Cobra Bargain

Chapter 28

In the daytime, Jin knew, it took about an hour to drive from Milika to Azras.

At night, with Daulo taking it a little easier, it took half again that long, with the result that it was just about midnight when they crossed the Somilarai

River and drove on into the city.

"So now what?" Jin asked, peering with some nervousness down the largely deserted streets. The last thing she wanted was for them to be conspicuous.

"We go to the apartment Mayor Capparis is lending us, of course," Daulo said.

"Did he send you the key, or are we going to have to wake up someone?"

"He sent the combination," Daulo told her. "Most temporary homes in Azras use keypad locks. That way all you have to do is change the combination when the occupants leave."

Which was basically the same system the Cobra Worlds used. "Oh," Jin said, feeling a little silly.

They passed the center of town and continued into the eastern part of the city, pulling up at last in front of a large building very reminiscent of the Sammon family house in Milika. Unlike that structure, though, this one had been carved up into apartments which-judging from the size of theirs-weren't appreciably bigger than the two-room suite the Sammon family had given her. In that space were squeezed a tiny foodprep area, a living room, and a bedroom.

A single bedroom.

"Small wonder the city people resent us," Daulo commented, dropping his cases in a corner of the living room and taking a few steps to peer around the corners into each of the rooms. "The average worker in my family's service has a larger home than this."

"Must be lower-class housing," Jin murmured. A hundred ways to approach the issue occurred to her; but there was no point in cat-footing around it. "I see there's just one bed here."

For a long moment he just looked at her-not at her body, she noted, but into her face. "Yes," he said at last. "I really shouldn't have to ask."

"Qasaman women are that pliant?" Jin asked bluntly.

He pursed his lips. "Sometimes I forget how different you are.... No, Qasaman women aren't overly pliant; just realistic. They know that women don't function well without men... and as the heir to a powerful family, I'm not exactly someone they want to refuse."

A shiver of disgust ran up Jin's back. For just a second the polite veneer around Daulo had cracked, giving her a glimpse of something far less attractive beneath it. Rich, powerful, probably pampered, as well-he'd likely had life pretty much his own way since the day he was born. On Aventine that type almost always grew up into selfish, immature adults. On Qasama, with the pervasive male contempt for women, it would be far worse.

She shook the train of thought away. It's a different culture, she reminded herself firmly. Assumptions and extrapolations may not be valid. She'd seen his discipline in regards to the family business, after all; some of that must have seeped into his personal life, as well.

But whether it had or not, she had to lay down the ground rules right here and now. "So," she said coolly. "Does that mean you've taken advantage of your family's power to prey on young women who haven't got any choice in the matter?-and, worse, with the underlying hint that you might marry them someday?

At least the razorarms are honest with their victims."

Daulo's eyes flashed with anger. "You know nothing about us," he spat. "Nothing about us, and even less about me. I don't use women as playthings; nor do I make promises I don't intend to keep. You of all people should know that-else why am

I here?"

"Then there should be no problem," she said quietly. "Should there."

Slowly, the fire faded from Daulo's eyes. "So now it's you who toy with me," he said at last. "I risk my honor and position for you, and in return you stir up anger in me to drive away all other feelings."

"Was that the reason you agreed to come with me?" she countered. "And as long as you've brought it up, tell me: if I accepted your advances, wouldn't you some day wonder whether I had manipulated you that way?"

Daulo glared at her in silence for a moment. Then he sighed. "Perhaps I would have. But is it any better this way? Perhaps now you're manipulating me through the aura of mystery about you, an aura that might disappear if you showed an ordinary woman's behavior with a man."

Jin shook her head. "I'm not manipulating you, Daulo Sammon. You're helping me for the reasons of rational self-interest that we've already discussed. You're too intelligent to make decisions based on your hormones."

He smiled bitterly. "And so now you make it a point of honor for me to stay away from you. You play your games well, Jasmine Moreau."

"It's not a game-"

"It doesn't matter. The end result is the same." Turning his back on her, he stomped to the bags they'd brought in and began rummaging through them. "You'd best get some sleep; we'll need to rise early for worship." Pulling out a blanket, he strode to the living room couch and began tucking it in.

Worship? she wondered. They never did that in Milika. Do the proper places only exist in the cities? She opened her mouth to ask... but it didn't seem like a good idea to prolong the conversation. "I understand," she said instead.

"Goodnight, Daulo."

He grunted in return. Pursing her lips, Jin turned and went into the bedroom, shutting the door behind her.

For a long minute she sat on the bed, wondering if perhaps she'd played the whole thing wrong. Would it really have been so bad to go ahead and accept his advances?

Yes, of course it would have... because she'd have been doing it for the wrong reasons. Perhaps to avoid having to argue the point with him, or to pay back his family for their hospitality, or even to cynically ensure his continued cooperation by bonding him emotionally to her.

