awoke.

He found no more holes in his informer's knowledge. He negotiated the opulent corridors of the residence without another mishap, though twice he had to conceal himself to avoid a patrol of guards, and at one point he needed the assistance of a cleverly stashed key to allow him through a certain door that was always locked. Mirrored figures slunk alongside him in the silent corridors, where the cool air hung still as a dream, bereft of moisture. The night's hue became a deeper green as Neryn glided out from behind her larger sister and cast her full glow. Statues of Suran regarded him from spiked niches in the lacquered walls. Once a cat padded past, keeping to the corners, on its own mission of subterfuge.

There were no guards on the door of Barak Reki's bedchamber. His wife, so it was said, could not abide the idea of armed men so close as they slept. It was a foible that Keroki thought she would have cause to regret.

He put his hand to the door, resting it against the patterned surface, his other hand reaching for the blade of his knife. He got no further.

It was not the needle-bladed dagger that drove into his arm which truly stunned him, nor the hand that clamped around his mouth and drew his head roughly back. Simply, it was the fact that he had not heard them coming. He was tripped to the floor before he had a chance to react, and he hit the cold marble with enough force to take his breath away.

Now he found himself lying flat on his back once again, looking up at the ceiling, with a terrible numbness spreading like ice through his body. He tried to move, but his mind had been divorced from his muscles and his thoughts did not translate into action. Poison on the blade. Real panic filled him for the first time since childhood, a terror of paralysis that was raw and fresh and untested, and it pummelled him and made him want to scream.

Standing astride him in the darkness was a woman of almost supernatural beauty, with dusky skin and deep black hair, clad in a thin veil of a dress that was belted with silk. Keroki had purged all thoughts of lust from himself a long time ago, but even so a creature like this would have been enough to shatter his resolve, had the situation been different. But he felt far from ardour now.

She knelt down over him, straddling his waist with her hips. Delicately, she plucked the dagger from his arm and laid it aside, then brought her face close to his. Her breath smelt of desert flowers.

'Your friend with the poisons is outstanding, is he not?' she purred. 'Before I killed him I persuaded him to give me the one you are enjoying at the moment.' A slow smile, cruel and mesmerising, touched her lips. 'I thought perhaps I would handle this matter myself. No need to trouble Reki; there would be so many… repercussions. And besides,' she added, her voice dropping to a whisper, 'I like my prey alive. And I am so very hungry tonight.'

Keroki, believing himself to be in the clutches of some demon, tried anew to scream; but all he could force from his body was a whimper.

She laid a finger on his lips.

'Sssh,' she murmured. 'You will wake my husband.'

That was when Keroki finally realised who his assailant was. He had not recognised her at first, for he had never seen her face, and artistic renderings did not do her justice. Reki's wife. Asara.

She put her lips to his and sucked, until he felt something wrench free inside him and the rushing, bright flow of his essence came sparkling and glittering from his mouth into hers. His last thoughts as he felt the tidal pulses of his life retreating into darkness were strangely unselfish. He wondered what would be the fate of his land, the land that he loved although he had never known it till now, if a monster such as this stood at the right hand of the most powerful man in the desert.