Her Cobra gear provided her an arsenal of awesome weapons. She had no intention of adding her body to that list.

Daulo would understand someday, too. She hoped.

Daulo woke her shortly after sunrise, and after taking turns to clean up in the cramped bathroom they left the apartment and set off on foot down the street.

Azras by day was a strikingly different place than it had seemed the night before. Like the cities Jin's Uncle Joshua had seen on his visit to Qasama, the lower parts of Azras's buildings were painted with wild forest-pattern colors that seemed sometimes to throb with movement. Above the colors, the buildings were glistening white, demonstrating the kind of careful maintenance that bespoke either a healthy city budget, a strong civic pride, or both.

It was the people, though, that attracted most of her attention.

They were out in force-perhaps three hundred within sight-all walking the same direction she and Daulo were going. All of them going to worship? she wondered.

"Where exactly are we going?" she asked Daulo quietly.

"One of the sajadas in the city," he told her. "Everyone-even visitors-are expected to go to worship on Friday."

Sajada. The word was familiar; and after a moment it clicked. Daulo had pointed out Milika's sajada to her on that first tour of the village, but at the time she'd still been posing as a Qasaman and had been afraid to ask what the place was. But then why had they never gone there...? Ah-of course. Presumably this type of worship was a weekly event, and her only other Friday on Qasama had been spent flat on her back recovering from her crash injuries.

Which immediately brought up another problem: she hadn't the foggiest idea of what she was heading into, or how she'd be expected to behave once they got there. "Daulo, I don't know anything about how you worship here," she muttered.

He frowned at her. "What do you mean? Worship is worship."

There were several possible responses to that; she chose what she hoped was the safest one. "True, but form varies widely from place to place."

"I thought you learned everything about us from your father's trip here."

Jin felt sweat breaking out on her forehead. Walking through a crowd of Qasamans was hardly the time to be making even veiled references of this sort. "His hosts didn't show him everything," she murmured tightly. "Would you mind keeping your voice down?"

He threw her a brief glare and fell silent. No, she thought morosely, he hasn't forgiven me yet for last night. She just hoped his bruised ego would heal before he did something dangerous.

They reached the sajada a few minutes later, an impressive white-and-gold building that looked to be a scaled-up version of the one she'd seen in

Milika-and now that she thought about it, almost identical with similar structures she'd sported in the tapes from the previous mission. A conformity which, taken with Daulo's comment about worship being worship, implied a strong religious uniformity all across Qasama. A state-controlled religion, then? Or merely one that was independently pervasive? She made a mental note to bring up the subject if and when Daulo ever calmed down.

Joining the flow of people, they climbed the steps and headed Inside.

"Well?" Daulo asked an hour later as they left the sajada. "What did you think?"

"It was like nothing I've ever experienced before," Jin told him honestly. "It was... very moving."

"Or primitive, in other words?"

His voice was heavy with challenge. "Not at all," she assured him. "Perhaps more emotional than I'm used to, but a worship service that doesn't touch the emotions is pretty much a waste of time."

A little of the stiffness seemed to go out of his back. "Agreed," he nodded.

The crowds heading home seemed to be thinner than they had been on the way into the sajada, Jin noticed, and she asked Daulo about it. "Most of them will have stayed at the sajada with their heyats," he told her.

"Heyats?"

"Groups of friends and neighbors who meet for further worship," he explained, throwing her an odd look. "Don't you have anything like that on-at home?" he amended, glancing around at the scattering of other pedestrians within earshot.

"Well... they're not called heyats, anyway," she said, thinking hard. It was evident the Qasamans took their religious expression very seriously. If she was going to win Daulo back as a more or less willing ally again, she had better find an answer that emphasized the similarities between Qasaman and Aventinian worship and minimized the differences. "But as you said earlier, worship is worship," she continued. "Only our style is different. The intent is certainly the same."

"I understand that. It's the style I'm trying to find out about."

"But style isn't really what counts..." She trailed off as something ahead caught her attention. "Daulo... how obvious is it that we're not city people?"

They took another three steps before he answered, "Those ghaalas up there, are they what you're worried about?"

"I don't know that word," she murmured, "but if you mean those teens leaning against the building, yes, that's who I mean. Can they tell from our clothing that we're from a village?"

"Probably," Daulo said calmly. "But don't let it worry you. They won't bother us." He paused. "And if they do, let me handle it. Understand?"

"Sure," Jin said. Her heart, already pounding in her ears, picked up its pace a bit. The scruffy-looking youths-seven of them, she counted-definitely had their eyes on her and Daulo.

And were definitely drifting away from the wall onto the walkway. Moving to block their path.